gland in March 1848 to set up a branch of Siemens & Halske. This company had been founded in Berlin by his elder brother, Ernst Werner Siemens (181692), and Johann Georg Halske (181490). By 1858, Carl Wilhelm had registered the Siemens & Halske Agency in London, providing engineering consultancy to the emerging telegraph market. Its clients included the British Government, for both the terrestrial electrical telegraph and the pioneering submarine telegraph cables markets. At the same time, another brother, Karl Heinrich Von Siemens (1829-1906), set up a Siemens & Halske factory in St Petersburg to sell telegraph equipment and cables to the Russians. On 19 March 1859, Carl Wilhelm became a naturalized British subject under a warrant granted by Queen Victoria, changing his name to Charles William Siemens. This was in preparation for his marriage to Anne Gordon (18211901) on 23 July that year. She was the sister of Lewis Brodie Gordon (1815-76), Professor of Civil Engineering and Mechanics at Glasgow University. In 1865, a rift developed between William Siemens and Johann Halske over the submarine telegraph cable market, which Halske considered too risky, so they went their separate ways. Halske retained a large equity stake in the London company, but it was re-registered as Siemens Brothers. In 1869, Karl Hendrich came to join William in London, and he too would later become a naturalised British citizen. Siemens Brothers prospered and the site expanded to 35 acres (14 Hectares), employing around 10,000 people at its peak, second only to the Royal Arsenal in this part of London in the size of the site and its number of employees. Despite its strong German links, which would result in confiscation of share capital, internment and/or deportation of many German national employees during both World Wars, Siemens Brothers was responsible for several major technical developments that assisted the allies in both WWI and WWII. In the First World War, these included
field telephone systems, and trench cable, but perhaps the most significant development was ruggedised light bulbs for the Aldis and OL signalling lamps, used by the Royal Navy and the Army respectively in both wars. In the Second World War, the demand for telecommunication cable was again high because of bomb damage caused by German air-raids, but significant military projects included the ‘Clyde Loop’, that protected and kept the mouth of the River Clyde free of mines, and the High-Speed Motor Uniselector used in what was known then as ‘Chain Home’, a key element in the revolutionary Radio Direction Finding (RDF) system. RDF would later become RADAR (RAdio DeWWI Field Telephone and tection And Ranging). Siemens also the Aldis Lamp Bulb produced the extremely robust light bulbs for the Churchill tank, without which it would have been inoperable, due to the massive vibrations produced by its engine and drive system. However, perhaps the most audacious and ingenious of these products was the rapid development and manufacture, in complete secrecy, of the H.A.I.S. Cable for Operation PLUTO (Pipe Line Under The Ocean). The story of PLUTO begins in early April 1942, when Lord Louis Mountbatten (1900-79), the current Queen’s second cousin, and at that time Chief of Combined Operations, put a proposition to Geoffrey Lloyd (1902-84), the Conservative MP for Birmingham Ladywood, at that time Secretary for Petroleum and head of the Petroleum Warfare Department of the Ministry of Fuel and Power. Mountbatten’s proposal was that if a military campaign into Europe against the Nazis was to be successful, then there would need to be a pipeline across the English Channel to provide petrol, oil and lubricants in bulk to support the armed forces. Lloyd put this concept to the experts in his department and their consultants who had, prior to the outbreak of war, been working on pipelines across the Bristol Channel, the River Mersey, and the Thames. Their advice was that tidal and weather conditions in the English Channel, together with the risk of enemy action, would make it impossible to implement the proposal using any currently known land or sea construction method, which required pipes of 6” (inches) or more in diameter. However, the problem reached the ears of Arthur Clifford Hartley (1889-1960), SEPTEMBER 2021 | ISSUE 120
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