The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain in the decades before and after 1800. It launched an upheaval with historic, worldwide consequences over the course of the century, spreading first to other countries and eventually spanning the entire globe. Industry displaced agriculture as the leading economic sector. Many people moved from the countryside to urban areas. Production shifted from small workshops to factories that were equipped with a system of powered processing machines. The capital goods and consumer goods rationally produced at these factories brought greater prosperity to a broad population – at least in the medium to long term.

The nineteenth century also saw a revolution in transportation and communications. Railroads expanded traffic by land – for freight transport, business trips, and tourism. On the sea, steamships initiated a new phase of globalization. Cargo shipping grew and became more predictable. Electric telegraphy made it possible, for the first time, to communicate almost instantaneously across long distances. The phenomenon began with telegraph lines laid overland; but in the second half of the century, transoceanic cables already connected every continent.

All these developments originated in Great Britain. As the 19th century progressed, industrialization transformed other countries as well, including Germany. These successor countries in the industrialization process worked hard to inaugurate a technology transfer and learn from the British example. Travel to the British Isles for education – and sometimes for industrial espionage – was standard practice for countries catching up in industrialization. The nations on the European continent were the first to draw even with the United Kingdom in new technologies, including electric telegraphy. And the family firm founded by Werner von Siemens around mid-century thus developed telegraphic sets and systems that could vie with British products in quality.

Werner von Siemens involved his family in building up the company. Werner, Carl, and William Siemens constituted a “league of siblings,”[1] headed by Werner, who largely set the course for the Siemens companies in the 19th century. It was Werner who clearly defined the triumvirate’s tone. But his brothers Carl and William both played significant roles as well in Siemens’ evolution into a global player – Carl in building up the Russian business and William in taking care of the English side. Business in England soon became especially important, because the United Kingdom was where the submarine cables that significantly advanced the process of globalization were designed and produced.

Werner’s younger brother Wilhelm was raised in Germany, but chose the United Kingdom as his new home, became a British subject, and adopted the name William. In the text that follows, we refer to him as Wilhelm for the period when he lived in Germany, and William once he emigrated to England. He viewed himself entirely as a member of the Siemens league of siblings, but more than the other brothers, he injected his own personal interests into their joint ventures. He represented the Siemens companies in England, but also operated as an independent engineer, scientist, and entrepreneur. Those efforts did not proceed entirely free from conflict with his brothers, especially Werner. The early literature about Siemens characterized William as “eccentric, obstinate, unpredictable,”[2] with an “ill-tempered irritability,”[3] a “type tending to the choleric.”[4] Those characterizations stand in stunning contrast to the perceptions of his English contemporaries.[5] It is probably no mistake to treat this discrepancy as the product of differing national and commercial views of William’s work.

William wanted to push Siemens’ English business forward as much as possible. Working from England, he believed, offered the opportunity to make Siemens the world’s leading telegraphy company. But his brothers Werner and Carl – not to mention their business partner Johann Georg Halske, who headed production in Berlin – were unwilling to back this high-risk strategy. In the years following, William made an effort to delegate at least some of his tasks at Siemens Brothers, the English part of the company, though without entirely abandoning his commitment to the family firm.

William Siemens was a highly qualified and highly respected mechanical engineer for whom telegraphy was just one interesting field among many. And in fact, telegraphy gradually lagged behind mechanical engineering and metallurgy as a focus of interest for him. In these two fields, he achieved noteworthy successes. Although he did not achieve his own goals, he made a crucial contribution toward a new steelmaking process, named the Siemens-Martin process after him and a French steelmaking family. This became the world’s most significant steelmaking process for an entire century. William’s technical and scientific achievements, as well as his personal charm, opened the door for him to take on influential positions in the English engineering world and in science.

The present biography concludes a trilogy on the founding generation of the Siemens firm –Werner, Carl, and William. It deals with a man who in many regards does not fit the standard image of a Siemens brother: a German who became an Englishman; a mechanical engineer, not an electrical engineer; an engineer and scientist who worked in a wide range of fields; a liberal who opposed Prussian triumphalism; and an independent personality who did not shy away from conflict, whether within the business or the family.

Above and beyond exploring his personality, William’s biography also opens up the opportunity to compare England and Germany in terms of political environment, state of engineering, and corporate culture. The letters between Werner and William often include hints from each that the other should come spend a certain amount of time in London or Berlin to get a better understanding of the conditions for building up a business there.

Siemens’ activities in England have benefited from an extensive, engaging treatment in the literature. The long-established work of Richard Ehrenberg (1906) is still indispensable. Ehrenberg’s study provides numerous sources, and thus has documentary status as well. J.D. Scott (1958) offers an overall history of Siemens Brothers, developed from the company’s files. Sigfrid von Weiher’s history of the Siemens plants in England (1990) is well-referenced with sources but suffers from Weiher’s unconditional adoption of Werner’s Berlin point of view. Werner’s autobiography, Recollections, is a valuable source for the characterization of William in particular. Lutz’s biography of Carl von Siemens (2016) and Bähr’s of Werner von Siemens (2017) reflect the current status of research, and both also explore relations among the brothers.

The relevant biographical literature on William is limited to a work by William Pole, published in English in 1888 and in a German translation in 1890.[6] Pole, a friend and colleague of William’s, was asked by the family to prepare the biography after William’s death. He examined letters and records that in some cases are no longer available.[7] He sought information from William’s relatives, colleagues, and friends, and from institutions where William had been a member. Most notably, Pole contacted William’s long-standing private secretary, Edward F. Bamber, the secretaries of the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Society of Arts, brother Werner, William’s wife Anne, and his adopted son Alexander Siemens as well as his friends Frederick Joseph Bramwell, William Thomson, William Henry Barlow, and Edward A. Cowper. Pole’s work is indispensable because it offers the most extensive collection of information about William and reprints important sources. But in the light of today’s historiographical criteria, it has a number of weaknesses. Although Pole attempts to situate William’s life amid the general development of technology and electrical engineering, even that limited perspective amounts to more of a chronology than a portrayal that provides real context.

This biography of William Siemens is based on numerous sources from a wide variety of collections. Two of these, however, are of particular importance. The first key group is William’s letters to family members, held in the Corporate Archives of the Siemens Historical Institute. Among others, these include 2,236 letters between William and...