Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/857

Rh to Helsingfors. Then the Crimean War came on, and the firm was kept busy with the special lines demanded for its prosecution.

After two failures by an English firm in trying to lay a telegraphic cable between the island of Sardinia and Bona in Algeria, the third attempt was successfully carried out in September, 1857, with material furnished by Herr Siemens's house and in a method prescribed by him. This was the first of the deep-sea cables, or of those which were laid in water more than one thousand fathoms deep, and was followed by the laying of many longer lines, in most of which enterprises Herr Siemens had a part. In 1859 he was shipwrecked on the Alma in the Red Sea; in 1863 he came very near losing his life while trying, with his brother Wilhelm, to lay the cable between Oran and Cartagena. The brothers laid the line from Malta to Alexandria, and, with the steamer Faraday, built especially for the purpose, they laid sis transatlantic lines. In its attempts to maintain telegraphic communication with India the British Government had found its lines through the Mediterranean Sea, Asia Minor, and Persia too liable to interruption to be depended upon. To take the lines through safer regions they would have to be carried partly through Russian territory. Herr Siemens was applied to, and he, through the good will he had won by his constructions for the Russian Government, secured a concession from it for building a line through Kiev, Odessa, Kertch, and the Black Sea to Suchum Kale. The business of this line led him several times into the country of the Caucasus, concerning which and the prehistoric copper mines at Kedabeg and the German colony at Annenfeld in the same region he gives, in his Reminiscences, some very pleasant accounts.

As much as to his improvements in the electric telegraph, the practical applications of electricity owe to Siemens's invention of the dynamo-electric machine in the winter of 1866, which opened to them entirely new fields in the development of power and light. In claiming the credit due to himself in this field, he does not forget to acknowledge what he owes to the predecessors who laid the foundations on which he built.

While thus busy with the development and practical application of electrotechnics, as he called it, Siemens observed and participated in the advancement of other branches of science; and we find him now busy in investigating the geological structure of the earth; now engaged, with his brother Wilhelm, in researches concerning the cause of the sun's heat and the means by which it is maintained, or studying with his brother Friedrich new problems of heat; now plunged in the most abstruse problems of meteorology; now sharply criticising the bacillus theories of Dr.