30. This Industrial Giant Started Off as an Innocent Manufacturer of Telegraph Equipment, Then Detoured to Massive Evil
In 1847 Werner von Siemens, an industrialist from Hanover, Germany, partnered up with a master mechanic named Johann Georg Halske, to found the Siemens & Halske Telegraph Construction Company. The following year, they built Europe’s first long-distance telegraph line; 310 miles from Berlin to Frankfurt am Main. The company expanded at a rapid pace to become a global giant. Less than two decades after its founding, it completed the Indo-European Telegraph Line, stretching nearly 7000 miles from London to Calcutta.
Eventually renamed Siemens AG, the company today is Europe’s biggest industrial manufacturing company, employing over 385,000 people, and generating more than € 86 billion in revenues in 2019. Its factories churn out a wide range of products in the fields of electronics, electrical engineering, energy, medical goods, drives, fire safety, and industrial plant goods. However, between its founding and now, the otherwise innocent industrial giant took a detour to evil. In the Nazi era, Siemens was Germany’s industrial giant, and it made use of slave laborers by the hundreds of thousands.