Siemens AG

The brothers Friedrich and Carl Wilhelm Siemens invent the regenerative furnace, initiating the development of the open hearth steel-making process.

This furnace operates at a high temperature by using regenerative preheating of fuel and air for combustion.

The two German-born engineers had claimed in 1857 to be recovering enough heat to save 70-80% of the fuel.

Through this method, an open-hearth furnace can reach temperatures high enough to melt steel, but the Siemens brothers do not initially use it for that.

Lars Magnus Ericsson, his reputation in telephony manufacturing established, becomes a major supplier of telephone equipment to Scandinavia.

Because the Ericson factory cannot keep up with demand, work such as joinery and metal-plating is contracted out.

Much of its raw materials are imported, so in the following decades Ericsson will buy into a number of firms to ensure supplies of essentials like brass, wire, ebonite and magnet steel.

Much of the walnut used for cabinets is imported from the US.

As Stockholm's telephone network has expanded rapidly in 1879, the company had reformed into a telephone manufacturing company, but when Bell bought the biggest telephone network in Stockholm, it only allowed its own telephones to be used with it, so Ericsson's equipment sells mainly to free telephone associations in the Swedish countryside and in the other Nordic countries.

Ericsson was born in Värmskog, Värmland and had grown up in the small village of Vegerbol, between Karlstad and Arvika.

At the age of twelve his father had died, and he had had to start working as a miner, working until he had money enough to leave the village and move to Stockholm in 1867.

He had then worked for six years for an instrument maker, Öllers & Co., who mainly created telegraph equipment.

Because of his skills, he had been given two state scholarships to study instrument making abroad between 1872 and 1875.

One of the companies he worked at was Siemens & Halske.

Upon his return to Sweden in 1876, he had founded a small mechanical workshop together with his friend Carl Johan Andersson, who had also worked at Öllers & Co., and repaired foreign-made telephones.

This workshop was actually a former kitchen of some thirteen square meters situated at Drottninggatan 15 in the most central part of Stockholm.

In 1878, Ericsson had begun making and selling his own telephone equipment.

His phones were not technically innovative, as most of the inventions had already been made in the US.

In 1878, he had made an agreement to supply telephones and switchboards to Sweden's first telecom operating company, Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolag.

Also in 1878, local telephone importer Numa Peterson had hired Ericsson to adjust some telephones from the Bell Telephone Company, inspiring him to buy a number of Siemens telephones and analyze the technology further.

Through his firm's repair work for Telegrafverket and Swedish Railways, he was familiar with Bell and Siemens Halske telephones.

He has improved these designs to produce a higher quality instrument.

These are used by new telephone companies, such as Rikstelefon, to provide cheaper service than the Bell Group.

He has no patent or royalty problems, as Bell had not patented their inventions in Scandinavia.

His training as an instrument maker is reflected in the high standard of finish and the ornate design which makes Ericsson phones of this period so attractive to collectors.

At the end of the year he had started to manufacture telephones of his own, much in the image of the Siemens telephones, and the first product had been finished in 1879.

The first regular electric tram service using pantographs or trolley poles, the Gross-Lichterfelde Tramway, goes into service in Lichterfelde, a suburb of Berlin, Germany, by Siemens & Halske AG, in May 1881.

Earlier installations prove difficult or unreliable.

Siemens' line, for example, provides power through a live rail and a return rail, like a model train, limiting the voltage that can be used, and providing electric shocks to people and animals crossing the tracks.

Siemens will later design his own method of current collection, from an overhead wire, called the bow collector.

The company Siemens still exists today.

The high prices of Bell equipment and services had led Henrik Tore Cedergren to form an independent telephone company in 1883 called Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolag.

As Bell would not deliver equipment to competitors, he forms a pact with Ericsson, which is to supply the equipment for his new telephone network.

In 1884, a technician named Anton Avén at Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolag had combined the earpiece and the mouthpiece of a (by then) standard telephone into a handset.

It was used by operators in the exchanges that needed to have one hand free when talking to their customers.

Ericsson picked up this invention and incorporated it into Ericsson products, beginning with a telephone named The Dachshund.

In 1884 also, a multiple-switchboard manual telephone exchange had been more or less copied from a design by C. E. Scribner at Western Electric.

This is legal, as the device is not patented in Sweden, although in the U.S. it holds patent 529421 since 1879.

A single switchboard can handle up to ten thousand lines.

The following year, L. M. Ericsson and Cedergren tour the US, visiting several telephone exchange stations to gather "inspiration".

They find that U.S. engineers are well ahead in switchboard design but Ericsson telephones are as good as any available.

George Westinghouse imports a number of Gaulard-Gibbs transformers and a Siemens AC generator to begin experimenting with AC networks in Pittsburgh in 1885.

Westinghouse's interests in gas distribution and telephone switching have logically led him to become interested in electrical power distribution.

He had investigated Edison's scheme, but had decided that it is too inefficient to be scaled up to a large size.

Edison's power network is based on low-voltage DC, which means large currents and serious power losses.

Nikola Tesla is working on "alternating current (AC)" power distribution.

An AC power system allows voltages to be "stepped up" by a transformer for distribution, reducing power losses, and then "stepped down" by a transformer for consumer use.

A power transformer developed by Lucien Gaulard of France and John Dixon Gibbs of England had been demonstrated in London in 1881, and had attracted the interest of Westinghouse.

Transformers are not new, but the Gaulard-Gibbs design is one of the first that can handle large amounts of power and is easily manufactured.

William Stanley, Jr., demonstrates the first complete system of high voltage Alternating Current transmission, consisting of generators, transformers and high-voltage transmission lines, on March 20, 1886.

His system allows the distribution of electrical power over wide areas.

Stanley and George Westinghouse install the first multiple-voltage AC power system in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

The network is driven by a hydropower generator that produces five hundred volts AC.

The voltage is stepped up to three thousand volts for transmission, and then stepped back down to one hundred volts volts to power electric lights.

Stanley, as an electrician working with tele keys and fire alarms of an early manufacturer in Philadelphia, had designed one of the first electrical installations (at a Fifth Avenue store in ).

In 1885, Stanley had built and on September 21 1886 patents the first practical alternating current device, based on Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs' idea.

This device is the precursor to the modern transformer.

Stanley's work led him to be hired by Westinghouse as his chief engineer in Pittsburgh.

Westinghouse, assisted by Stanley, and Franklin Leonard Pope, has worked to refine the transformer design and build a practical AC power network.

In 1886 also, Westinghouse forms the "Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company" (which will be renamed the "Westinghouse Electric Corporation" in 1889).