Siemens, SIR WILLIAM (KARL WILHELM), the youngest brother of Werner Siemens, was born at Lenthe in Hanover, April 4, 1823. He was educated at the trade school at Magdeburg, and spent a year in study at Göttingen University, where he worked hard at science. In 1843 he visited England, and was successful in introducing a process for electro-gilding invented by his brother Werner and himself. In 1844 he again came to England and patented his differential governor. Thenceforward he made England his home, and became a naturalised British subject in 1859. In 1862 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was presented with the Royal Albert Medal (1874) and with the Bessemer Medal (1875) 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. He was knighted in April 1883, and died on November 19 of the same year. 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 (opened 1883), electricity to the production of locomotion. In his regenerative furnace (1856; see Vol. V. p. 240) 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 (see IRON). Of his miscellaneous inventions and researches, the following are particularly worthy of mention: 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.
See his Life (1889) by Pole and his Scientific Works (1889).