Siemens Brothers & Co.
Siemens Brothers and Company Limited was an electrical engineering design and manufacturing company based in London , United Kingdom . It was founded as a branch in 1858 by Carl Wilhelm Siemens , a brother of the founder of the German electrical engineering company Siemens & Halske , Werner von Siemens . The main activities were in Woolwich , where cables and electrical luminous flux devices were manufactured from 1863 to 1968. Several buildings of historic interest have been preserved on the site between the Thames Barrier and Woolwich Shipyard. New plants were built in Stafford in 1903 and Dalston in 1908. During the First World War, Siemens Brothers was bought by a British consortium because most of its property was in the hands of foreigners whose country of origin was at odds with the Entente cordiale .
Siemens Brothers and Company Limited was bought by Associated Electrical Industries in 1955 . At the time, the business was described as follows: manufacture, sale and installation of submarine and land cables, overhead telegraph, telephone and power transmission lines, public and private telephone exchanges and carriers, telephone line transmission equipment, and marine radio and signaling equipment. The company produced all kinds of lamps, various electrical devices and electrical railway signals through subsidiaries.
history
On October 1, 1858, the German company Siemens & Halske founded an English company, Siemens & Halske & Company, a partnership between William Siemens, the cable manufacturer RS Newall from Gateshead and Siemens & Halske from Berlin. The aim was to lay Newall's newly developed submarine communication cable. The London branch was under the control of William, later Sir William Siemens, formerly known as Carl Wilhelm Siemens (1823-1883). Born in Lenthe, Kingdom of Hanover , Sir William went to England in 1843 to sell a patent that he shared with his brother Werner. He found a job in Birmingham with engineers Fox, Henderson & Co, and became a naturalized British citizen in 1859 on the day he married Anne Gordon, the daughter of an Edinburgh lawyer. Her brother was Lewis Gordon, RS Newall's business partner. In the 1850s, Sir William developed the Siemens regeneration furnace. After various errors in Newall's installed cables, the connection to RS Newall was broken at the end of 1860. In 1865, Johann Georg Halske , partner at Siemens & Halske, withdrew from the English branch. The company became Siemens Brothers. The shareholders were Werner von Siemens and Carl Wilhelm Siemens, with Werner owning the majority of the business capital.
Corporate activities
Submarine cables
Siemens Brothers Telegraph Works opened as a new cable factory in Woolwich, London, in 1863. It expanded to over 6 acres and employed more than 2,000 people. In 1869 the London and Berlin firms jointly built and laid a telegraph line from Prussia to Tehran, which formed a major part of the direct line from England to India, 2,750 miles. In the years 1874 to 1875, the London company alone completed the first direct Atlantic cable to the USA. The Direct United States Cable Company (DUS) was established for this purpose. Further cable connections across the Atlantic followed until 1901. In 1876, a direct Paris-New York cable was discussed in France. In March 1879, Siemens Brothers received the order from the banker Pouyer-Quertier. In mid-June, they finished manufacturing the PQ cable in Woolwich when the cable-laying vessel Faraday began laying it under the control of Ludwig Loeffler. The main cable was handed over to the owners in just over four months. Neither France nor the US had a cable factory. In 1881 cables were laid from England to Nova Scotia (north cable). In 1882 a cable was laid from England to Nova Scotia (south cable). The construction and laying of cables remained the company's main activity until Sir Williams' death in 1883. After his death, the London manager Johann Carl Ludwig Loeffler (1831-1906) were offered shares in order to keep him in the company. He managed to increase his stake to 25%, but there was disagreement over how the company was run and Alexander Siemens, Williams' adoptive son, replaced Loeffler in 1888. Werner bought Loeffler's stake. Loeffler died 18 years later in Tyrol, leaving behind a property worth more than 1.5 million pounds. He was a major investor in Western Australian mines.
Heavy current products
The invention of the dynamo in 1867 led to a switch from Siemens' previous strengths in light power products to heavy power products and processes. The world's first modern high-voltage power plant opened in Deptford East in 1891. It was designed in 1887 by the 23-year-old former Siemens apprentice Sebastian de Ferranti and built by the London Electricity Supply Corporation at Thames Bank in Deptford Creek, two and a half miles west of Siemens' Woolwich site. After the invention of arc lamps, Siemens Brothers started manufacturing them.
literature
- Wilfried Feldenkirchen: Siemens: From workshop to global company . 2nd edition, Munich 2003.
- Sigfrid von Weiher: The English Siemens works and the Siemens overseas business in the second half of the 19th century (Writings on economic and social history 38) Berlin 1990
- Georg Siemens: The way of electrical engineering. History of Siemens . Volume I The time of free enterprise 1847–1910. 2nd edition, Freiburg, Munich 1961