Carl Heinrich von Siemens

Businessman
Born: Menzendorf, Mecklenburg - 3 March 1829
Died: Menton, France - 21 March 1906

Carl Heinrich von Siemens was a German businessman and entrepreneur, the younger brother of the pioneering electrical engineer and inventor Werner von Siemens, whose advances in telegraph technology led him to found the company Siemens & Halske in 1847. In 1852, Werner and Carl von Siemens signed a contract to set up an underground and underwater telegraph line between St. Petersburg, Oranienbaum, and Kronshtat. Carl von Siemens remained in St. Petersburg, establishing a Russian branch office of his brother's company in the following year.

No. 34 on 1st Line of Vasilevsky Island - the original address of Carl Siemens' workshop
Siemens Electrical Plant (now Kozitskiy Plant)
Former apartment building of the Guards Economical Society, which now houses the Siemens office in St. Petersburg

Siemens set up the company's Russian operations on Vasilevsky Island, in the heart of St. Petersburg's German immigrant community. Siemens & Halske gradually established itself as the leading electrical company in Russia, with workshops to make and repair telegraph equipment, and a factory producing rubber-insulated cable able and arc lamps. Carl von Siemens headed the Russian office until 1869, when he moved to help his brother William Siemens in Britain. He returned to St. Petersburg in the 1880s, when the company was responsible for providing electric lighting for Nevsky Prospekt and several neighbouring streets.

Von Siemens married a Russian wife, became a member of the 1st Guild of Merchants, and was eventually raised to the ranks of the Russian nobility by Nicholas II in 1895.

Addresses: 70, 5-ya Liniya VO (Former Siemens & Halske Telegraph Workshops), 40, Kozhevennaya Liniya