Sir Charles William Siemens was a German-born engineer and entrepreneur.
Background
Siemens was born on April 4, 1823 in Gehrden, Germany, where his father, Christian Ferdinand Siemens (31 July 1787 - 16 January 1840), a tenant farmer, farmed an estate belonging to the Crown. The Siemens family is an old family of Goslar which has been documented since 1384. His mother was Eleonore Deichmann (1792 - 8 July 1839), and William, or Carl Wilhelm, was the fourth son of a family of fourteen children. Of his siblings, Ernst Werner Siemens, the fourth child, became a famous electrician and was associated with William in many of his inventions. He was also the brother of Carl Heinrich von Siemens and a cousin of Alexander Siemens.
Education
In the autumn of 1838 when William was fifteen years old, he began his studies to become an engineer. He attended a highly respected School of Trade and Commerce, the Gewerbe-Schule Magdeburg. William had a particularly close relationship with his eldest brother; Ernst Werner Siemens had decided to teach William mathematics so that he could learn English at school instead. This programme helped them both and William's knowledge of English proved an incalculable advantage to them both. He went on to pass his examination easily. Less than a year later, their mother died and their father soon afterwards in 1840.
Once William had completed his course at the Magdeburg school he went on to the University of Göttingen where he attended lectures on physical geography and technology, high mathematics, theoretical chemistry and practical chemistry and physics. He was also able for a short time to work with Wilhelm Weber, the renowned scientist and inventor, in his Magnetic Observatory.
William was nearly nineteen when he left university to become an apprentice engineer.
Career
In 1843 Siemens visited England at the age of nineteen, in the hope of introducing a process in electroplating invented by himself and his brother Werner. The invention was adopted by Messrs Elkington, and Siemens returned to Germany to enter as a pupil the engineering works of Count Stolberg at Magdeburg.
He laboured mainly in two distinct fields, the applications of heat and the applications of electricity, and was characterized in a very rare degree by a combination of scientific comprehension with practical instinct.
In the application of heat Siemens's work began just after J. P. Joule's experiments had placed the doctrine of the conservation of energy on a sure basis. Taking up the regenerator - a device invented by Robert Stirling twenty years before, the importance of which had meanwhile been ignored - he applied it to the steam engine in the form of a regenerative condenser with some success in 1847, and in 1855 engines constructed on Siemens's plan were worked at the Paris exhibition.
The complete invention was applied at Chance's glass-works in Birmingham in 1861, and furnished the subject of Faraday's farewell lecture to the Royal Institution.
The Siemens-Alteneck or multiple-coil armature followed in 1873.
Another of the uses to which Siemens turned electricity was to employ light from arc lamps as a substitute fot sunlight in hastening the growth and fructification of plants. His strength lay in his grasp of scientific principles, in his skill to perceive where and how they could be applied to practical affairs, in his zealous and instant pursuit of thought with action, and in the indomitable persistence with which he clung to any basis of effort that seemed to him theoretically sound.
His position was recognized by his election in 1862 to the Royal Society, and later to the presidency of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the Society of Telegraph Engineers, the Iron and Steel Institute, and the British Association; by honorary degrees from the universities of Oxford, Glasgow, Dublin and Wurzburg; and by knighthood (in 1883).
Achievements
Siemens-Martin process
Membership
Member of the Royal Society, president of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, president of the Society of Telegraph Engineers, president of the Iron and Steel Institute, president of the British Assossiation
Connections
On 23 July 1859, Siemens was married at St James's, Paddington, to Anne Gordon, the youngest daughter of Mr Joseph Gordon, Writer to the Signet, Edinburgh, and brother to Mr Lewis Gordon, Professor of Engineering in the University of Glasgow and became a naturalised British subject. He used to say that on 19 March of that year he took oath and allegiance to two ladies in one day - to The Queen and to his betrothed.
Father:
Christian Ferdinand Siemens
Mother:
Eleonore Deichmann
Spouse:
Anne Gordon
Brother:
Ernst Werner von Siemens
He was a German inventor and industrialist, and the founder of the electrical and telecommunications company Siemens
