The world's first commercially successful regenerative furnace was built by Friedrich Siemens for a small glass making company at Rotherham, South Yorkshire, in 1860. Success came after several years of trials and rapidly led to other larger British glass makers to commission such furnaces which soon became widely used. Most accounts of the development of regenerative furnaces by William and Friedrich Siemens ignore the first glass furnace and assume that earlier trials with steel-making in Sheffield were the first to succeed, but those all failed, largely for lack of sufficiently good refractory materials. The important facts were reported in detail by R Ehrenberg in 1906, but his account has been ignored. This article takes a closer examination of the facts.
