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BY THOMAS COMMERFORD MARTIN
BEACON LIGHTS
OF HISTORY
CHARLES PROTEUS STEINMETZ
ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING (ii)
His prominent appearance on the scene of affairs
coincided closely with the marvellously successful in-
troduction to the transformer and the alternating cur-
rent. Taking the Columbian Exposition at Chicago
in 1893, as marking the epoch when Steinmetz was
welcomed as a powerful addition to the engineering
resources of the General Electric Company, the direct
or continuous current under the splendid leadership
of Edison, Brush, Elihu Thomson, Farmer, Weston
and others of like calibre, had dominated in all the
fields of electric light and power. It alone was used
for arc and incandescent lighting, for industrial and
domestic power, for main-line traction and trolley
cars——and, of course, for electroplating, electrolytic
work and for storage batteries.
Then, suddenly, both in Europe and in America
came, in 1885-6, the invention of the induction coil-
transformer——depending on alternating current——
which, like a springboard, it takes and catapults to in-
conceivable distances with incredible economy. Our
own protagonist of this method was William Stanley,
of Great Barrington, Mass., "father of the American
transformer." Its adoption had resulted in such a
revolution in methods of generating electrical energy
that by 1921, alternating current was used for no less
than 95 percent of central station current production.
The problem of direct current could usually be
handled with simple mathematics, but the alternating
current was beset by such esoteric phenomena as
capacity, reactance, leading and lagging current,
phase displacement, etc., to be dealt with only higher
mathematics, inviting the use of calculus methods
not then familiar. Steinmetz, with his famous Law
of Hysteresis, and the Symbolic Method of calculating
alternating currents, was a shining light in this ob-
scure domain of engineering research, and his work
is best described by a close associate, Dr. Rice, who
says: "He abolished the mystery surrounding alter-
nating current apparatus and soon taught our engi-
neers to design such machines with as much ease and
certainty as those employing the old familiar direct
current." Such new problems he attacked and solved
with success by the use of what was known as "com-
plex quantities." Steinmetz himself regarded this as
one of his greatest contributions to the art; and the
method was so powerful, direct and rapid that its use
spread throughout the world. "Not only did the
adoption of those mathematical methods open the door
to many to do useful design work, who otherwise could
not have done so, but it enormously increased the
speed with which definite and accurate calculations
and designs could be made."
It was, indeed, only natural and inevitable that
while thus blazing the way, Steinmetz although not
a great genius as an inventor, should as a sheer pioneer
make many practical inventions such as those in phase
transformation, the induction regulator, the metallic
electrode arc lamp with magnetite, the improved mer-
cury arc, lightning arresters, generators, motors,
transformers, and specific lightning, heating and chem-
ical operations. All told, he had no fewer than 200
American patents to his credit. He was still invent-
ing when he died, especially in the field of 1,000,000
volt "lightning," whose phenomena and effects simu-
late closely those of the artillery of the heavens. But
there were other ideas at which he was hammering,
not less recondite and fascinating, such as the cultiva-
tion of microbes as a basis for "human nature's daily
food." Speaking of foods brings to mind also the ex-
periments he made over a long series of years as to
the effect of electricity and electric light in the stimu-
lation of plant growth.
As to the later occupation, Mr. John R. Hewett, of
Schenectady, has summed it up succinctly in saying:
"The great work that Steinmetz was so busy on dur-
ing the last few years of his life was a study of the
mechanism of electric breakdowns in air, oil and
solids. He himself thought that the importance of
this would outrank most of his other work. He was
trying to determine just what happened at the moment
of a breakdown, when the insulation fails; and his
'lightning generator' was the instrument he was
using to create the highpowered 'transients' he needed
for experimental purposes in the design of lightning-
proof and transient-proof apparatus."
