The Siemens Family

German inventors

• Friedrich Siemens
• Born: December 8, 1826
• Birthplace: Lübeck, Prussia (now in Germany)
• Died: May 24, 1904
• Place of death: Berlin, Germany

• Karl Siemens
• Born: March 3, 1829
• Birthplace: Lübeck, Prussia (now in Germany)
• Died: March 21, 1906
• Place of death: St. Petersburg, Russia

• Werner Siemens
• Born: December 13, 1816
• Birthplace: Lenthe, Prussia (now in Germany)
• Died: December 6, 1892
• Place of death: Berlin, Germany

• William Siemens
• Born: April 4, 1823
• Birthplace: Lenthe, Prussia (now in Germany)
• Died: November 19, 1883
• Place of death: London, England

The four Siemens brothers are noted for their many seminal contributions to applied technology in nineteenth century electrical and steel industries, including telegraphy, the electric dynamo, and the open-hearth steel furnace.

Early Lives

Four brothers among the thirteen children of Christian Ferdinand and Eleonore Deichmann Siemens and many of the brothers’ sons became famous as inventors, scientists, and engineers, whose applied technology led to the creation of significant advances in electrical and steel industries, especially in telegraphy, the dynamo, the electric railways, and in the open-hearth steel furnace. Their father was a farm manager of large Prussian estates; he died in 1840, only a year after their mother had died.

The eldest son, Ernst Werner, while serving in the Prussian artillery at the age of twenty-three, assumed the guardianship of his seven younger brothers and successfully guided them into technological schools and profitable positions across nineteenth century Europe. Two brothers and one sister died in childhood; one brother became a farmer; and another became a glass manufacturer. Werner, William (earlier named Karl Wilhelm), Friedrich, and Karl were all born in Prussia (modern west Germany). These four made enormous contributions to modern technology and manufacturing in their lifetimes.

Werner and some of his brothers attended St. Catherine’s School in Lübeck. Upon completion of grammar school there, Werner enlisted in the Prussian army in order to enter the Berlin Artillery and Engineering School. Upon graduation in 1837, he was promoted from ensign to second lieutenant in the Third Artillery Brigade and was stationed at Magdeburg. He took William along to study at the Trade and Commerce School there while he continued in the military service. Transferred to Wittenberg in 1840, Werner experimented with electrolysis and succeeded in developing a process for gold plating by galvanic current and was granted a five-year patent for it in 1842. By selling his rights to a jewelry firm, he began a lifelong income from his inventions.

William Siemens emigrated to England in 1843 and became a naturalized citizen in 1859. A prolific inventor, he was granted 113 English patents; as a shrewd businessperson, moreover, he accumulated a large fortune. Karl Siemens had studied at Lübeck and at Berlin before joining his brother Werner in his endeavors. He became the most cultivated and diplomatic member of the family, having a keen sense of business management. Werner wrote of him: “Karl was the true connecting link between us four brothers, who indeed differed radically from one another, but were bound together for lifelong common work by an all-abiding fraternal love.” Friedrich Siemens had gone to sea from Lübeck in sailing ships but returned to work with Werner and then with William in England. Werner declared him “the born inventor” with a “characteristic of steady, spontaneous, uninfluenced thinking and self-training [which] gave him a peculiarly meditative air and his performances a pronounced originality.”

Lives’ Work

One of the great technological achievements of the Siemens brothers was the development of instruments and the establishment of international firms under their control for the European and Asian telegraph systems. First to utilize the substance called gutta-percha for covering underground telegraph wires, Werner created a screw press that extruded the substance around the wire while hot and cooled it into a seamless insulated covering that could carry electrical current underground or underwater. Then, he joined forces with a young physical mechanic, Johann Georg Halske, forming the firm of Siemens and Halske in Berlin, to perfect his invention of a self-interrupting dial telegraph instrument. Werner resigned from the military service in 1847, the year of his dial invention, and began manufacturing telegraph cable and equipment to fulfill contracts from Prussia and Russia to lay long lines between key cities, which soon outmoded all optical semaphore systems along military or railroad routes.

