Siemens started with a telegraph that pointed at letters instead of using Morse
In 1847 Werner von Siemens and Johann Georg Halske opened a Berlin workshop around a telegraph whose needle spelled out letters. Within twenty years their firm had strung a line 11,000 km from London to Calcutta. Today Siemens is Europe's largest engineering company, with roughly 320,000 staff and a history that includes Nazi forced labour.
Siemens & Halske was founded on 1 October 1847 and opened its first workshop on 12 October. A year later it built Europe's first long-distance telegraph line, 500 km from Berlin to Frankfurt am Main. Family members spread the business abroad: Carl Wilhelm, later Sir William Siemens, represented it in London from 1850, and another brother, Carl Heinrich, ran a branch in St Petersburg from 1855 as the company built Russian telegraph networks.
Electricity was the next frontier. In 1867 Werner described a dynamo that needed no permanent magnets, an idea others hit on independently, but Siemens was first to build such machines. In 1881 a watermill-driven Siemens alternator lit the streets of Godalming in England, and in 1885 the company sold a generator to George Westinghouse, letting him begin AC experiments in Pittsburgh. Its Hobart tramway in Tasmania, opened in 1893, was the Southern Hemisphere's first complete electric tram network. By 1907 the group employed 34,324 people.
The darkest chapter came under the Nazis. The company used the forced labour of deported people, owned a plant at Auschwitz and ran a factory beside the Ravensbrück camp, where women prisoners were made to work. Research has shown that these camp factories were set up and run by the SS together with company officials, sometimes senior ones, in conditions where hunger and death were common. By late 1944 Siemens was operating almost 400 relocated plants to escape Allied bombing.
After the war, from a new base in Bavaria, it moved into computers, semiconductors, washing machines and pacemakers. The modern Siemens AG was formed in 1966 by merging three parent firms. Later decades brought a 20 per cent stake in AMD in 1977, the purchase of Westinghouse's power generation arm in 1998, and a string of spin-offs, from Infineon in 1999 to Siemens Energy in 2020. It reported revenue of around 78 billion euros in 2023.
Source: Siemens