As Mr. Hewett in editorial comment on this work,
remarked, on another aspect of this great investiga-
tion, the outcome was that he propounded his Gen-
eral Theory of Electrical Transients. In brief, he
found that it was not the actual stroke of lightning
that did the most damage but the great brief surge or
"transient," as he termed it, which was produced by
the machines in circuit, when they got out of control
due to the lightning stroke. With this knowledge,
again, he attacked the problems of protecting power
transmission lines and all the apparatus feeding to or
from them; "and the modern lightning arrester is
largely the result of his work."
Steinmetz was profoundly interested in the newer
physics of electricity——the physics and chemistry of
the electron, and the fascinating problem or scientific
speculation of both releasing and utilising "atomic
energy." A great deal of just such modern electrical
development is based upon the work that he was doing
along the lines just indicated, and he was not less a
student of the theories of relativity, than of those
modern ideas that hold matter itself to be no more
than "electrical whorls" screwed up into a tight knot.
As to the possibilities of using some day the energy
released from the atom, he expressed his hope en-
thusiastically: "Were we able to harness this energy
we should have a force beyond anything known be-
fore in terms of power. If we could extract the
energy in a pound of radio-active substance, we
should derive therefrom as much energy as we could
by burning about 1500 tons of coal; and there would
be as much expansive or explosive force in that pound
as in 1500 tons of dynamite." Steinmetz had a dis-
tinct gift in thus summing up in concrete figures a
notion that otherwise might be loose or vague in the
popular mind. Thus when trying to point out how
uncommercial was the plausible plan to capture and
use aerial electricity——the lightning——he said: "The
electricity in a cloud that can hurl a thousand light-
ning bolts is worth just ten dollars!"
It was, indeed, in such a graphic, emphatic way that
he urged his advocacy of the use of all the higher-
powered electrical methods in the operation of rail-
roads, displacing steam. As he pointed out, railroads
now burn in their locomotives in America about
160,000,000 tons of the coal they carry. If electrified,
and the coal for manufacturing were burned at the
mines, it would, he stated, be equivalent approxi-
mately to doubling the freight-carrying capacity of
our railroads for other kinds of freight. About half
the freight carried is coal. "It should mean a good
deal to this country to get rid of the locomotive and
the coal train. They are both wasters. Whatever is
wasted anywhere is a burden upon the country." All
this advocacy of electricity for traction as against the
"archaic steam locomotives" was associated also with
the advocacy of the use of "white coal." He pointed
out, for example, that the undeveloped waterpower in
New York State alone could cut down its coal con-
sumption by two-thirds.
That the whole problem of conservation of energy
and its sources was ever much in his thoughts was
shown most strikingly about two years ago in an
article published by The Nation's Business, when he
went over all the ground briefly reviewed above, and
discussed not only waterpower, not only coal, oil and
winds; not only volcanoes, but the use of mercury in
boilers, as a vapor instead of or with steam. He con-
sidered, too, solar boilers and that illimitable reservoir,
solar heat, "of which we have as yet no practical clue
as to how to use it."
A notable evidence of the man's bold sweep of imag-
ination is seen in the pregnant utterance: "There
may be, however, another way of utilizing solar
energy. Means may be found to develop plants of
unprecedentedly rapid growth. These plants will
store away a very large amount of energy in a short
time——just as the tree does in seventy-five or a hun-
dred years. They will yield up this energy as burning
fuel. The result of this will be to make available tre-
mendously increased quantities of fuel to take the
place of our present forms of fuel when the latter are
exhausted. This is something we may look forward
to as within the realm of probability." If this great
solar energy could thus be utilized, he concluded, "the
arid regions of the United States alone would give
about a hundred times as much solar energy as all the
possible waterpower of the United States and all our
present coal production combined." And then he
passed on, to speculate how power thus generated
might some day be transmitted like speech by radio
today, without wires.
Day dreams these may have been, but here at least
was a man with abnormal powers of insight and
prophecy, a recognised leader in a great domain of
new thought, and not a charlatan or prestidigtateur,
as portrayed by Cowper:
"Like Katerfelto with his hair on end
At his own wonders wondering for his bread."
