Sir William Siemens summary

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Sir William Siemens, 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).