Siemens, Sir William (redirected from Karl Wilhelm Siemens)

Siemens, Sir William, 1823–83, English electrical engineer, b. Germany; brother of Ernst Werner von Siemens. Originally his name was Carl Wilhelm Siemens. After visiting England to introduce an electroplating device he devised with his brother Ernst he returned in 1844 and became (1859) a naturalized British subject. He was head of the English branch of the Siemens firm, which made telegraphic and other electrical apparatus and handled electrical engineering projects. Among his important inventions were a water meter (1851) and a device for reproducing printing that remained standard until the development of photography, and he was one of the first to apply (1883) electric power to railways. With his brother Frederick he developed an improved regenerative furnace that was used to produce steel; the process, and a variation of it introduced by Pierre Martin, came to be known as the open-hearth process. He was knighted in 1883.

---

Siemens, Sir (Charles) William

 orig. Karl Wilhelm Siemens

(born April 4, 1823, Lenthe, Prussia—died Nov. 19, 1883, London, Eng.) German-born British engineer and inventor. He immigrated to Britain in 1844. In 1861 he patented the open-hearth furnace (see open-hearth process), which was soon being widely used in steelmaking and eventually replaced the earlier Bessemer process. He also made a reputation and a fortune in the steel cable and telegraph industries and was a principal in the company that laid the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable (1866). His three brothers were also eminent engineers and industrialists (see Siemens AG).