By the 1850’s, Werner’s firm had constructed the line from Berlin to Frankfurt am Main, and that success led to contracts with his brother William to lay submarine cables across the Atlantic, with his brother Karl to lay lines out of St. Petersburg for Russia, and to connect the famous London to Calcutta, or Indo-European, telegraph line that opened in 1870. The rare combination of inventive skill, manufacturing capability, and useful diplomatic-political connections enriched the firms of the Siemens brothers and their shareholders.

As the London agent for his brothers’ European firm of Siemens and Halske, William spent much of his career advancing the realm of the electric telegraph. In 1874, he laid the first Atlantic cable from England to the United States from a special ship he designed, the Faraday. For his distinguished achievements, he won medals at industrial exhibitions and the presidency of many English engineering and metals associations. In 1862, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, the oldest scientific society, founded in 1662. In 1883, seven months before his death, he was knighted by Queen Victoria for his services. He had married Anna Gordon in 1859; they had no children, and she died in 1901.

Karl developed the Russian branch of the German firm and directed most of the construction of the international telegraph lines and cables that the family firms won contracts to build. Later, he became a Finnish-Russian citizen in order to do business in Russia; he married and lived in St. Petersburg for many years and was raised to the hereditary Russian nobility in 1895. After Werner’s death, Karl became head of Siemens and Halske (Johann Georg Halske withdrew from the partnership in 1867).

Perhaps the most significant invention of the Siemens brothers was the construction of the regenerative furnace for the emerging steel industry. Friedrich pioneered the work of the firm on the application of the regenerative principle into the smelting of steel in conjunction with the French engineer Pierre-Émile Martin to create the famous Siemens-Martin open-hearth furnace. In England in 1856, Sir Henry Bessemer had patented a forced-air process for the smelting of steel; in the United States, William Kelly had devised a “pneumatic process” as early as 1849 but belatedly received an American patent in 1857. Friedrich and William applied their regenerative principle to the smelting furnaces with much larger capacities for molten metal, glass, and special materials. In 1864, in cooperation with Martin, they developed the so-called Siemens-Martin process, which works on the heat-storage principle.

In conventional furnaces, air and the combustible gases are introduced cold into the furnace, and the hot waste gases escape via smokestacks. In the regenerative process, the heat of the waste gases is captured for use in preheating the air and the combustible gases. Two or four refractory brick chambers are next to the smelting unit, and, in alternating fashion, the hot waste gases are passed through the chambers, which have large thermal storage capacity. Then, valves close and new air and gases are preheated as they are introduced through the hot chambers and fed into the furnace. This process creates much higher temperatures for smelting, permits the use of low-grade gases, and saves on fuel costs.

For twelve years, from 1847 to 1859, William, in England, had tried unsuccessfully to apply this regenerative principle to steam engines. In 1856, Friedrich obtained a patent for the idea of using a waste heat condenser for industrial furnaces. In France, Martin had made steel by wrought iron, or cast iron, in a similar regenerative open-hearth furnace. Martin and the Siemenses combined their efforts in the Siemens-Martin process, which utilized iron ore directly from the mines. Eventually, the open-hearth process became immensely profitable as the recycling of scrap iron was implemented. First adopted for commercial steel manufacture in 1865, by 1896 the tonnage of steel from England’s Siemens-Martin furnaces had surpassed the production of all Bessemer furnaces.

A third field of invention and manufacture evolved from Werner’s invention of the “dynamo-electric machine,” which he demonstrated in 1866. Almost at the same time, Charles Wheatstone in England and Samuel Alfred Varley in France had exhibited similar apparatuses and contested the priority of Werner’s claim. Eventually Werner gained recognition when he demonstrated his invention and published an account of the principle behind it. Again, it was the firm of Siemens and Halske that was quickly able to apply the new dynamo in practical applications and then manufacture the electrical apparatus.

