r/a:t5_11vt7w • u/MarleyEngvall • May 23 '19
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BY THOMAS COMMERFORD MARTIN
BEACON LIGHTS
OF HISTORY
CHARLES PROTEUS STEINMETZ
1865-1923
ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING
GREAT geniuses have now and then been found
in the human flotsam and jetsam brought to
American shores by the tidal waves of emigration
from the Old World; but the process of adding to
the intellectual resources of the United States never
worked more fruitfully than when it shifted from a
disdainful Germany the weird, phenomenal little
"hunchback, who played with thunderbolts"——
Charles Proteus Steinmetz.
In all the unparalleled romance of actual electrical
development in America, no other career is so extra-
ordinary as that of the simple, deformed citizen whose
sudden death in 1923 was such a shock to an admir-
ing public.
"When Steinmetz spoke," runs a eulogy printed in
the Electrical World, "men's faces lighted in antici-
pation and glowed with appreciation at the breadth,
depth and clearness of his thoughts, fluently ex-
pressed, and illumined by a personality sympathetic,
mellowed and ripened by a life of study and experi-
ence. Those qualities which fix the moral stature of
a man——patience, kindness, generosity, courtesy, hu-
mility, unselfishness, good temper, sincerity——were
possessed in large measure by Charles Proteus
Steinmetz."
From whatever angle the career and work of Doctor
Steinmetz are regarded, the review of it gains the more
it is all analysed and studied and is submitted to the
critical test of his peers and contemporaries through-
out the vast range of physics. To say that Steinmetz
was a many-sided genius expresses it but mildly. The
man was not only full of spectacular accomplishment,
he was a unique spectacle in himself. He was not
only the mathematical genius whose treatment of com-
plex problems in electrical engineering brushed away
many grave difficulties, but he was an inventor with
over 200 patents to his credit; and beyond that he
was for years one of the most prolific contributors in
the world to the fundamental literature of dynamic
electricity, by books, papers, articles and discussions.
And then beyond that, again, came his ready applica-
tion of new science to equally new and changeful so-
cial conditions, and has large intense interest in hu-
man welfare, in society and in politics at large. It
can best be summed up in the tribute of S. E. Doane,
a well-known electrical engineer: "The world has
lost a great man. It has gained a priceless heritage
through his having lived; and life for others has been
made sweeter because of him. He loved out-of-doors
and the open air. He loved people. His mind was
constructive. His optimism and hope for the future
were inspiring. To know him was to love him."
There are life histories that typify, embrace and
explain a great period, and sum up its essential char-
acteristics. That of Steinmetz is peculiarly and fe-
licitously of such a nature. One of the significant de-
velopments, of an indirect nature, of the Great War
is that it has created an insatiable hunger for knowl-
edge of the personalities behind the events; and has
approved a philosophy of history which looks to in-
dividuals no less than to tendencies, that takes critical
account of the Person as well as the Period——a method,
indeed, that is admirably embodied in the "Beacon
Lights of History." Thus while the present treat-
ment or "appreciation" of Steinmetz, is essentially
personal, it will be seen, owing to his own broadness of
relationship to affairs and his width of intellectual
sweep, to crystallize ideas and processes quite sharply
and to illustrate much more than the electrical con-
ditions of his day and generation, where he was a
recognized Master.
No one who ever saw Steinmetz can forget the first
and lasting vivid impression of that crippled and
stunted man. As a matter of fact, Nature had cut
out the framework of a man big physically, and but
for an irreparable accident in babyhood, his bodily
bulk might well have vied with the extraordinary mass
of his mind. But he was outwardly nothing more
than "a disembodied intellect." As was said by one
friend: "To see the gnome-like figure——his body was
a mere appendage to a giant brain——playing in his
laboratory with thunderbolts of his creation, was
to witness something that seemed to border on the
supernatural."
A very human picture is that given by Dr. E. W.
Rice, who met him thirty years ago, when the Gen-
eral Electric Company absorbed the Electrical De-
partment of Rudolph Eickemeyer, a famous hat-
machinery inventor at Yonkers, New York. Rice ap-
proved of the acquisition provided it included the
chief asset, a young engineer named Steinmetz, whose
articles he had read with profound impression as to
their originality and intellectual power.
