Story Highlights
- Historical event:
- 1 October 1847
- Siemens was originally a telegraph company named „Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske“.
The widely-known German company Siemens was established on this day in 1847.
Its founders were Werner von Siemens and Johann Georg Halske, and it was seated in Berlin, which was then the capital of the Prussian Kingdom (Germany was still divided into many small states during that time, and united only some 20 years later).
Siemens was originally a telegraph company named „Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske“. Telegraphs were an early long-distance communication system which relied on Morse Code to transmit electric impulses through over long distances via wire.
A novelty which Siemens introduced in that field were telegraphs which used a moving needle to point to the sequence of letters that the signal indicated.
Already during the very next year after the company was founded, the experts at Siemens set up the first long-distance telegraph cables in Europe. The Berlin-Frankfurt telegraph line was some 500 kilometers long.
In 1867, the company started working on an exceptionally long telegraph line, which stretched from London to Calcutta, India. Siemens branched out to the electric industry, and became one of the largest companies in Germany by the time the First World War (Great War) broke out.
During the 20th century, Siemens also got involved in many high-tech industry branches, such as nuclear energy (they built all 17 nuclear plants in Germany), mobile telephony (Siemens Mobile), and IT (Fujitsu Siemens).
It is interesting that they also have a branch dedicated to medical diagnostics, which are today one of their most important exports. The entire Siemens company currently employs between 360,000 and 400,000 people.
