Sir Carl Wilhelm Siemens FRS FRSA, anglicised to Charles William Siemens, was a German-British electrical engineer and businessman.
Sir (Charles) William Siemens was a German-English engineer and inventor who devised the “regenerative system” of using waste gases to preheat fuel gases, for the open-hearth furnace used in steel manufacturing. He was also important in the telegraph industry, a pioneer in undersea cable. He assisted in the engineering of the London-Calcutta telegraph line (1869), a landmark achievement in communications. His name at birth was Carl Wilhelm Siemens, the younger brother of Ernst Werner Siemens , who founded what is now the multinational Siemens company. Carl first visited England as agent for his brother to introduce an electroplating device. He returned in 1844, stayed, became a naturalized British subject in 1859, and known as Charles William Siemens until knighted as Sir William Siemens a few months before his death
The seventh son of Christian Ferdinand Siemens, a prosperous farmer. Siemens was a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (president, 1872), the Iron and Steel Institute (president, 1877), the Society of Telegraph Engineers (first president, 1872), the British Association (president, 18820, and the Royal Society of Arts (chairman, 1882) and a fellow of the Royal Society. Carl Wilhelm Siemens invented many industrial processes and held some 113 patents. He was also a successful entrepreneur who spent most of his active life in his adopted country. He was born in Hanover, and studied at several German universities, before visiting England in 1843. In his early years in England he made experiments with superheated steam, for which he was awarded the gold medal of the Society of Arts in 1850. He was naturalized in Britain in 1859. In 1858 he established an English branch of his brother’s company Siemens & Halske in London, which subsequently employed more than 2000 people in a factory built in 1866 at Charlton, in the south of the city, which made telegraphic equipment. He patented the electric arc furnace, used in steelmaking and other metallurgical processes, in 1867. He designed the Faraday, the prototype of the cable-laying ship.