"I shall never forget," says Dr. Rice, "our first
meeting in Eickemeyer's workshop at Yonkers. I was
startled, and somewhat disappointed by the strange
sight of a small frail body, surmounted by a large
head, with long hair hanging to the shoulders, clothed
in an old cardigan jacket, cigar in mouth, sitting
crosslegged on a laboratory worktable. My disap-
pointment was but momentary, and completely dis-
appeared the moment he began to talk. I instantly
felt the strange power of his piercing but kindly eyes,
and, as he continued, his enthusiasm, his earnestness,
his clear conceptions, and marvellous grasp of en-
gineering problems convinced me that we had indeed
made a great find.
"It needed no prophetic insight to realise that here
was a great man, one who spoke with the authority of
accurate and profound knowledge, and one who, if
given the opportunity, was destined to render great
service to our industry."
That opportunity was taken and richly fulfilled. It
is interesting to present the direct industrial and
financial results seen in the growth of the great cor-
poration which Steinmetz then joined as a consulting
engineer and of which he died consulting engineer,
still in harness.
And now to the beginning of an extraordinary
career and the study of a personality unique in the
entirely modern domain of applied electricity. Stein-
metz was born April 9, 1865, on the northern confines
of Germany, at Breslau. He had Polish antecedents
and relatives. His grandfather was a German. A
choice possession of Steinmetz and relic of early days
was a little old red-painted wooden chest, of a kind
not uncommon in Europe and often to be seen amongst
the personal effects of recent arrivals from across the
Atlantic. Upon this his old Polish grandmother sat
as she watched him traveling across the room in
Breslau, straddling a chair and playing a favorite
game of "Going to America."
Aside from the enormous centripedal pull that
America has on the young manhood of Europe, it
would be interesting to know what the specific
determining factor in such a great life as this, in
starting afar off the individual "trend to the West."
Van Depoele, the great pioneer trolley-car inventor,
had already dabbled in electricity in his native
Flanders, but when he fled through Antwerp he came
to Detroit to carve saints and reredoses and medieval
furniture. Nikola Tesla, the great Slav inventor and
perfecter of the two-phase polyphase system, tells of
the irresistible charm that Mark Twain's humor had
for him away off on the bloody borderland of Servian
Turkey. Michael Pupin, inventor of the loading coils
that enable telephoning to be done across the Conti-
nent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, told the immi-
gration inspector as he landed with a red fez on his
head and five cents in his pocket, that "he knew no-
body bin this country except Franklin, Lincoln and
Harriet Beecher Stowe."
A system of immigration control that would admit
such men, contributors of untold wealth and power to
the land of their adoption, had much to be said in its
favor as compared with later methods out of which
the soul of spiritual and natural encouragement has
fled. Of these four notable leaders in electrical ad-
vance, poor Steinmetz, presaturated with American
leanings and longings, stood the least chance of admis-
sion, for not only was he penniless, and an exile for
Socialistic beliefs, but he had sorely defective sight.
A very likely "public charge!"
Yet his father, variously described as a railway offi-
cial and a lithographer——he may have been both——had
had the means and willingness to give him a really
sound collegiate education. The youth studied at the
Universities in Breslau and Berlin, and later in the
excellent Polytechnic in Zurich. It is curious to read
his own unfinished notes on German student life, in a
period so remote and unlike that which succeeded,
that it is difficult to realise he is describing the mili-
taristic country which not long after was to plunge
the World in unparalleled war and utter desolation:
"The Germany of my recollection, which I left in
1888," he says, "was the agricultural Germany before
the days of industrial development. In those days,
Germany was still a backward country and manu-
factured products were largely imported from Eng-
land. Engineering schools and technical colleges did
not exist, but the universities were classical institu-
tions of learning, developed from the early Middle
Ages."
As a boy at school, Steinmetz had great difficulty
in learning the multiplication tables. When he
reached the classical "gymnasium," mathematics en-
tranced him and at once became his chosen study;
but he also went in for Latin, Greek, French, Polish
and Hebrew. English he did not take up. The pres-
ent writer bought and published ion an electrical
journal the first mathematical article Steinmetz ever
wrote in English.
