He was born in Hanover in 1816. He joined the Prussian army as a cadet and attended the United Engineering and Artillery School in Berlin, after which he was appointed a second lieutenant in the artillery. He was always fascinated with new gadgets and inventions and began to experiment in his own time with the new force, electricity. Siemens first caught the public eye when he defied his critics and patented a galvanic process for gilding and plating in 1842; his brother sold the patent to a firm in Birmingham for a staggering £1,500. It was Siemens who realized the potential of the electric telegraph, inventing a process to insulate overhead wires so that they could be used along railways; the first of these was installed in 1847 along the famous Berlin – Potsdam line. In that year he teamed up with a mechanical engineer Johann Georg Halske and set up a small workshop with a handful of employees in the Schöneberger Strasse; by 1914 the huge firm employed more than 60,000 people. Siemens-Halske specialized in laying telegraph and submarine cables; one of the most extraordinary was the overland telegraph line which stretched from Britain to India by way of Prussia, Russia and Persia, and was completed by three Siemens firms under their London-based Indo-European Telegraph Company in 1867.
Siemens was a brilliant inventor and came up with a number of electrical instruments, the most important being the electric dynamo demonstrated at the Paris International Exhibition in 1867. The first ever elevator, built in a New York department store, had been steam powered; but in 1881 Siemens installed the first ever electric elevator, which astounded everyone with its smooth and quiet ride. He was fascinated by transportation and built an ingenious miniature electric railway which later served as a model for a full-scale service, as well as an electric trolleybus. Siemens and Halske electric trams first glided through Lichterfelde in 1881 and soon linked the city together.
The new Bell telephones had been invented in America, and despite official disapproval Siemens was determined to install them in Berlin. The first 200 subscribers were hooked up in 1880. Electric street lighting illuminated Berlin in the same year. Until the 1820s Berliners had lived in almost complete nocturnal darkness, and during what they called the ‘dark season’ between November and March one in three homes had to have a petroleum lamp outside the door. When gas street lamps were finally introduced they were said to have a ‘bad influence on people’s morality, undermining fear of the Lord and terror of the dark’. The introduction of Siemens’s electric light half a century later was greeted with more enthusiasm. The first lamp was put up in 1880, outside the Bauer Restaurant on Friedrichstrasse, and the first street to be fully electrified was the Leipziger Strasse. Berliners crowded around waiting for the ‘magic lights’ to be switched on, and the result was impressive. Never had the shadows been so sharp or the vision so clear. Despite the great expense – 1 kilowatt of electricity cost 40 pfennigs, more than twice the cost of gas – Berliners saw it as a matter of pride to put electric lights up throughout the city as soon as possible. The first coloured electric sign for Manoli cigarettes was hailed as a landmark, but before long all the clubs on the Friedrichstrasse were dazzling visitors with their blue and green and red lights.
Siemens’s great rival was a charming man by the name of Emil Rathenau, whose son Walther was later assassinated under the Weimar Republic. Born in Berlin in 1838 Emil studied engineering at technical college and worked as a draughtsman at Borsig’s firm in Moabit. He travelled extensively in England and on his return to Berlin purchased a small engineering plant in a converted dance hall in the famous Chausseestrasse. His forty employees started by building steam engines, equipment for gas works and props for the State Opera House; indeed one of his first contracts was to build a ship for Meyerbeer’s Die Afrikanerin. Rathenau’s life changed in 1881 when he saw Edison’s incandescent electric bulb at the Paris exhibition. At his funeral his son said:
when Emil Rathenau saw that little bulb alight for the first time, he had a vision of the whole world covered with a network of copper wire. He saw electric current flowing from one country to another, distributing not only light but also power – energy that would become the life blood of the economy and would stimulate its movement and growth … he vowed that he would devote his life to electricity.55
In 1883 Rathenau founded the German-Edison Company in order to produce Edison’s inventions in Berlin, and it was over the production of the humble light bulb that he first clashed with Siemens. Neither could outproduce the other and after a long and expensive struggle the two giants agreed that Siemens should have the sole right to manufacture white carbon filament bulbs while the German-Edison Company had the right to produce yellow incandescent bulbs. Berliners supported the two companies almost as if they were rival teams. Rathenau challenged Siemens again by designing and building power stations: the first in the city was put up by his Municipal Electricity Works, and really made his fortune. AEG was created from a number of his smaller companies and rose to fame in 1891 when it laid the first long-distance electric power cable of 175 kilometres between Lauffen and Frankfurt-am-Main. Thanks to Siemens and Rathenau steam was superseded by electricity, and Berlin remained the centre of the industry until the outbreak of the First World War.56 The new force had once again captured the Berliners’ imagination, and their endless catalogue of insults was expanded to include references to ‘crossed wires’, ‘weak currents’, and the need for a ‘new bulb’. With characteristic arrogance Berlin began to call itself ‘the light of the world’ and the ‘city of light’, labels which played an important part in the image of modernity and the metropolis which swept Berlin in the early twentieth century.57
The railroads and new industries gobbled up resources and their voracious appetite called for ‘money, money, and more money’. Behrenstrasse, the new financial district, was created to fill the need. In the age of absolutism banking had been strongest in German residence cities where, given the Church ban on usury, Jewish bankers (Hoffaktoren and Hofagenten) had managed the finances at court.58 The Rothschilds, for example, were descendants of a financial agent of the richest German prince, the elector of Hesse-Kassel, while others like the Kaullas in Stuttgart, the Kaskels in Dresden and the Oppenheims in Cologne had dominated their respective princely courts. Conversely, in free cities such as Hamburg and Bremen where there were no ruling princes, banking was almost non-existent. Berlin was the exception: although bankers like Ephraim and Isaak were employed by the Hohenzollerns they had been constricted by the unique and highly developed Prussian bureaucracy.59 Berlin’s lack of a banking tradition therefore left the way open to newcomers who pioneered modern financial practices in the nineteenth century. By the time of unification it was the new financial capital of Germany.
Berlin owed its new status to the ingenuity of a new group of Jewish families, the most important being the Mendelssohns and Mendelssohn-Bartholdys, Bleichröder-Schwabacks, Magnuses, Warschauers and Plauts. These were bankers for the new age, and quickly overtook the old private banks, which did not have the means to meet the increased demands for capital. The vast demand for money from government and railway consortia60 led to involvement in the formation of joint stock banks like the Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft. The first modern German credit bank, the Darmstadter, was founded in 1853. There was a great deal of initial resistance to it, both from the established small family banks and from the conservative Prussian elite, who wanted to see the creation of a larger state bank over which they could exert direct control. Frederick