attained, and steel is produced on the open hearth. Having matured his process at his experimental works in Birmingham, he laid the foundations of an industry which has attained a very great development in England, and lies at the base of extensive factories all over the world. The application of the principle of the regenerative furnace has been extended to numerous industrial purposes in which great heat is required; for the powers of the furnace are limited in practice only by the nature of the materials of which it is constructed. For the kind of services exemplified in this invention the Society of Arts awarded to Dr. Siemens, in 1874, its Albert medal "for his researches in connection with the laws of heat, and the practical applications of them to furnaces used in the arts, and for his improvements in the manufacture of iron, and generally for the services rendered by him in connection with economization of fuel in its various applications to manufactures and the arts." Only a week before his death, the Council of the Institution of Civil Engineers awarded him the Howard quinquennial prize, which had been previously awarded only to Sir Henry Bessemer for a similar meritorious service.
Sir William Siemens and his brother Werner have co-operated in electrical invention, beginning with the Siemens armature, which they introduced about twenty-five years ago. The brothers, with Mr. Halske, of Berlin, established the Siemens telegraph-works in London, whence the most important telegraph and cable lines in the world have been supplied, and where valuable improvements have originated. The house has constructed four transatlantic cables—the Indo-European line, the North China Cable, the Platino-Brazilian Cable, and others. The want of a suitable vessel had been a serious difficulty in laying the long cables across the Atlantic, and Dr. Siemens had the Faraday constructed, with novel features that made it admirably adapted for its work. In 1860, while experimenting with the Malta and Alexandria Cable, he devised a pyrometer for measuring temperature through the amount of resistance developed in conductors by increasing heat. In 1867 he read before the Royal Society a paper on the conversion of dynamical into chemical force, at the same meeting at which Sir Charles Wheatstone announced his simultaneous discovery of the same principle, while Mr. Cromwell Varley had applied for a patent embodying the idea. Subsequently the Siemens dynamo was developed. We next find Dr. Siemens's name associated with the electric light, electric railways, and the electrical transmission of power. A fine illustration of the latter application is given by the Portrush and Bushmills Railway in the north of Ireland, opened last September, where passengers are carried on a line six and a half miles long of steep gradients and sharp curves "at a good ten miles an hour," solely by the water-power of the river Bush, applied through turbines to a dynamo at a distance of seven miles. At his own residence, near Tunbridge Wells, "not only did electricity perform a large part of the