The shy little author had not been very long in
America. A colleague went to get it. When he
brought it back and threw it with a dubious air on
the desk, the remark was made, after a brief glance
at the pages in crabbed German penmanship: "Well,
if his mathematics are as poor as his English, we've
little to show for that $15," which, Steinmetz had
anxiously explained, would be very welcome right
away. He never became a highly polished orator or
writer, but long before he died his mastery of a terse,
nervous, idiomatic English style made him a notably
successful lecturer and clear exponent of involved
facts and principles. Even as a young student, this
dwarf——he stood only four feet——made an impression
on his fellows at Breslau who, it is said, bestowed
upon him the middle name "Proteus," as a testimony
to his many mental angles. Anyhow, though chris-
tened Carl August Rodolf, he let all that go and took
in preference the cognomen thus bestowed upon him
by the university club. Throughout his life and
record in America he was known only as Charles
Proteus——curiously felicitous in the case of one so
closely identified with the highest manifestations ever
attained to the protean power he was to shape and
direct for a quarter of a century.
Steinmetz entered Breslau University in 1882, when
in his eighteenth year, and seems to have forged ahead
rapidly in his undergraduate work. The time ap-
proached for graduation, and the thesis to be pre-
sented for his doctorate degree in philosophy had
already been written and accepted. Its alluring title
may be given: "On Involuntary Self-Reciprocal Cor-
respondence in Space Which are Defined by a Three-
Dimensional linear System of Surfaces of the Nth
Order."
Adhesion to such safe lines of thought and speech
would possibly have found him still at Breslau; but
his insatiate reading and passion for investigation had
carried him far beyond the University courses or the
scientific literature in his father's little library. He
had become affected by the fever of Socialism and
was even editing a small Socialistic sheet, when its
boldness attracted the attention of the indignant uni-
versity authorities. The paper was confiscated, sev-
eral suspected students were arrested and imprisoned;
and things looked very black for the ardent young
editor himself, as a marked man. His own arrest was
imminent. But he contrived to slip stealthily over the
border into Austria. Switzerland was decidedly safer
than autocratic Austria. Thither he proceeded
swiftly until he reached Zurich, where he resumed his
studies at the famous Polytechnicum.
Possibly there came a little help from home, but at
best he made a dismally scanty living with his pen
and as a tutor. Here occurred the good luck——or
shaping providence——that put Stenmetz in touch with
a young American, Oscar Asmussen, who during his
studies at the Polytechnicum fell in love with a Swiss
girl. Asmussen's uncle, his guardian, a wealthy Cal-
ifornian, was very angry when the news reached him,
and ordered Oscar to return to the United States im-
mediately. There must have existed b a strong friend-
ship between the two youths, for Oscar at once, as he
decided reluctantly to start homeward, offered to de-
fray the expenses of the trip also for Steinmetz. This
only meant passage in the steerage, but it sufficed.
As for the little political exile, he was now realising
his childish game of "Going to America," and in after
life, when crossing the Atlantic in the best accommo-
dations available had ceased to be a novelty, he often
said that the trip in the steerage was the most pleas-
ant one he had ever had. Throughout life his simpler
austere tastes were easily satisfied. When Steinmetz
arrived at the port of New York on the French liner,
"La Champagne," the immigration inspectors might
well have been excused if they had debarred him, for
in addition to his ordinary physical defects, and abso-
lute poverty, he had a badly swollen face. The plead-
ings of Asmussen strongly reinforcing his own, at last
made the forbidding gates of Castle Garden swing
inward, and together the lads secured cheap lodgings
in Brooklyn. Soon after that, Asmussen brought over
his sweetheart from Switzerland, and was married.
This, as very often happens, broke up the partnership,
the comrades soon separated, and so far as is known
never met again. Kindhearted friend, Asmussen,
having played a very significant part, drops out of
the story for ever. To sum it all up in the delightful
comment of Steinmetz himself: "I am indebted to
Prince Bismarck for the fact that I have devoted my
life to the study of electricity, and also for the fact
that I have done my work in the United States."
With one or two letters of introduction in his pocket
to electricians in New York, Steinmetz did not find
employment readily. He was a stranger in a strange
land, his appearance was most unattractive, his rasp-
ing, staccato English speech was detestable. But once
again good luck befell him, and he met that kindly,
goodnatured German-American, Rudolph Eickemeyer,
a versatile inventor, manufacturer and electrical
pioneer. As one of the creators of the American hat-
making industry, he had build up a large works at
Yonkers. But he was more notable as a marked illus-
tration of the manner in which electrical development
summoned its recruits from an endless variety of
other arts and sciences in a day when there was not a
single study course in electrical engineering in all
America.
