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December 8, 1826 – Friedrich August Siemens, the hidden champion among the Siemens brothers is born
Friedrich Siemens (third from right) and his siblings, around 1850
Friedrich was born on December 8, 1826, in the town of Menzendorf in northern Germany. Most biographies describe him as a child with a “delicate constitution,” so he could not attend school regularly until age 11. As Werner von Siemens recalls in his memoirs, “Friedrich was not a good scholar. It was always difficult for him to follow another person’s train of thought to the end.” This was not due to a lack of intellect or talent, he adds: “[I]n contrast, from the time he was a child he was an excellent observer and had the gift of always being able to connect his observations together and make himself understood.” Still, he had difficulties in school throughout his childhood.
The Siemens children lost both mother and father within a short time in 1840. At age 14, Friedrich was sent to Lübeck to live with an uncle who was appointed as his guardian. But the two of them didn’t get along, and the boy’s proximity to the sea and problems in school quickly led to an “irresistible urge,” as Werner von Siemens put it, to become a sailor. Friedrich signed on as a cabin boy in Hamburg, spending several years at sea. He initially loved it, as William reported to Werner three years later: “Friedrich and Karl are sailors heart and soul; Friedrich will certainly never switch to anything else. He’s health personified, although he appears quite delicate.” Friedrich himself wrote to Werner in 1844 about his plans to stay in the navy, where he hoped to pursue a career. But that required a better education, so he went to stay with Werner, who could supervise his further education and obtain a position for him in the Prussian Navy or, as William offered, the English Navy.
Friedrich applied himself and did his utmost, with the help of his elder brother, to fill in the gaps in his education. Werner von Siemens himself was still a soldier in the Prussian Artillery, but he was increasingly occupied with his own inventions and projects. After he invented the pointer telegraph, he needed an assistant to handle drawings and correspondence or to supervise the completion of mechanical work. Friedrich gladly assumed that role and was involved in the founding of “Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske” in 1847.
Another noteworthy event from this time is the birth of medical technology at Siemens: Werner developed a voltage inductor in 1844. Friedrich was suffering from severe toothache that nothing could help. After experimenting with the voltage inductor, the two brothers decided that the alternating current that was generated could perhaps reduce or eliminate the pain if it was run through the root of the tooth. As Werner recalls in his memoirs, “In fact, it worked on a particularly painful front tooth. There was severe pain at first, but that stopped immediately. Showing great force of will, as was always the case with my brother Friedrich, he immediately treated all of his teeth by running alternating current through the roots, whereupon he was able to enjoy a complete absence of pain that he had not experienced for weeks.” Unfortunately, the relief did not last long. The pain soon returned, the effect of the treatment diminished each time, and after a while the pain was as strong as ever. However, this was Werner’s very first attempt at a medical application.
Friedrich Siemens soon began to work independently for the new company, as he did during construction of a telegraph line in Hanover in 1848. He later served as an official representative of the company at the World Exposition in London in 1851, along with his brother Carl. This activity was interrupted only by the defense of the city of Kiel against the Danes in 1848, the year of revolutions. The defense was commanded by Werner, who asked his brothers to come to northern Germany to support him. Following the hostilities, Friedrich returned to London to assist his brother William in selling the pointer telegraph in England. The two brothers later focused their efforts more intensively on heat technology. Although the work did not lead to concrete results, Friedrich was able to gain a great deal of experience thanks to his research, which was to lead to his greatest success in 1856.
During his research into heat technology, Friedrich had come up with the idea of applying the regenerative principle of the Scottish clergyman Robert Stirling to industrial furnaces, obtaining an English patent for this in 1856. The revolutionary aspect of this idea: Friedrich could achieve unprecedented combustion temperatures by using waste heat in the combustion process. During the next few years, he worked with William to improve his invention before permanently moving back to Germany in 1864, when he married Elise Witthauer and returned to Lübeck.
Friedrich’s next business achievement was the result of a family misfortune, the death of another Siemens brother, Hans, who had established a glass factory in Dresden. Friedrich took over the business after Hans died in 1867 and revolutionized glass manufacturing with his furnace method. Friedrich soon became the largest glass manufacturer in Europe thanks to acquisitions and constantly increasing production. Additional inventions, such as the crematorium (1877) and the regenerative gas lamp (1879), show Friedrich’s creativity and influence as an engineer and inventor. His gas lamp was so successful that it actually delayed the introduction of electric light throughout the country, in direct competition with Werner. The elder brother later recalled that, when Friedrich developed his lamp, “he made the triumph of electric light over gas lighting much more difficult, although this never led to a break in our fraternal harmony.” Friedrich made a decisive improvement to the Siemens-Martin process of steel production in 1879 by introducing open hearth operation. He contributed major financing to development of the Mannesmann brothers’ rolling method for seamless steel tubes starting in 1887. He was involved in the creation of the German-Austrian company Mannesmannröhren-Werke AG in 1889, serving on its Supervisory Board from 1890 to 1904. Friedrich was also the leaseholder of the state mineral spring in Fachingen, Germany, where his heirs held the lease until 2005.
Werner von Siemens considered his brother to be a “born inventor,” to whom “the inventive concept idea first comes, although initially in a completely unclear, foggy form in his pondering mind, who then tests the basis of the idea with unceasing energy and indefatigable effort, seeking any knowledge that he lacks, finally rejecting his idea as wrong or impracticable or developing it into a usable and almost always original invention.” This continued well into old age, as he appreciatively observed. In his eyes, Friedrich, along with William and Carl, were the brothers to whom he was most closely tied through their “life together and common aspirations.”
Friedrich August Siemens died in Dresden on May 24, 1904, leaving six children.
Dr. Florian Kiuntke