If I have dwelt thus long upon this particular branch of my subject, it is because I know of no other which so well illustrates two points in Sir William Siemens’ character which I have alluded to at the outset: his unwavering devotion to general principles and their consequences, and his ardent desire to promote the practical welfare of mankind. There is, however, as the late Professor Rolleston remarked to him, no subject which more impresses the minds even of persons who are laymen as regards science, than the history of Telegraphy (and I may perhaps be permitted to add, of Electrical Engineering generally), now so inseparably connected with his name. The University of Göttingen, at which he studied, was the cradle, if not the birthplace, of the electric telegraph in 1833. Shortly after, Sir Charles Wheatstone in England, and Mr. Morse in the United States, were simultaneously working at the same problem, and each claimed the honor of having solved it. The telegraph, however, was still in a very undeveloped state when the Brothers Siemens began to study it, and their series of inventions, especially for long-distance telegraphy, largely aided in bringing it to its present condition. One of their first was the Relay, an electro-magnet so delicate that it will move with the weakest current. By the use of five of Siemens’ polarised relays, a message can be sent by the Indo-European Telegraph from London to Teherán, a distance of 3,800 miles, without any retransmission by hand, and during the Shah of Persia’s visit in 1873, Dr. Siemens arranged for messages to be thus regularly despatched from a room in Buckingham Palace. In 1858, Messrs. Siemens Brothers established near London the well-known telegraph works, and the construction by them in 1868 and following years of the Indo-European Telegraph—the overland double line to India through Prussia, Southern Russia, and Persia—was the first great undertaking of the kind. Writing of it in August, 1882, during the first Egyptian campaign, Dr. Siemens said, “At the present time our communication with India, Australia, and the Cape depends, notwithstanding the nominal existence of the line through Turkey, on the Indo-European Telegraph.”