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Presentation: Carl von Siemens. A transnational entrepreneur.
Carl von Siemens, about 1855
Carl von Siemens was born in Mecklenburg on March 3, 1829. The tenth child in the family, he was 13 years younger than his brother Werner, who assumed responsibility for the education of his younger siblings after their parents’ early death in Berlin. During this period, a friendly relationship developed between the two brothers, who continued to correspond frequently throughout their lives. Under the influence of Werner von Siemens, Carl began to take an interest in electric telegraphy, which first found large-scale application in the mid-1840s. Carl did not participate in the founding of the Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske in the fall of 1847 and only began working for the company two years later. Through his involvement in the building of the first German electric telegraph lines, he acquired comprehensive technical and organizational knowhow.
When the young company experienced a serious crisis in the early 1850s, Werner von Siemens sent the 22-year-old to London, where he represented Siemens & Halske at the first world exhibition and used the opportunity to make the company’s name internationally known, to establish contacts and to explore the potential for telegraph construction outside the German market. Carl von Siemens next traveled to Paris, where he founded the company’s first foreign subsidiary. However, the business was closed after only six months due to conflicts with the company’s French partners. Carl von Siemens’ time in Paris was anything but happy. At the beginning of January 1853, he wrote to Werner in Berlin: “I cannot tell you how glad I am to leave this miserable Paris. I’ve spent a lot of money, earned nothing and, on top of that, lived badly. I must have lost 30 pounds since coming here.”
In 1853, Carl von Siemens traveled to Russia to personally monitor the building of the Russian telegraph system. He quickly proved himself a decisive and expert entrepreneur and obtained, within a very short time, an excellent reputation in St. Petersburg circles. Under his management, Siemens & Halske’s business activities in Russia developed to such an extant that, within only two years, they were the central pillar of the entire company: by 1855, the construction of the Russian telegraph system was generating 80 percent of Siemens & Halske’s total revenue. This dynamic growth put the relationship between Berlin and Petersburg on an entirely new footing. On January 1, 1855, the 26-year-old business leader officially joined the company’s top management as a shareholder. The Petersburg engineering office became a separate foreign subsidiary. Because of the extraordinary importance of the company’s business in Russia, Carl von Siemens took up permanent residence in the country. At the end of the year, he married Marie Kapherr, the daughter of a Petersburg businessman of German descent. In 1858, he obtained Russian citizenship. Over the decades to come, Carl established a number of companies in Russia – some also in fields outside Siemens & Halske’s core electrical engineering business.
1867 marked a watershed in the company’s Russian business. In that year, the Russian government assumed responsibility for the maintenance of the country’s telegraph lines – an activity that had been performed by Siemens & Halske since 1855. This move completely deprived the company of an attractive source of income. For reasons of health, Carl von Siemens subsequently left St. Petersburg and moved with his family to Tiflis, where he took over the management of the Kedabeg copper mine, which he had acquired jointly with his brothers Werner and Walter. After initial difficulties, the mine, which was located in the Caucasus Mountains, was a profitable enterprise by the 1870s.
But by that time, Carl von Siemens was no longer in Russia. Grief at the death of his wife Marie had prompted the 40-year-old entrepreneur in October 1869 to make a new beginning as manager of Siemens Brothers in London. In the 1870s, the company’s English subsidiary focused almost exclusively on the high-risk undersea cable business. Siemens Brothers laid its first transatlantic cable with Carl von Siemens as project head. A large number of additional telegraph links were planned for Europe, South America and Asia.
At the beginning of the 1880s, Carl von Siemens returned to St. Petersburg and brought new momentum into the company’s Russian business, whose product portfolio soon extended beyond telegraph equipment and rail signaling systems to include, above all, cables and accessories for electric lighting systems. For some of its products, the company enjoyed a monopoly. Cable production was expanded through the construction of a dedicated factory that began operation at the mouth of the Neva River in June 1882. Energy technology also became increasingly important for business development. Carl von Siemens endeavored to obtain concessions that would enable him to tap the Russian market. In 1886, he joined a number of local partners in setting up the Society for Electric Lighting – a manufacturer of electrical systems, a utility company and a financing company all in one. This “light company,” which owned power plants in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Łódź, acquired a monopoly and obtained the right to lay cables and erect power plants. It played a decisive role in Russia’s electrification. As a result, Carl von Siemens was fully justified in remarking to his brother Werner in a letter of 1888: “I appear to have been created by nature for great enterprises, for wherever I have gone up to now, great things have always occurred.” For his services in the industrialization of Russia, he was raised to the hereditary Russian nobility by Czar Nicholas II.
On the retirement of Werner von Siemens and the company’s official reorganization as a limited partnership in 1890, Carl – together with his two nephews Arnold and Wilhelm von Siemens – became the company’s top managers. After the death of its founder in 1892, Carl von Siemens established a second residence in Berlin. However, his life continued to be centered on St. Petersburg. When Siemens & Halske was publicly listed in 1897, Carl, as the company’s senior executive, was appointed Supervisory Board Chairman. In 1904, the 75-year-old business leader retired from the management for reasons of health. Two years later, on March 21, 1906, Carl von Siemens succumbed to pneumonia in an Italian sanatorium.
October, 11 2011 – Sabine Dittler
Further reading
“Carl von Siemens: Internationalization and going public” in: Wilfried Feldenkirchen / Eberhard Posner, The Siemens Entrepreneurs, Munich 2005, pp. 42–57.