Mark Hobbs charts the immense industrial legacy of August Borsig
August Borsig was one of six children born to a carpenter in Breslau, now Wrocław, in Poland. He arrived in Berlin in 1823, at the age of 19, with an aspiration to study engineering; after completing a two-year apprenticeship at Prussia’s Royal Institute of Industry, he spent the next ten years working at a foundry owned by the engineer Franz Anton Egells. During those years, Borsig saved what money he could with an ambition to one day open his own engineering works.
That day came in 1837 when he purchased 19,000 square metres of Berlin’s barren, sandy soil, right outside the city’s Oranienburg Gate, on the corner of Chausseestraße and Torstraße. In the 1830s, this area lay beyond the city proper. It was a sparsely inhabited no-man’s-land of cemeteries, fields, allotments, cottages and fledgling industry. But as the site of Borsig’s first factory, this now-busy street intersection has known noise and dirt for nearly two centuries and has as good a claim as any other street corner in Germany to be the birthplace of the country’s industrial revolution.
In the modest foundry that he built on the site, Borsig employed fifty workers. The foundry’s first successful castings were made in July 1837 but it took another three years for Borsig’s—and Germany’s—first steam locomotive to be constructed there. While Borsig established his engineering works, just a bolt’s lob away outside the city’s Potsdamer Tor, the Berlin-Potsdam Railway Company built Berlin’s first railway station.
On 22 September 1838, the Berlin-Potsdam railway line was opened. Further lines leading out of Berlin quickly followed, connecting Berlin to cities such as Anhalt (1838), Stettin (1840) and Frankfurt (1841). The growth of the railway network transformed Berlin from a provincial city tucked away amid the sparsely inhabited agricultural plains of Prussia, into one of the most important transport hubs in Central Europe.
Up until Borsig built his first locomotive, Germany’s new railway companies purchased their locomotives from the undisputed leader of steam locomotive technology, Robert Stephenson, in England. The Berlin-Anhalt Railway Company was the first to put its faith in Borsig’s machines, running his first locomotive ‘Borsig 1’ from Berlin’s Anhalter Station to Jüterborg, fifty miles away.
Confident in the capabilities of his creation and no doubt keen for a bit of publicity, Borsig arranged for a race to be publicly staged along the Berlin to Jüterborg route, between the ‘Borsig 1’ and an engine built by Stephenson, already in use on the line. The inquisitive crowd that gathered around the Anhalter station on 21 July 1841 witnessed Borsig’s engine pull up at the station a full ten mi…