Ludwig Martens

[2] Ludwig's father, a German-born industrialist named Karl Gustav Adolf Martens, was the owner of a steel mill in Kursk, Russia.

[3] In 1905, he fled from Germany to Switzerland supporting Lenin as an aide and ensuring that pamphlets and explosives were smuggled into Russia.

[2] In 1906, following the failure of the 1905 Russian Revolution, Martens emigrated to Great Britain and secretly established a machine gun factory for Lenin.

In 1916 Martens emigrated to the United States where he worked as a vice president of the engineering firm Weinberg & Posner (New York City).

[3] In 1917, after the February Revolution, Martens – together with Leon Trotsky and 278 other Russian Social Democrats – returned from the United States to Russia on a steamship.

[3] In March 1919 to break the embargo against Russia, Martens returned to the United States and founded the Russian Soviet Government Bureau at 110 West 40th Street, an informal embassy of Soviet Russia in opposition to the prerevolutionary Imperial Russian Embassy located in Washington, D.C., which the United States still recognized.

[5] On March 19, 1919, as de facto Ambassador from Soviet Russia, he presented diplomatic credentials from People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin to the U.S. State Department.

On that position Martens started works on developing the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly, the largest iron ore deposits in Russia.

[3] In 1926−36 Martens worked as the Head of the Research and Development Institutes for Diesel Manufacturing (Научно-Исследовательский Институт Дизелестроения) in Leningrad.