Charles Proteus Steinmetz
Charles Proteus Steinmetz (April 9, 1865- October 26,1923) was born in Breslau, Silesia, Germany. He developed theories for alternating current that made possible the expansion of the electric power industry in the United States. [1] (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0767088.html), [2] (http://www.invent.org/hall_of_fame/139.html)
Steinmetz studied electricity in Germany. He became a socialist but had to leave Germany when Bismarck began rounding up socialists. He immigrated to the United States where he eventually went to work for General Electric. His most influential work was to develop a theory of magnetic hysteresis. When Schenectady, where he was living, elected a socialist mayor, Steinmetz began serving in the city government. In his later years Steinmetz became interested in lightning.
Here's an interesting anecdote, as told by Charles M. Vest, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, during commencement on June 4th, 1999.
- In the early years of this century, Steinmetz was brought to General Electric's facilities in Schenectady, New York. GE had encountered a performance problem with one of their huge electrical generators and had been absolutely unable to correct it. Steinmetz, a genius in his understanding of electromagnetic phenomena, was brought in as a consultant -- not a very common occurrence in those days, as it would be now.
- Steinmetz also found the problem difficult to diagnose, but for some days he closeted himself with the generator, its engineering drawings, paper and pencil. At the end of this period, he emerged, confident that he knew how to correct the problem.
- After he departed, GE's engineers found a large "X" marked with chalk on the side of the generator casing. There also was a note instructing them to cut the casing open at that location and remove so many turns of wire from the stator. The generator would then function properly.
- And indeed it did.
- Steinmetz was asked what his fee would be. Having no idea in the world what was appropriate, he replied with the absolutely unheard of answer that his fee was $1000.
- Stunned, the GE bureaucracy then required him to submit a formally itemized invoice.
- They soon received it. It included two items:
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- 1. Marking chalk "X" on side of generator: $1.
- 2. Knowing where to mark chalk "X": $999.
Charles Proteus Steinmetz, mathematician and electrical engineer was born in Breslau, Germany, where his father was employed as a lithographer in the railroad office. His given name, which he used for about the first twenty-five years of his life, was Karl August Rudolf, bit in his application for American citizenship he Anglicized his first name to Charles and substituted for the other two the name Proteus, a nickname given him when he joined the student mathematical society in Breslau. Although deformed from birth, he was a normally inquisitive, mischievous boy but badly spoiled by his grandmother, who mothered the family after the death of Charles' mother when he was a year old.
It was evident early in his school career that he had a keen mind, and when he had completed the course in the gymnasium his father willingly sent him to the University of Breslau instead of apprenticing him to a trade. He entered the university in 1883. He was decidedly versatile and had an astonishing capacity for study. During his six years at the university he never missed a class, took a prodigious number of notes, and even undertook independent investigations at home. From the very first he selected difficult technical subjects. Beginning with mathematics and astronomy he expanded his studies so that in his sixth year he was taking theoretical physics, chemistry, electrical engineering, specialized work in higher mathematics and medicine. In addition, he was a student of economics and kept up his reading of the classics.
About 1884 he joined the student Socialist group and in the course of the succeeding four years became most active serving for a time as ghost editor of the People's Voice, published by the Socialists at Breslau. This proved his undoing, for as a result of a most daring editorial published in 1888, he had to flee from Germany to avoid arrest and imprisonment just as he had completed his university work and his thesis for his doctor's degree, which was never conferred upon him. Fleeing to Switzerland, where he lived a year in Zurich in straitened circumstances, he spent six months in attendance at the Polytechnic School and occasionally wrote an article on some phase of electrical engineering for a German technical journal.
In the late spring of 1889, on the spur of the moment, he sailed to the United States financed by a student friend who accompanied him. He landed in New York on June 1 and within two weeks found employment as a draftsman for Rudolph Eickemeyer at Yonkers, New York, to whom he had gone with a letter of introduction. Eickemeyer, who was then engaged in research and in the development of electrical machinery, established him in an experimental laboratory of his own. Here he applied himself earnestly not only to the electrical problems given him but also in characteristic fashion, to the problems of Americanizing himself. He mastered the language, applied for citizenship and even joined the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the New York (later American) Mathematical Society.
At the time, electrical engineers were concerned with reducing the losses of efficiency in electrical apparatus due to alternating magnetism (hysteresis). The laws of this power loss were entirely unknown and many engineers doubted its existence. Steinmetz, however, having been given the task of calculating and designing an alternating-current commutator motor and wishing to calculate the hysteresis loss, derived the law of hysteresis mathematically from existing data. He followed this with an elaborate series of tests on any and every sample of iron obtainable to prove the law and simplify its application and in 1892 read two papers on the subject before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.
Shortly after the organization of the General Electric Company in 1892 he joined the staff of the Calculating Department and went first to Lynn, Massachusetts and then to Schenectady, New York. After completing his second year with the Company he was made consulting engineer, a position he held throughout the rest of his life.
While he was engaged in his studies of magnetism at Yonkers he had begun studies of alternating electric current phenomena, which were then little understood and most complex. Through the application of pure mathematics involving a degree of intricate work bewildering to the layman, he found a mathematical method of reducing the alternating-current theory to a basis pf practical calculation, and presented a rather complicated outline of the new method to the International Electrical Congress in session at Chicago, Illinois, in 1893. He found himself in unapproachable intellectual solitude however, for practically no one could understand his theory or use his method. Gradually however, through the publication of several textbooks he brought about a clear understanding of his symbolic method, which is now universally used in alternating-current calculations.
His third and last great research undertaking had to do with the phenomena which are centered in lightning. In an effort to learn more about lightning, Steinmetz began a systematic study of it, publishing the dramatic experiments yielding man-made lightning in the laboratory.
In addition to his consulting work and his writing, he was professor of electrical engineering, 1902-1913 and professor of electrophysics, 1913 to 1923 at Union University, Schenectady, New York, and lectured on electrical subjects throughout the country. He served on the Board of Education of Schenectady, of which he was president for two terms, and on the Common Council. The numerous honors conferred on him included the presidency of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, 1901 to 1902, the award of the Elliott Cresson Gold Medal, made by the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He patented a large number of inventions, many of them basic, and wrote several books, among them Theory and Calculation of Transient Electric Phenomena and Oscillations (1909); General Lectures on Electrical Engineering (copyright 1908), compiled and edited by J. L. Hayden; Radiation, Light and Illumination (1909); and Elementary Lectures on Electric Discharges, Waves and Impulses, and Other Transients (1911), all of which went through several editions.
He never married but legally adopted as his son and heir Joseph Le Roy Hayden, who survived him.
MEN OF GENERAL ELECTRIC
Biographical Sketches of Some Outstanding General Electric Men