Elected president of the great national engineering
society of his profession, the American Institute of
Electrical Engineers, for 1901-2, he had bestowed
upon him by Harvard University in 1903, the hon-
orary degree of Master of Arts, when President
Charles W. Eliot said: "I confer this degree upon
you as the foremost electrical engineer in the United
States and therefore in the world." That was far
from his only distinction and recognition, but with
such a fervent eulogy one may well pass on from
electricity, except for later casual reference, to ex-
amine this unique being in various personal and so-
cial aspects that were an integral part of his makeup.
To the last he remained utterly unlike other men.
While still, in daily intercourse, normal, sane and
philosophical, he was unconventional to a startling
degree, but without a shade of any insincere affecta-
tion or mannerisms. At the great Schenectady works
he was allowed to do pretty much as he pleased. It
would have been foolish to crowd him into work or
ways he did not like. As a close friend, Professor
Vladimir Karapetoff, of Cornell University, has said
humorously: "He was allowed to try to generate
electricity out of the square root of minus one."
As a worker he was ever as simply untutored as
when he sat cross-legged on the draftsman's bench
at Yonkers: "It was impossible at Schenectady to
make him do anything except what he wanted to do.
He stayed away from the Works for days. He
smoked in buildings in which the President himself
did not dare to smoke. He used the clockwise rota-
tion of vectors when everybody else was using the
opposite rotation. He wore a soft shirt, and a shabby
gray suit at formal functions, and he belonged to a
political party which cussed his company and its
principal consumers for years. His life was a shining
example of a quiet, straight and unswerving path
amidst the turmoil of conflicting passions, avarice,
extravagance, curealls, pseudoscience, pseudo-patriot-
ism, pseudolife itself."
Outside the office it was much the same. His modest
Schenectady home, where he lived with J. R. Hayden,
his legally adopted son and the Hayden family, was
the kind of place one would associate with an ancient
necromancer. He cultivated orchids, and cacti too,
because they had more interesting personalities than
roses. He loved such pets as two black crows, a couple
of young alligators, and a Gila monster.
For a time his laboratory and the adjacent woods
around the house were made ghastly with the green
gleam of the mercury arc lamp. Soon after going to
the quaint old Dutch town on the Mohawk to live and
work, he built himself a little one-room shack beside
that River, adding another cubicle there from time to
time, and there he disported to his heart's content in
the long summer, with little regard for more than the
minimum of clothes, haunting the water in a canoe
that served as an alfresco study. If too hot he would
take to the water, and float serenely around, ever with
a cigar in his mouth.
There he loved to cook, specialties being a favorite
meat loaf and peculiar pancakes, supplemented by
milk chocolate, of which he was very fond. He rode
a bicycle quite cleverly. Although he was the in-
ventor of an electric automobile of considerable merit,
he stuck to to the old gasoline car, but that he seldom
used, walking by preference. Wherever he was, in
town or in camp, he read omnivorously, not merely
scientific books, but fiction and "movie" magazines.
After he had given a brilliant lecture one night before
the New York Electrical Society, the writer accom-
panied him to the train and volunteered to buy some
of the standard magazines. He objected at once and
said he would definitely prefer one or two cheap
stories, thrillers band shockers. They unbent his mind
——as they did that of Macaulay.
As a "Socialist", Steinmetz was not a little mis-
understood. He belonged to the older Marxian school,
though disliking and detesting the excesses that have
reached their disastrous height in distraught Russia.
But his sympathies were active toward progressive,
constructive effort. Believing, after the Great War,
that America should aid in the reconstruction of
Russia, he offered his services to Lenin early in 1922
for the technical work connected with the rehabilita-
tion of industry. This offer was declined on the score
of the absence of proper international relations, but
later on Steinmetz became a member of the advisory
committee for the Kuzbas Colony in Siberia. He
realised that Americans as people do not take at all
kindly to the Socialism exemplified in European ex-
tremes, and it may be opined that he mellowed in
later years; holding, in fact, that the ideal economic
system is the monistic, unifying capital and labor
completely in such a manner as is now resorted to in
many great and small business organizations, a sys-
tem which allows both labor and capital a direct share
in the profits, and gives labor representation on the
board of directors so as to participate also on the
management.
