Electrical Engineers
Siemens Brothers 1858-1958. By J. D. Scott. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 35s.) WHEN great business houses take to patronising the arts—if only by way of commissioning com- pany histories—it is natural that they should like a good, sound job : none of your laminated stuff, but solid mahogany. Physically, therefore, this is an uncommonly handsome, if rather heavy, book, and much the same can be said of the writing. There are paragraphs here on share capital and debentures and the like that would make an accountant yawn. But J. D. Scott is a stylish and perceptive writer, who has practised the arts both of history and of fiction, and although lie has had to find room for much dull stuff he has transmuted much else into not only a valuable but a readable social, economic and scientific history of the past amazing century, from the arrival of Carl Wilhelm Siemens from Germany-in 1843—`as he came up the sewage-laden Thames he must have feared the endemic cholera'—by way of telephones and transatlantic cables and electric light to the laying, in 1944; by the company he founded, of the Pipe Line Under The Ocean that was to drive British and American tanks into the heart of his native
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