Nearly 250 dynamos were manufactured each year by Siemens and Halske during the 1880’s. The number reached five hundred by 1892, as street and home lighting came of age, as did electrical motors for streetcars, railways, and factories. Siemens and Halske proceeded to develop the first electric tramway in 1881 in Lichterfelde with an overhead bow collector touching the trolley line. Siemens’s arc lamps illuminated the Berlin Potsdamer Platz in 1882; the brothers demonstrated their first electric lift or elevator at the Mannheim Industrial Exhibition in 1880, and in 1892 produced their first electricity meter, called a “saber meter.”

Significance

Werner and Sir William Siemens were the outstanding geniuses among the Siemens brothers; Friedrich and Karl Siemens extended the technology developed by the firm of Siemens and Halske into telegraph and electric systems sold, installed, and maintained by the company across the Western world. The family was instrumental in advancing the theoretical and technological fields of nineteenth century electronics with hundreds of patents granted to them and to members of their pioneering firm.

The Siemens brothers were significant leaders in German, English, and Russian enterprises of telegraphy, telephones, and electrical systems that served to promote the advancement of knowledge, the speedy transmission of information, and the shipment of people and material via electrical railways across Europe and Asia. Their several contributions to the manufacturing of steel, copper, and glass into less expensive materials for modern life immensely contributed to the Industrial Revolution after the great Crystal Palace Exposition of London in 1851, when Siemens and Halske were awarded the Council Medal, the first of hundreds to be won by the brothers.

Bibliography

Derry, T. K., and Trevor I. Williams. A Short History of Technology from the Earliest Times to A.D. 1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. This text is a sequel to the five-volume A History of Technology, begun by Charles Singer. Good coverage of the Industrial Revolution. A chapter entitled “Coal and the Metals” covers developments in the making of inexpensive steel. Comparative tables showing the chronological events of technological achievements in Great Britain, Europe, and the United States along with bibliographies for each chapter enhance this introductory study.

Feldenkirchen, Wilfried. Werner von Siemens: Inventor and International Entrepreneur. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994. This first book in a three-volume history of the Siemens Corporation focuses on Werner’s business career, describing how he and his brothers achieved their vision of a multinational electric technology company.

Karwatka, Dennis. “Technology’s Past.” Tech Directions 56, no. 10 (May/June, 1997): 12. Profile of Werner Siemens, describing his family background, technological innovations, and the company he founded.

Pole, William. The Life of Sir William Siemens. London: John Murray, 1888. The authorized biographer of the Siemens brother who had made England his home. It was produced by a popular biographer of that era with the help of family and friends, who provided personal papers and recollections.

Siemens, Charles William. The Scientific Works of C. William Siemens. 3 vols. Edited by E. F. Bamber. London: John Murray, 1889. These papers, including his addresses, lectures, and papers read before scientific societies, provide closer detail of his inventions and business ventures.

Siemens, Georg. History of the House of Siemens. 2 vols. Freiberg, Germany: Karl Alber, 1957. This set describes the development of inventions by the various Siemens brothers and the practical applications of them via the business enterprises in Europe and elsewhere. Much of the business story relates the efforts of William and Werner (volume 1). The tragic chapters on the two world wars include the technological advancements in telephony, telegraphy, and electrical fields to the year 1945 (volume 2).

Siemens, Werner von. Inventor and Entrepreneur: Recollections of Werner von Siemens. Translated by W. C. Coupland. 2d ed. London: Lund Humphries, 1966. This autobiographical work provides one of the best stories of the gifted Siemens family and modestly relates Werner’s own great achievements as inventor and businessperson. His story centers on the telegraph and electrical systems that his firm, Siemens and Halske, had established in many nations.

Singer, Charles, et al., eds. The Late Nineteenth Century, 1850 to 1900. Vol. 5 in A History of Technology. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1954-1958. Although the Bessemer process had pioneered the making of steel, the Siemens-Martin open-hearth method ultimately outproduced it in the twentieth century. This volume presents the most readable introduction of both means of steel manufacturing.