Werner von Siemens

Ernst Werner von Siemens was a German electrical engineer and industrialist who founded the Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens and Halske in Berlin in 1847, the company that grew into Siemens AG. He developed a pointer telegraph using a rotating needle rather than Morse code, and in 1866 demonstrated the self-excited dynamo, a discovery that made large-scale electricity generation practical and helped found the modern electrical power industry. His firm went on to build the world's first electric passenger train, demonstrated at the Berlin Industrial Exhibition in 1879, the first electric elevator in 1880, and the first electric tram line, opened in a Berlin suburb in 1881. He was ennobled in 1888 and received the Prussian order Pour le Merite for Sciences and Arts in 1886; the SI unit of electrical conductance, the siemens, is named after him.