The Romance of Industry and Invention. Various
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native country, and to his mechanical engineering, 'a comparative Crœsus.' After the lapse of forty years his heart still beat quick when thinking of this determining incident in his career.
The sum which Elkington paid him for his 'thermo-electrical battery' for depositing solutions of gold, silver, and copper was £1600, less £110 for the cost of the patent. Although quite successful at the time, other and cheaper processes speedily supplanted it; but the young German had gained a footing and the money he needed for future experiments. When he came back to Germany he was looked upon as quite a hero by his admiring family circle. It was indeed a creditable exploit for a youth of twenty. When he returned to England again in February 1844, he received so much encouragement from leading engineers and scientific men for his 'chronometric governor,' that he decided to settle permanently there, and he became a naturalised British subject in 1859. He joined with a civil engineer, named Joseph Woods, for the promotion and sale of his patents. 'Anastatic printing' was one of his early inventions, which, however, never became profitable. Then came schemes in paper-making, new methods of propelling ships, winged rockets, and locomotives on new principles, all of which were a continual drain on his own and his friends' resources without a corresponding return, so that in 1845 he took a situation and earned some money by railway work, which enabled him to pay another visit to Germany. In 1846, undaunted by previous failures, he threw himself heartily into the study of the action of heat as a power-giving agent, and invented an arrangement known as the 'regenerator' for saving certain portions of this waste. As afterwards applied to furnaces for iron, steel, zinc, glass, and other works, it was pronounced by Sir Henry Bessemer a beautiful invention, at once the most philosophic in principle, the most powerful in action, and the most economic of all the contrivances for producing heat by the combustion of coal. He now secured an appointment in 1849 with Fox & Henderson, Birmingham, at a fixed salary of £400 a year, and his interest in his patent. Here he profited largely by the experience gained, but the engagement terminated in 1851, when he afterwards settled as a civil engineer in 7 John Street, Adelphi, in March 1852.
His next great achievement was the production of steel direct from the raw ores by means of his regenerative furnace, which the President of the Board of Trade in 1883 mentioned in the House of Commons as one of the most valuable inventions ever produced under the protection of the English patent law, and he said further that it was then being used in almost every industry in the kingdom. Siemens had spent fourteen years in perfecting this regenerative furnace, and it took him other fourteen to utilise it, and perfect it in making steel direct from the raw ores. Martin of Sireil, who made one or two additions to the Siemens steel furnace, has been termed its inventor, but this claim has no foundation. What is known, however, as the 'Siemens-Martin process' is now competing very effectively with the Bessemer process. It consists essentially in first obtaining a bath of melted pig-iron of high quality, and then adding to this pieces of wrought-iron scrap or Bessemer scrap, such as crop ends of rails, shearings of plates, &c. These, though practically non-infusible in large quantities by themselves, become dissolved or fused in such a bath if added gradually. To the bath of molten metal thus obtained spiegeleisen or ferro-manganese is added to supply the required carbon and to otherwise act as in the Bessemer converter. The result is tested by small ladle samples, and when it is of the desired quality a portion is run off, leaving sufficient bath for the continuation of the process.
Siemens took out his patent for the 'open hearth' process of steel-making (the Forth Bridge is built of steel made in this way) in 1861, and four years later erected sample steel works at Birmingham. The engineer of the London and North-Western Railway adopted his system at Crewe in 1868, and the Great Western Railway works followed. In 1869 this process was being carried out on a large scale at the works of the Landore-Siemens Steel Company and elsewhere in England, as well as at various works on the Continent, including Krupp's, at Essen.
In 1862, Siemens was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1874 was presented with the Royal Albert Medal, and in 1875 with the Bessemer Medal in recognition of his researches and inventions in heat and metallurgy. He filled the president's chair in the three principal engineering and telegraphic societies of Great Britain, and in 1882 was President of the British Association. As manager in England of the firm of Siemens Brothers, Sir William Siemens was actively engaged in the construction of overland and submarine telegraphs. The steamship Faraday was specially designed by him for cable-laying. In addition to his labours in connection with electric-lighting, Sir William Siemens also successfully applied, in the construction of the Portrush Electric Tramway, which was opened in 1883, electricity to the production of locomotion. In his regenerative furnace, as we have seen, he utilised in an ingenious way the heat which would otherwise have escaped with the products of combustion. The process was subsequently applied in many industrial processes, but notably by Siemens himself in the manufacture of steel.
The other inventions and researches of this wonderful man include a water-meter; a thermometer or pyrometer, which measures by the change produced in the electric conductivity of metals; the bathometer, for measuring ocean depths by variations in the attraction exerted on a delicately suspended body; and the hastening of vegetable growth by use of the electric light. He was knighted in April 1883, and died on November 19 of the same year. There is a memorial window to his memory in Westminster Abbey.
As the elder brother of Sir William Siemens was so closely connected with him in business life, and may be said to have encouraged and led him into the walk of life in which he excelled, he also deserves a notice here. Werner Von Siemens, engineer and electrician, was born December 13, 1816, at Lenthe in Hanover. In 1834 he entered the Prussian Artillery; and in 1844 was put in charge of the artillery workshops at Berlin. He early showed scientific tastes, and in 1841 took out his first patent for galvanic silver and gold plating. By selling the right of using his process he made 40 louis d'or, which supplied him with the means for further experiments. During the Schleswig-Holstein war, he attracted considerable attention by using electricity for the firing of the mines which had been laid for the defence of Kiel harbour. He was of peculiar service in developing the telegraphic service in Prussia, and discovered in this connection the valuable insulating property of gutta-percha for underground and submarine cables. In 1849 he left the army, and shortly after the service of the state altogether, and devoted his energies to the construction of telegraphic and electrical apparatus of all kinds. The well-known firm of Siemens and Halske was established in 1847 in Berlin, and to them the Russian government entrusted the construction of the telegraph lines in that country. Subsequently branches were formed, chiefly under the management of the younger brothers of Werner Siemens, in St. Petersburg (1857), in London (1858), in Vienna (1858), and in Tiflis (1863). In 1857, Siemens accomplished the remarkable feat of successfully laying a cable in deep water, at a depth of more than 1000 fathoms. This was between Sardinia and Bona. Shortly after he superintended the laying of cables in the Red Sea; and these successful experiments soon led to the greatest undertaking of all, the connection of America with Europe. Besides devising numerous useful forms of galvanometers and other electrical instruments of precision, Werner Siemens was one of the discoverers of the principle of the self-acting dynamo. He also made valuable determinations of the electrical resistance of different substances, the resistance of a column of mercury, one metre long, and one square millimetre cross section at 0°C., being known as the Siemens Unit. His numerous scientific and technical papers, written for the various journals, were republished in collected form in 1881. In 1886 he gave 500,000 marks for the founding of an imperial institute of technology and physics; and in 1888 he was ennobled. He died at Berlin, 6th December 1892. A translation of his Personal Recollections by Coupland appeared in 1893.
Space forbids us mentioning other worthy names in the steel and iron trade, although we cannot pass by Sir John Brown, founder of the Atlas Steel-works, Sheffield (1857), and one of the first to adopt the Bessemer process. He was also the pioneer of armour-plate making. The immense strides he made in business may be judged from the fact that when he started in 1857 his employees numbered 200, with a turnover of £3000 a year; in 1867 they numbered 4000, and the turnover was £1,000,000. The weekly pay roll amounted to £7000 in 1883, and when he handed over the business to his successors, he was paid £200,000 for the goodwill.
KRUPP'S IRON AND STEEL WORKS AT ESSEN.
One of the largest iron and steel