During his lifetime, Werner von Siemens contributed as an entrepreneur, inventor, and technician to making the world change more profoundly than ever before. The founder of today’s Siemens AG, born in 1816, grew up when industry was on the rise. As steam engines and railroads became more widespread, an epoch of heretofore unparalleled technological innovations began. As a pioneer of electrical engineering, Werner von Siemens helped to found a sector without which our modern world would be inconceivable. Other inventors at that time also used new knowledge in the natural sciences about the principles of electricity, but only a few recognized the economic potential of this new technology so successfully, and only a few industrialists were also active on the international stage so early on.

Today, Werner von Siemens is more famous than almost any other German entrepreneur from the early industrial age. This is due not only to the fact that the company he founded counts among the great brands in the electrical engineering industry, but also to his achievements as an inventor, a founder of professional associations, and a promoter. Already shortly after his death, as the “father of electrical engineering” he had become an icon of a national culture of memory that valued scientific and technological achievements above entrepreneurial ones. This image began to fade in the last few decades, along with public interest in Werner von Siemens. Only heads of the Siemens Corporate Archives or the Siemens Forum have written noteworthy biographies of him in the last 70 years.[1]

Nonetheless, taking up the study of Werner von Siemens today is exceptionally rewarding if one examines his life story in all its complexities and without trying to glorify him. Along the lines of current approaches to historical research, the present biography offers a complete picture of his personality, including information about his family, business, and social spheres, for the first time.[2] Alongside the entrepreneur and inventor, Werner von Siemens the citizen, the husband, the brother, the family father and neighbor, but also the parliamentarian, the association chairman, and the member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften [Academy of Sciences] will also be described. In order to clarify the temporal contexts, this biography is divided into chapters for the individual phases of his life, and these, as much as possible, are comprised of sections on various spheres of activity.

One focus, which can be regarded as a key to Werner von Siemens’ biography, is his exceptionally important relationship with his siblings. He always saw himself as part of a league of siblings. This is especially true of his close relationship with his brothers Wilhelm (William) and Carl, who can be regarded as his most important life companions. The two of them also shaped the development of the companies Siemens & Halske and Siemens Brothers in which they took part. Private and business matters went hand in hand in the relationship between the brothers Werner, William, and Carl. Their loyalty to one another was an important factor in their business success and decisively influenced Werner von Siemens’ ideas of what a family company should be.

The close ties between the brothers have not previously been systematically explored in any Werner von Siemens biography. When the national economist Richard Ehrenberg wrote the first history of the Siemens firms in 1906, he was still aware that it was about “undertakings of the Siemens brothers.”[3] Later, this connection was pushed to the background. Only more recently was it rediscovered by Martin Lutz in his biography of Carl von Siemens. Lutz’s biography, at the same time, presents a new image of the brothers by placing their work in the context of nineteenth-century globalization.[4] In the past years, kinship history, a field emerging from historical anthropology, has discovered the Siemens family as a field of inquiry. David Warren Sabean sees an example of a “kinship” system in this form of family relations; such systems helped to promote the development of the German economy in the 19th century.[5] At the same time, little is yet known of how the solidarity among the Siemens brothers and within the entire family was shaped. The present biography pursues these questions both in relation to Werner von Siemens as well as in relation to his family context.

Werner von Siemens’ behavior as an inventor and business owner/entrepreneur in a new sector based on knowledge forms another focus of the book. He counted among the entrepreneurs of early industrialization in Prussia. Firms at that time – like Siemens & Halske – were overwhelmingly owner-managed or family companies. Rather atypical, by contrast, was the path Werner von Siemens took to found his companies. Together with the mechanic Johann Georg Halske, he founded a workshop as an officer without any experience in manufacturing in order to market a telegraph device he had invented. His rise as an entrepreneur and business owner went hand in hand with that of the new sector based on knowledge from the natural sciences. This required a different procedure than in the older industrial sectors, primarily a greater willingness to internationalize the business and consideration of the risks associated with the utilization of technologies that were not yet fully mature. The transition to large-scale operations and the establishment of the electrical engineering industry changed the conditions of business and required a rethinking of many things. The dominant retrospective image of Werner von Siemens as an industrial baron derives from this later period, but it does not do justice to his entire biography.

Just how difficult it is to use general explanatory models to describe Werner von Siemens’ activities becomes apparent from the various assessments of individual aspects of his actions in historical research. In his classic study of the development of the operational organization at Siemens & Halske, Jürgen Kocka established that Werner von Siemens adhered to the models of an owner-operated private company even when the company had long since become too large for this sort of framework.[6] Studies in the history of technology and science paint a completely different picture. In these, Werner von Siemens is described as a far-sighted entrepreneur who, as the inventor of the dynamo machine, recognized the potential of heavy-current technology early on and, in the promotion of research, implemented future-oriented innovations.[7]

The present biography is based mainly on letters from and to Werner von Siemens. It is very fortunate for business history research that these sources, which are quite informative, have survived in such large numbers. The correspondence between Werner von Siemens and his siblings alone comprises about 6,500 letters. The large number derives above all from the constant communication with his brothers William and Carl, who led the Siemens companies in London and St. Petersburg. In their letters, the brothers shared information about business matters and technical questions as well as about private events and assessments. It is quite rare for a tremendous source of this kind to have survived from the nineteenth century; it can likely be explained by the fact that the Siemens Historical Institute today has one of the oldest German company archives at its disposal. The first comprehensive presentations of Siemens history already relied on the letters of the company founder.[8] Many of them were published in books edited by Conrad Matschoss (1916) and Friedrich Heintzenberg (1953).[9] Neither collection, however, included the corresponding letters to Werner von Siemens, which are no less revealing. In the meantime, the basis of correspondence that has been gathered and transcribed has grown broader. Thanks to the digitalization of the letters initiated by the Siemens Historical Institute, they can be analyzed in a much more targeted and comprehensive way. This Werner von Siemens biography is now the first to have utilized these possibilities. To complement the letters, the relevant data files of the Siemens Corporate Archives and the materials from the archive of the Siemens family foundation in Goslar were also analyzed. Very few related files can be found in the holdings of the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz [Secret State Archives Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation].

In his memoirs Lebenserinnerungen [Recollections], Werner von Siemens left his own account of his career and...