He also found time for more artistic pursuits such as taking dancing lessons and even painting a landscape of Nordhausen for the wife of the factory manager.

Due to the education of the younger members of the family becoming a financial worry, on 10 March 1843, Carl Wilhelm Siemens left for London.

William had already shown himself to be an enthusiastic businessman, having financed his trip by selling an invention of his brother's, an improvement to the gold and silver plating process, to George Richards Elkington.

Siemens had been trained as a mechanical engineer, and his most important work at this early stage was non-electrical; the greatest achievement of his life, the regenerative furnace.

Though in 1847 he published a paper in Liebig's Annalen der Chemie on the 'Mercaptan of Selenium,' his mind was busy with the new ideas upon the nature of heat which were promulgated by Carnot, Clapeyron, Joule, Clausius, Mayer, Thomson, and Rankine.

Working on this new line of thought, which gave him an advantage over other inventors of his time, he made his first attempt to economise heat, by constructing, in 1847, at the factory of John Hick, of Bolton, an engine of four horse-power, having a condenser provided with regenerators, and using superheated steam.

The use of superheated steam was attended with many practical difficulties, and the invention was not entirely successful; nevertheless, the Society of Arts, in 1850, acknowledged the value of the principle, by awarding Siemens a gold medal for his regenerative condenser.

In 1850 he established the London sales office of Siemens & Halske, the engineering company producing telegraphs, which his brother Werner had founded in 1847 at Berlin.

He started selling such devices to the wire rope producer R. S. Newall and Company in Dundee, of which his friend (and uncle of his later wife) Lewis Gordon was the co-owner.

As a member of the circumnavigation committee preparing the oceanographic expedition of HMS Challenger, Siemens was commissioned in 1871 to develop an electric thermometer to measure the temperature of the ocean at different depths.

In 1881, a Siemens AC Alternator driven by a watermill was used to power the world's first electric street lighting in the town of Godalming, United Kingdom.