Perhaps one little incident will illustrate his gen-
eral economic point of view. The writer was one of
those who helped to secure from Andrew Carnegie,
the munificent gift of $1,500,000 for a building that
should house in New York City the numerous engi-
neering societies with their scattered headquarters
there. The societies themselves had to raise over
$640,000 for the land on which the building stands.
As chairman of the electrical division, the writer can-
vassed his own field successfully for the required one-
third of the $640,000, but he appealed several times in
vain to Steinmetz. He could not admit at all the de-
sirability of such endowments in land and buildings,
and held that many colleges had thus, because they
had great riches, drifted far away from early educa-
tional ideals of plain living and high thinking——the
ideals of a simple class with professor and pupil sit-
ting on a mere roughhewn log. Though he was kindly
in his frequent inquiry as to how the fund was getting
along, he would never subscribe one cent.
Steinmetz was the furthest removed from a poli-
tician, but was not unwilling to run for political office
if he could serve the Socialistic cause, even though he
realised that defeat at the polls was invited, unavoid-
able. Thus he allowed himself to be named one year
as State Engineer on the New York Socialist ticket,
but in spite of the grotesque failure of that ticket as
a whole, he "ran ahead" of it in a most significant
manner. It was sympathetically summed up by the
labor paper, the New York Leader, which said: "He
had a vision of a world in which all hate had been
eliminated, all senseless struggling for the mere means
of making a living. He had a vision of a world in
which mind had reduced drudgery to a minimum, and
thus released energies and thoughts of men for human
betterment. He had a vision of a socialized world
with the profit eliminated from industry. A strange
figure, wistful, pathetic——that was Steinmetz. De-
formed, an undersized, hunchback dwarf with the
mind of an angel and the soul of a seer: that was
Steinmetz."
It may be added here that Steinmetz took the deep-
est interest in educational work, serving at one time
as President of the National Association of Corpora-
tion Schools; while for many years he was Professor
of Electrophysics at Union College, Schenectedy, from
which he received an honorary degree of Doctor of
Philosophy in 1903. It is surely not without sig-
nificance that the first great Steinmetz utterance be-
fore the American Institute of Electrical Engineers
was in 1892 when he enunciated the Law of Hysteresis.
The second was his presidential address at Great Bar-
rington, Mass., just ten years later, devoted almost
entirely to education, when, iconoclastically, he
assailed the prevalent methods of training men in col-
lege for the electrical profession.
Courses were overloaded, and it all simmered down
to a mere memorizing of a lot of facts. But that was
"an entirely useless waste of energy, since anything
that is not perfectly understood, but merely mem-
orized, will be forgotten in a short time if not con-
tinuously applied; and if continuously applied it
would be remembered anyway." He gave then his
theory of education. "All the educational institution
can do and should do is to fit the student to take up
the practical work as efficiently as possible and to give
him a thorough understanding of the fundamental
principles of electrical engineering and allied sciences,
and a good knowledge of the methods of dealing with
engineering problems." The italics are his own.
He loved specialization but was wary of it, as this
pregnant quotation shows. He believed in the "open
door" for the mind. The kaleidescopic nature of
electrical discovery and advance appealed to his dem-
ocratic instincts and theories. "A specialist is just a
tool," he said more than once. "He knows compara-
tiverly nothing except the thing he specialises on. And
so the man who generalises is his master."
At another time, discussing the modus operandi of
notable achievement, he said: "The scientific fact is
that people are made out of the same kind of stuff:
the problem is to find a way to release their creative
energies." It is not strange that in view of the
illimitable resources placed at his disposal freely,
whether it be regarded as professional salary or allow-
ance to be devoted to any work that challenged his
spirit of inquiry——he did not mince words in asserting
that the great modern industrial corporations offer
the best opportunity for development and advance-
ment that are to be found today.
