Every day was a busy one with Siemens. His secretary was with him in
his residence by nine o'clock nearly every morning, except on Sundays,
assisting him in work for one society or another, the correction of
proofs, or the dictation of letters giving official or scientific
advice, and the preparation of lectures or patent specifications. Later
on, he hurried across the Park 'almost at racing speed,' to his offices
at Westminster, where the business of the Landore-Siemens Steel Company
and the Electrical Works of Messrs. Siemens Brothers and Company was
transacted. As chairman of these large undertakings, and principal
inventor of the processes and systems carried out by them, he had a
hundred things to attend to in connection with them, visitors to see,
and inquiries to answer. In the afternoon and evenings he was generally
engaged at council meetings of the learned societies, or directory
meetings of the companies in which he was interested. He was a man who
took little or no leisure, and though he never appeared to over-exert
himself, few men could have withstood the strain so long.
Siemens was buried on Monday, November 26, in Kensal Green Cemetery. The
interment was preceded by a funeral service held in Westminster Abbey,
and attended by representatives of the numerous learned societies of
which he had been a conspicuous member, by many leading men in all
branches of science, and also by a large body of other friends and
admirers, who thus united in doing honour to his memory, and showing
their sense of the loss which all classes had sustained by his death.
Siemens was above all things a 'labourer.' Unhasting, unresting
labour was the rule of his life; and the only relaxation, not to say
recreation, which he seems to have allowed himself was a change of task
or the calls of sleep. This natural activity was partly due to the spur
of his genius, and partly to his energetic spirit. For a man of his
temperament science is always holding out new problems to solve and
fresh promises of triumph. All he did only revealed more work to be
done; and many a scheme lies buried in his grave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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