Sigmund Schuckert

Johann Sigmund Schuckert was a German electrical engineer and manufacturer, born October 18, 1846 in Nuremberg and died September 17, 1895 in Wiesbaden, who built one of Germany's earliest and largest electrical equipment companies. The son of a barrel maker, he trained instead as a precision mechanic, worked as a journeyman across Munich, Stuttgart, Hannover and Berlin, and spent several years in the United States from 1869 onward, including a stint at Thomas Edison's telegraph factory in Newark, New Jersey. Returning to Nuremberg, he founded his own business in 1873 repairing sewing machines, and by 1875 was manufacturing and selling his own electrical generators; a royal subsidy in 1876 and the 1878 contract to light Bavaria's Linderhof Palace helped the company, Schuckert and Co, grow into a major producer of arc lamps, dynamo generators and electric lighting systems, including an installation at the Moscow Kremlin. He patented parabolic mirror glass for electric lights in 1886, and his company exhibited what was billed as the largest floodlight in the world at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, the year after nervous exhaustion forced his own retirement in 1892; the company converted to a public limited company in 1893, by then producing about 2,500 generators a year, and was absorbed into Siemens in 1903 as Siemens-Schuckertwerke.