My recent chat with AI started simple: How did we get from Michael Faraday’s 1821 toy demonstration of a wire spinning in a bowl of mercury to the high-power industrial motors that run our world today?
It turns out the evolution of the electric motor wasn't just a story of laboratory breakthroughs. It was a messy, high-stakes saga funded by wartime telegraphy, secured by Cossacks, and built by a group of brilliant, broke brothers who knew exactly how to close a magnetic air gap when it mattered most.
When I asked what role Werner von Siemens played, the conversation shifted from pure physics to heavy mechanical engineering. It turns out Siemens’ grand contribution wasn't discovering a new law of nature; it was eliminating the air gap.
Early armatures were bulky and left air gaps between the spinning rotor and stationary magnets. Because air resists magnetic fields, energy was wasted. Siemens invented the shuttle armature in 1856, cutting deep grooves into an iron cylinder to tuck the wires inside, allowing the iron core to spin mere fractions of a millimeter from the magnets.
I realized that Siemens was pouring capital into motor R&D in the 1850s and 60s, but motors weren’t commercially viable yet. Where was the money coming from?
I discovered that Werner von Siemens started with absolutely zero family money. He was not a member of the aristocracy, Werner officially received the "von" name in 1888, quite late in his life (he was 71 years old). He was a penniless son (with 10 other siblings) of an educated tenant farmer who couldn't afford college. He only got an engineering education because he joined the Prussian Artillery Corps in 1834, which offered free schooling to officer candidates.
To be accepted as an officer candidate, Werner had to pass a demanding entrance examination that tested math, physics, geography, and French. This was a great hurdle for him because his secondary school education had focused heavily on classical languages (like Latin and Greek) rather than hard sciences. He spent three months cramming under intense self-preparation. Later in his life, he admitted in his recollections that while he prepared fiercely, passing the exam and securing his spot was also aided by "a spot of good luck."
Once inside the academy, Werner treated his strictly military duties as a necessary chore to secure his livelihood, focusing his real energy on the chemistry and physics lectures taught by top university scientists. The penniless outsider had successfully used the Prussian state to fund the very education that would later allow him to revolutionize the industrial world.
Even his early laboratory work was pure hustle. He perfected a commercial electroplating process while serving time in a military prison cell for acting as a second in an illegal duel! Because he was an officer, he was given "honorable confinement" (Festungshaft), allowing him to turn his cell table into a chemistry bench and smuggle in reagents through a friendly local apothecary and earn some money.
While serving as an artillery officer, Werner became fascinated by the early needle telegraphs being developed in Britain by William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone. These early devices required users to watch multiple needles point to letters on a diamond-shaped grid. They were finicky, easily knocked out of sync, and required skilled operators. Werner looked at this system and thought he could make it vastly more user-friendly. In 1846, he built a prototype of a dial telegraph. It was so simple that an untrained person could type and read messages instantly.
Because Werner had spent years publishing scientific papers and developing his dial telegraph prototype, he was appointed as a technical expert to the Prussian Telegraph Commission in 1846. He effectively became the internal advisor helping the government decide what to buy, putting him in the perfect position to pitch his own capabilities.
Werner had the design, but he lacked two critical things: the money to build it at scale, and the mechanical precision to manufacture it perfectly. He found his solution in two men: Johann Georg Halske, a highly skilled master clockmaker and precision mechanic in Berlin. Johann Georg Siemens, Werner’s wealthy cousin. He provided the initial seed capital of 6,842 thalers (a substantial sum for a young startup) to buy tools and rent a small workshop. On October 1, 1847, they opened the Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske in a small Berlin courtyard with just ten employees.
In 1848, amidst a wave of violent democratic revolutions, the Prussian government desperately needed a secure, underground communications line from Berlin to Frankfurt. Werner did not have high-society aristocratic connections, but he built a highly strategic, merit-based professional network inside the Prussian military and scientific establishment. He secured the 1848 Berlin-to-Frankfurt 500km telegraph contract through a mix of institutional placement, a powerful mentor (Magnus), and a perfectly timed political crisis. He also had just invented a machine to coat copper wires in seamless gutta-percha (a newly discovered Malaysian tree sap, better than rubber, sent to him by his younger brother Wilhelm in London). He landed the contract and laid the underground line.
But then came the twist: After a while, the early underground wires rotted. Bacteria ate them. Field mice and hamsters chewed through them. The Prussian underground network collapsed, a bitter bureaucratic feud erupted, and Siemens was effectively blacklisted from getting any more Prussian state contracts.
To survive, the Siemens brothers had to pivot internationally. They ignored Germany and went all-in on the Russian Empire. It required adapting to a closed, highly suspicious St. Petersburg aristocracy. Werner sent his 24-year-old brother, Carl Siemens, to embed himself in Russian high society. Carl succeeded by exploiting the looming panic of the Crimean War and pitching a killer product: a telegraph dial entirely redesigned with the Cyrillic alphabet, meaning completely untrained Russian soldiers could operate it instantly. They first won the initial contract for a line from Warsaw to the Prussian border, finishing in months, proving to the Tsarist officials that the company could deliver under immense pressure. Then they won the 9,000km 1853 telegraph contract.
Having learned his lesson from the previous underground catastrophe, instead of burying the wires to rot, Siemens built a 9,000-kilometer overhead network on wooden poles. This led to the discovery of the Tatarengalvanometer.
Laboratory testing equipment of the 1850s used delicate silk threads to hang magnetic needles, they broke if you looked at them wrong. Because Siemens was laying lines through the brutal Siberian winter and the rocky Caucasus, Werner ruggedized the technology. He mounted the needle on a heavy steel pivot and encased it in a dust-proof, waterproof cast-iron shell. It was built so tough that local labor crews could drop it in the mud or throw it in the back of a horse wagon without losing calibration.
The engineers affectionately named it after the local frontier populations: the Tatarengalvanometer.
...And the rest is history.
If I had read a standard biography of Werner von Siemens, I would have gotten a dry list of dates. If I had read a textbook on electric motors, I would have gotten pure math.
By using an AI collaborator as an adaptive sounding board, I was able to follow the thread of my own curiosity in real-time. I could jump instantly from the electromagnetic flux of a shuttle armature to the sociological reasons a German engineer could charm his way into the Tsarist court, and then immediately back down to the math of Ohm's Law.
The Siemens story is also a reminder that extraordinary success requires hard work, resilience, intelligence, building a strong network by being useful to others, and a measure of luck, often arriving disguised as a crisis.
PDF: Memoirs of Siemens [Lebenserinnerungen]
Music: Where have all the Flowers Gone - Marlene Dietrich