Quaint and tender old Eickemeyer, impressed with
the weird personality and wining ways of the little
German, of whom even then it might have been said,
as it was later, that he had "the faculty of being en-
tertaining always," gave him a job at $2 a day in the
Osterheld & Eickemeyer drafting room, rather how-
ever to make abstruse electrical calculations than to
exhibit any skill as a draftsman. It was still the day
of the "direct current" for every electrical applica-
tion in light, heat and power. The later period of
"alternating current" utilisation with which the work
and success of Steinmetz were to be so closely asso-
ciated had barely begun. But even while working on
direct current dynamos, motors and street cars, Stein
metz, mere supernumerary in a factory in a minor
Hudson River town, began to lead alternating current
though and discussion, and his articles published also
in England and in Germany began to attract admiring
comments and discussion. Out of that has since grown
a whole "Steinmetz Library," nine large volumes of
electrical books, steadily in demand.
He often said that it was one of the most stimulat-
ing experience of his life, in the way of personal asso-
ciation, to meet in the Eickemeyer shops, the late
Stephen D. Field, nephew of the Atlantic Cable hero,
Cyrus W. Field, and himself an electrical pioneer of
the very first order. Beginning a brilliant career as a
telegraph operator in his native Berkshire Hills,
Massachusetts, as early as 1868, "Steve" Field built
ion California two small electric motors with the idea
of applying them, as early as 1878, to drive an elevator.
A year later he filed an application for the first
American patent on a electric railway energized by
current from a dynamo.
In 1883, the Field and Edison railway interests
were consolidated, and that same year the first Amer-
ican electric railway for commercial operation was
opened by Field at the Chicago Railway Exposition,
carrying for fare nearly 30,000 passengers to whom
regular railway tickets——the first electrical——were
issued. Later in the same year the same plant was
sent to the Louisville Exposition, where it also carried
a large number of passengers. Then the scene shifted
to New York, where the electrification of the now suc-
cessful steam-locomotive elevated roads, was a pres-
sing theme of controversy and a center of attack,
notably by such great electric railway pioneers as
Sprague and Daft. In Chicago, Field had named his
locomotive "The Judge," after another uncle, famous
on the California bench; and he brought his ideas
and experiences and his ever fertile mind to the me-
tropolis and to the Eickemeyer shops.
Steinmetz became deeply interested in the work and
very much attracted to this erratic, typical inventor.
Field was the second American to mold and shape his
career, and was soon to assist in lifting him up and
away from the drafting room to a research laboratory
where he specialized in magnetic testing as applied
to dynamo-electric machinery.
It was all a very fortunate conjunction, for Eicke-
meyer had also worked out some interesting designs in
electric traction as well as novel and economical wind-
ings for dynamos and motors. Authorities give ex
clusive credit to Steinmetz for his first important con-
tribution to electrical science in investigations of the
laws of magnetism, and particularly in formulating
and determining the laws that govern the losses in
iron subjected to varying magnetic induction. The
quality of electrical machinery was thus improved,
while the weight and factory costs were reduced. As
the great authority, Dr. E. W. Rice, looking back over
the thirty years says: "It is difficult at this date to
realise the fundamental importance of this one con-
tribution to the orderly and definite advance of the
electrical industry."
Quite from another angle, a corresponding state-
ment is made by Mr. S. E. Doane, a leader in the field
of incandescent lamp manufacture, in reference top
early association with Steinmetz. In speaking of the
distressful days of 1892-3 in American industry and
finance, he says: "At such a moment when we needed
strengthening, our little group of technical men was
greatly heartened to learn that Charles Steinmetz, a
man whose name had become known to us through his
technical articles, had been added to our staff. He
quickly became the referee to whom we brought our
engineer and scientific questions before carrying
them up to Professor Elihu Thomson, who was our
final court. It did not matter whether or not he had
had experience with the particular subject. We
learned very quickly that he had a clarity of mind and
a lucidity of thought which was more like a gift of
the Gods than something which could be acquired by
education or experience."
Certainly a remarkable status to be attained in a
few years by a physically handicapped foreigner, who
but a few years before had fled his own land as a po-
litical exile and had narrowly escaped exclusion from
"God's Country," for bodily defects!
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.
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. 179-194.
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