The Mother of all Furnaces

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Sir William Siemens (1823-1883) was an important inventor who had an even larger genius for the application of his ideas, mostly in the fields of heat and electricity and power.  He occasionally strayed into the pure sciences, the work of which was sometimes fruitful and sometimes not. The illustration below is from an idea of the second variety, something where he applied his work in the regenerative furnace to the conservation of solar energy.  It was an adventurous and unworkable, although the illustration he used to illustrate a paper on the subject (in Nature, 9 March 1882) was drop-dead beautiful.