Mikhail Sidorov’s sudden passing on July 12, 1887 at the age of 64 halted his ambitious and well-planned initiative to develop the Ukhta oil field. He was buried in the Lazarus Cemetery in St. Petersburg, not far from the tomb of his esteemed countryman Academician Mikhail Lomonosov.
The Caucasian Saga of the Siemens Brothers
The successful operations of the German electrical engineering firm Siemens & Halske in the 19th century are fairly well-known. But few are aware that the Siemens brothers were also present at the birth of the Russian oil business.
In 1882, the newspaper Kavkaz [“Caucasus”] published a detailed article by production engineer Stepan Gulishambarov, “Oil Fields in the Empire, Georgia, Guria, Ossetia, Karalini, and Kakheti,” focusing especially on the oil operations of the “Siemens brothers, Prussian nationals whose company is better known in the world for its successes in setting up telegraph communications and manufacturing electrical hardware.”
The six Siemens brothers—Werner, Wilhelm, Friedrich, Karl, Walter, and Otto—had each received a technical education and were successful entrepreneurs. The operations of Siemens & Halske were inextricably linked with Russia from the company’s earliest years. The Siemens brothers began establishing the first business contacts as early as 1851, only four years after they founded the company. Collaboration began with the delivery of 75 recoding telegraphs for Russia’s first telegraph line, which ran from Finland through St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kyiv to Odessa and the Crimea. For a company that had begun with a small production facility and 10 workers, this was a very important order. A year later, Werner Siemens, full of ambitious plans, came to St. Petersburg. His great expectations were completely justified, and his company was immediately supplied with enough orders to keep it busy for the next 15 years.
Siemens & Halske’s Russian expansion compelled the company’s managers to open their own representative office in St. Petersburg in 1855, headed by Werner’s younger brother, the 24-year-old Karl Siemens. He quickly learned Russian and began studying the Russian way of life and Russian customs with great interest. Soon Karl married a Russian girl, and began to be called Karl Fëdorovich.35
By 1867, the Siemens brothers had become tax farmers for cobalt and iron ore mines in Kedabeg (Tiflis Province), and also leased the Mirzan, Shirak, and Eldar oil wells in Georgia for 4,500 rubles a year. By the time they began operating, the annual tax-farming fee had grown steadily: 1,000 rubles from 1848 to 1858, 2,800 rubles from 1858 to 1862, and 3,100 rubles from 1862 to 1866. Still, the volume of oil production from sources at the disposal of the Transcaucasus Treasury Board was very meager—according to the Learned Mining Committee, these wells yielded only 775 barrels in 1865.
Initially, the organization of oil production at the fields at Imperial Springs [Tsarskiye istochniki] rested on the shoulders of Walter Siemens (1833–1868), the acting consul of the North German Alliance in Tiflis. Residing in the Caucasus from 1865 on, he contributed much in the initial stages for the development and launching of many of the firm’s commercial projects, including the production of oil. However, an unfortunate fall from a horse proved fatal, and he was buried in the Tiflis city cemetery on June 12, 1868. His short obituary in the Kavkaz described him as “someone whose individuality set him apart from most ordinary people.”
Otto Siemens, who took over as acting consul of the North German Alliance in Tiflis, continued Siemens & Halske’s Caucasian oil project. His brilliant abilities as a businessman, engineer, and production organizer were on full display at the Imperial Springs fields. State of the art foreign methods and equipment were employed to organize the first oil production there. Following the construction of new, deeper wells at sites of obvious surface oil shows, the first three new wells were started in 1869, and a refinery was built. According to data from the Caucasus Bureau of Mines, in 1870, the Siemens Brothers oil field contained 80 hand-dug wells and seven drilled wells whose combined oil production was 7,015 barrels. The refinery had four distillation vats with volumes of 325 to 390 gallons, four air coolers, three rinsing tubs, and eight basins for storing crude and residual oil. The produced crude was refined into 1,550 barrels of photogen, 124 barrels of gasoline, 217 barrels of heavy oil, and 4,035 barrels of residual oil.
In July 1868, the Imperial Russian Technical Society (IRTS) established a Caucasian Division in Tiflis. Otto Siemens was elected as a candidate for membership in the new engineering society and regularly took a very active role in discussions on important technical issues associated with the oil industry. One such issue involved the problem of using residual oil as fuel for the smelting of copper ore. Otto Siemens was one of the first in the Caucasus to find an effective way to resolve this problem. At the March 13, 1871 meeting of the Caucasian Division of the IRTS, he presented diagrams of two “regenerative apparatuses for the combustion of residual oil,” one of them designed by Friedrich Siemens and the other by his own hand.
Vladimir Bogachev, a member of the IRTS Caucasian Division, evaluated the apparatuses, observing: “The idea on which the design of the aforementioned devices is based is extremely clever; but how practical the latter will be can only be decided by an experiment that Mr. Siemens intends to perform at one of his factories.”
Otto Siemens can also be considered one of the pioneers in the asphalt paving of roads in the Caucasus. The production of road asphalt was soon under way at an Imperial Springs plant, and the asphalt was used successfully in the construction of Russian bathhouses in Tiflis, among other projects. In addition, Otto Siemens proposed installing asphalt sidewalks for less than 3 rubles per square foot to Tiflis Governor K. I. Orlovsky, but the conservative governor opted instead for cobblestone pavers.
Nevertheless, the company’s contribution to the development of Russian industry, as well as the Siemens brothers’ fruitful activities in Russia over the past 16 years, did not go unrecognized. Great success awaited the Siemens & Halske Company at the 1870 National Manufacturers’ Exhibition in St. Petersburg, where it immediately won two medals, the gold and the silver.
Unfortunately, Otto Siemens was unable to bring all his creative ideas to fruition. He died in the fall of 1871, during a cholera epidemic in Tiflis. The Kavkaz published a report announcing that the Imperial German Consul, Dr. Otto Siemens, had passed away on September 23, 1871, and offering the paper’s condolences to the Siemens trading house.
At the October 11, 1871 meeting of the Caucasus Division of the IRTS in Tiflis, mining engineer Ivan Shteyman, head of the Bureau of Mines of Caucasian Province, read out the obituary for Otto Siemens, which emphasized that his activities “in the mining industry have earned him a place of honor in the history of the Transcaucasus Territory.”
After Otto’s death, Karl Siemens took over management of the Caucasian oil project. In the summer of 1872, Siemens & Halske participated in a Polytechnic Fair held in Moscow. Vasily Minin, a reviewer for a Moscow newspaper, wrote: “The physics section got many interesting devices from Siemens & Halske in Berlin, including an electromagnetic range-finder, an electric pyrometer, and an apparatus for detonating mines.... Meanwhile, the Caucasian Territory’s exhibit featured, alongside ‘historical Petrovian artifacts,’ a mineralogical collection that contained items from the Kedabeg copper smelter and products from their refinery.” On the same topic, Russkiye vedomosti [“Russian Gazette”] noted: “The Caucasus exhibit revealed a great many riches that Russia has yet to start using.”