Johann Georg Halske was a German master mechanic

Mechanic

A mechanic is a craftsman or technician who uses tools to build or repair machinery.Many mechanics are specialized in a particular field such as auto mechanics, bicycle mechanics, motorcycle mechanics, boiler mechanics, general mechanics, industrial maintenance mechanics , air conditioning and...

.

Born in Hamburg

Hamburg

-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...

, Halske started his own workshop in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

 in 1844, which he ran together with his partner F. M. Böttcher. In 1847 Halske founded the Siemens & Halske Telegraph Construction Company together with Werner von Siemens. Halske was particularly involved in the construction and design of electrical equipment such as the press which enabled wires to be insulated with a seamless coat of gutta-percha

Gutta-percha

Gutta-percha is a genus of tropical trees native to Southeast Asia and northern Australasia, from Taiwan south to the Malay Peninsula and east to the Solomon Islands. The same term is used to refer to an inelastic natural latex produced from the sap of these trees, particularly from the species...

, the pointer telegraph and the morse

Morse

Morse can refer to:* Morse code, a method of coding messages into long and short beeps-Places:Canada* Morse , Saskatchewan* Morse, Saskatchewan, a hamlet* Morse No...

 telegraph and measuring instruments. In 1867 he withdrew from the company because his views on company policy diverged from those of the Siemens brothers and devoted himself in his role as a Berlin city councillor to the administration of the city and the establishment of the Museum of Decorative Art

Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin

The Kunstgewerbemuseum, or Museum of Decorative Arts, is an internationally important museum of the decorative arts in Berlin, Germany, part of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin...

. He remained friends with Werner von Siemens until Halske's death in 1890. Even after his departure from the company he co-founded he continued to support it, and participated financially in the Siemens pension fund that was founded in 1872.

External links

• Picture, biography, and bibliography in the Virtual Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
  Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
  The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin was established in March 1994. Its research is primarily devoted to a theoretically oriented history of science, principally of the natural sciences, but with methodological perspectives drawn from the cognitive sciences and from...