SIGL, Georg

S. gained a machine-technical education as a twelve-year-old boy in the locksmith workshops of his brother-in-law. In 1828 he went on a journey in Switzerland, Bavaria and Württemberg (Württemberg ironworks). In 1832 he returned to Vienna and started to work at the Helbig und Müller machinery factory, where he quickly learnt about production of printing presses. In 1837 a hardware manufacturer Christian Wilhelm Dingler employed him as a "participatory" master in his workshop in Zweibrücken (Germany) in the field of manufacturing printing presses. From 1840 onwards S. worked as a "mechanikus" in Berlin, where he owned a small machinery factory, owned by his family until 1899. In 1846 S. returned to Vienna and founded a small workshop, which was shortly thereafter extended in the former palace at the Puthonschen Althanplatz. During the revolutionary turmoil in 1848, when Specker machinery works burnt in the flames, and William Norris locomotive factory from Philadelphia was used as a military hospital, S. was able to buy a locomotive factory in Michelbeuerngrund and equip it with useful machines and transmissions from the Specker factory.
In the complex of buildings, where the Technological craft museum was later located, S. in 1851 began with the construction of machinery for the manufacture of tools, paper, agricultural machinery and steam engines, machines for making coins, mill wheels and power plants, oil presses, steam generators, storage tanks, rotating plates, reciprocating and rotary pumps and keels. His printing machines were considered very efficient. S. provided large steam engines for water supply devices in Trieste, Vienna and Florence.
He also manufactured one-cylinder steam engines for ships and Morgan shovel-shaped wheel with automatic adjustable blades for ships, sailing on the Danube, steam engines for ships, which were installed on gunboats and steamers to transport people and torpedoes with detonators made according to Siegfried →Marcus plans for the navy. S. built the first locomotive for a freight train in 1856 in Vienna. She had a specific name "Gutenberg" and was not custom-manufactured. In 1870 he constructed the thousandth locomotive and the thousandth printing machine in the same year. Manufacture of locomotives did not prosper only in Vienna. In 1861 he leased the Günther locomotive factory in Wiener Neustadt, which at that time belonged to the Creditanstalt bank, and later he bought it. The Neustadt factory did not manufacture only locomotives, but various other Machine Engineering products.
In December 1874 S. produced two thousandth locomotive.
The company in Wiener Neustadt, which existed since 1930, was transformed into a joint-stock company after the stock collapse in 1873. In 1910 the company produced its five thousandth locomotive. S., also known as "Austrian Krupp", designed an industrial combine, which included the production of pig iron and coal and also the general engineering techniques and construction of locomotives and had all the characteristics of a vertically structured group. At the time of greatest prevalence, during1872/73, the group comprised a machine factory in Berlin (170 workers), a machine factory in Vienna (1800 workers), locomotive factory in Wiener Neustadt (2,800 workers), ironworks in Pittn (130 employees), production of mowing equipment in Rettenegg (30 workers), coalmine in Szapar (70 workers) and the silos and warehouses in Budapest (25 workers). Manufacture of machinery and production of locomotives in S.'s factories were made according to the design methods on which Grimburg Rudolf von Grimus lectured at the Polytechnic Institute in Vienna.