August Borsig

Johann Karl Friedrich August Borsig (1804 to 1854) was a German businessman who founded the Borsig-Werke in Berlin, a railroad and steam locomotive manufacturing company. Born in Breslau, now Wroclaw, the son of a carpenter foreman, he trained at the Royal Provincial Art and Building School and the Royal Institute of Trade, then learned engine construction at a Berlin iron foundry and managed a factory for eight years. Convinced of the future of railroads, he used his savings to buy a site near the Oranienburger Tor and declared the firm founded on 22 July 1837. His first locomotive was finished in 1840 and beat a Stephenson-built engine in a race on the Berlin to Juterbog line, which showed that Germany did not need to import locomotives. By 1854 the company had built 500 locomotives and supplied 67 of the 68 new Prussian ones. Borsig also set up a health fund, a funeral fund and a savings bank for his workers, and he died in Berlin in 1854, after which his son Albert led the firm.