All he did only revealed more work to be
done; and many a scheme lies buried in his grave.
Though Siemens was a man of varied powers, and occasionally gave
himself to pure speculation in matters of science, his mind was
essentially practical; and it was rather as an engineer than a
discoverer that he was great. Inventions are associated with his name,
not laws or new phenomena. Standing on the borderland between pure and
applied science, his sympathies were yet with the latter; and as the
outgoing President of the British Association at Southport, in 1882, he
expressed the opinion that 'in the great workshop of nature there are no
lines of demarcation to be drawn between the most exalted speculation
and common-place practice.' The truth of this is not to be gain-said,
but it is the utterance of an engineer who judges the merit of a thing
by its utility. He objected to the pursuit of science apart from its
application, and held that the man of science does most for his kind who
shows the world how to make use of scientific results. Such a view was
natural on the part of Siemens, who was himself a living representative
of the type in question; but it was not the view of such a man as
Faraday or Newton, whose pure aim was to discover truth, well knowing
that it would be turned to use thereafter.
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