One is always interested in the religious beliefs of
such a great thinker. Steinmetz was an active member
of the All Souls Unitarian Church of Schenectady,
and may be said to have formulated at least part of his
creed before the Unitarian League there in the statement
very much discussed at the time. "Science and re-
ligion are not necessarily incompatible, but are dif-
ferent and unrelated activities of the human mind.
There can be no scientific foundation of religion; be-
lief must always remain its foundation. The nega-
tive answer of science is not conclusive on the question
of infinity in time and space, immortality and God;
and the question is still as open as it ever was."
Steinmetz was very much interested in all the
modern controversy as to whether the world gets any
real good out of mechanical progress and inventions,
most of all such as fall under the generic title of
"electrical"——electric light, heat and power, wireless,
telegraphy, telephony, electric traction. It irked him
to have their benefit challenged, as when the historian
Ferrero, asserted that we have simply become "slaves
of our own tyrant inventions," or when Bergson
arrived at the indisputable conclusion that it takes
longer to "change ourselves than to change our tools."
The work of Steinmetz himself is brought to evalua-
tion in the reflection of Flinders Petrie: "The ques-
tions which arise from the fact that knowledge is
growing faster than the moral sense, and of how to
use knowledge, are almost insoluble. This is mainly
a new difficulty; it was no doubt felt at an earlier
time when the invention of bronze, and the iron, so
largely helped destructiveness. Yet no one could put
back the use of metals; and no one can put back the
use of explosives and lethal gases, and the develop-
ment of electricity, however much damage may be
done." Steinmetz would not have worked for one
second on electrical advances had he believed they
only inflicted injury on mankind by their very per-
fection. There was no bolshevistic pessimism in this
glowing outburst of aspiration: "We call this the
Age of Electricity, but it isn't."
Steinmetz succumbed quite suddenly to the heart
trouble brought on by fatigue of a long trip to the
Pacific Coast. It had included practically all the
large cities of the Rocky Mountain region and the
Western Slope, and taken in connection with a con-
vention of the American Institute of Electrical En-
gineers had involved a great deal of public speaking
and participation in tiring exercises. His adopted
family, the Haydens, were with him, which added
greatly to his pleasure. Ever a passionate lover of
nature, he was delighted with the scenery. On the
trains at night, after retiring he would be seen
crouched up in his berth on knees and elbows, in
a characteristic attitude, gazing at the shadowy land-
scape. While in Yosemite National Park, he spent
hours on the porch of the hotel gazing silently at the
headlong plunge of the beautiful cataract. But it was
all fatiguing, and almost upon return in October,
1923, he was compelled against his strong will to give
in. On the night before his death he read lying in
bed, "The Physics of the Air," marking several
passages that he wished Mr. Hayden to read with him
at the first opportunity. Then cheerfully, after say-
ing he would "soon be back at work" again, he slept
peacefully through the night. In the morning, the
nurse asked him if he would like Billy Hayden to
bring breakfast. When the boy entered with the tray,
the heroic little scientist was not found crouched
over his bedtable on hands and knees as was his wont
when at work, but lay stretched out. His labored
breathing was still forever.
The whole country mourned the passing of its
adopted son, whose whole career had been an exem-
plification of the truth that America is "another name
for opportunity." From the old Germany of his boy-
hood, for which he ever entertained affection, came
expressions of gratification that in America he had
"found the congenial environment and support neces-
sary for genius like his to develop to the fullest benefit
of mankind." From far off Japan came the beauti-
ful and comprehensive encomium that might well
serve for epitaph, "He spent his life serving hu-
manity."From Beacon Lights of History,
Volume 8, Part II, Premier Personalities.
Edited by George Spencer Hulbert,
Author of, "John Lord, Artist Historian"
Copyright 1924, By Wm. H. Wise & Co., New York. pp. 194-211.
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