Steinmetz, Charles Proteus. [45], A famous anecdote about Steinmetz concerns a troubleshooting consultation at Henry Ford's River Rouge Plant. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. 127 (July, 1922), 26. We have taken out crops year after year and never put anything back on the earth. In 1913, Steinmetz felt he was working on the answer: Electricity, my friend! Electricity will take the place of coal, and will do the work a thousandfold better. April 9, 1865 In just a few years, Steinmetz would prove his American friend right. Steinmetz, on the other hand, felt that a full liberal education not only would help with knowing the origin of terms but also because the vocation of the engineer is especially liable to make the man one-sided. [22] For example The Automobile (Feb 26, 1914), 532. Charles Proteus Steinmetz Alternating Current U.S. Patent No. The Hayden children had a grandfather, Daddy Steinmetz, who ensured that they grew up in a household filled with wonder. In his sleep, doctors said, his heart had failed. If you did and hated having to take English, History, and Languages you can blame Steinmetz too, I guess. See, in January 1914, Steinmetz gave a talk with the title of The Future of Automobiling Belongs to the Electic as gas cars were very expensive and, unlike a horse, an electric car requires no attention.[21] Edison immediately asked Steinmetz if he could add that the electric car requires no attention if equipped with an Edison battery.[22] Steinmetz agreed and even signed the ad and Edison used this and his image to promote the Edison battery. 22. [further explanation needed] He was a member and adviser to the fraternity Phi Gamma Delta at Union College, whose chapter house was one of the first electrified residences. Loki: The Life of Charles Proteus Steimetz. In 1910, GE created that department and made Steinmetz the head. When a Socialist mayor took office, Steinmetz served as president of the Schenectady Board of Education and was instrumental in implementing longer school hours, school meals, school nurses, special classes for children of immigrants and the distribution of free textbooks. Steinmetz loved the trip but found it a bit tiresome and declared that their next one would be to the Mediterranean. He arrived at Ellis Island in 1888 and was nearly turned away because he was a dwarf, but an American friend whom Steinmetz was traveling with convinced immigration officials that the young German Ph. He felt that America, has given me everything I wanted the only criticism which I can make is that I would far more enjoy my advantages if I knew that everybody else could enjoy the same. What It Is and What It Has Accomplished. Journal of Chemical Education. 31. GE and Union college continued to use his image to promote themselves so that he was commonly known to the general public up until the 1960s. Charles Proteus Steinmetz At first, Charles struggled in school then, suddenly when he was around 10 years old, school just started to click. Steinmetz Americanized his name to Charles Steinmetz. Jack B. Scott wrote in to tell of his fathers encounter with the Wizard of Schenectady at Henry Fords River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan. A Chicago public high school, Steinmetz College Prep, is named for him,[37] as well as a Schenectady public school, the Steinmetz Career and Leadership Academy. z l] (electromagnetism) The energy converted into heat per unit volume per cycle during a cyclic change of magnetization is proportional to the maximum magnetic induction raised to the 1.6 power, the constant of proportionality depending only on the material. He taught at Union College from 1902. He systematized the use of complex number phasor representation in electrical engineering education texts, whereby the lower-case letter "j" is used to designate the 90-degree rotation operator in AC system analysis. ; the next year he was transferred to Schenectady as chief consulting engineer, remaining in that position until his death. Finally, Steinmetz turned to Corinne. Friday, December 30, 2022. Until that time the power losses in motors, generators, transformers, and other electrically powered machines could be known only after they were built. He soon obtained a job with a small electrical firm owned by Rudolf Eickemeyer in Yonkers, N.Y. At about the same time, Steinmetz Americanized his first name to Charles and substituted Proteus, a university nickname, for his two middle names. [27], One of the highest technical recognitions given by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the "IEEE Charles Proteus Steinmetz Award", is given for major contributions to standardization within the field of electrical and electronics engineering. Corrine Hayden then outlined the terms of their cohabitationSteinmetz would pay only for his share of expenditures. Without Charles Steinmetz's theories of alternating current, the expansion of the electric power industry in the United States in the early 20th century would have been greatly delayed. He arrived at Ellis Island in 1888 and was nearly turned away because he was a dwarf, but an American friend whom Steinmetz was traveling with convinced immigration officials that the young German Ph.D. was a genius whose presence would someday benefit all of America. Rock climbing, skiing, boating, picnics, bicycle rides, they even tried to fly with what they called the Mohawk River Arial Navigation Club, which was Americas first glider club. However, they couldnt really get any of their prototypes off the ground, Steinmetz said that they made a few jumps but nothing they produced, could be dignified with the term flight.[5] Amusingly, Steinmetz managed to make it look like they flew with trick photography. The city was abuzz with speculation. However, to Steinmetz, working at GE was part of his socialist and environmental beliefs. [4] Charles Proteus Steinmetz, The Mentor-World Traveler 13 (May 1925), 14. In the fall of 1923, Steinmetz was invited to give a talk at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in Del Monte, California. stonemason What did Charles Steinmetz do at General Electric? If we move in with you, she eventually told him, I must run the house as I see fit.. This was just a fraction of a real lightning bolt which Steinmetz estimated averaged between 50 to 100 million volts. 3 Why was Charles Steinmetz almost turned away at Ellis Island? Ford was delighted until he got a bill for $10,000, at which point he demanded an itemized bill. When some of his fellow party members were arrested, Steinmetz took over the editorship of the party newspaper, The Peoples Voice. One of the articles he wrote was considered inflammatory; the police began a crackdown on the paper, and Steinmetz had to flee Breslau (1888). The Lives of Dwarves: Their Journey from Public Curiosity to Social Liberation. Moe sarcastically refers to Curly as a "Steinmetz" in the 1944 Three Stooges short Busy Buddies. [14] Hammond, Charles Proteus Steinmetz: A Biography, 296. [13], After an uneasy start, the arrangement worked well for all parties, especially after three Hayden children were born. [6] Hammond, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, 239. By that time, he had adopted a new American name: Charles Proteus Steinmetz. Four good reasons to indulge in cryptocurrency! Corrections? By this time, Steinmetzs reputation was exploding, at least with engineers. Gradually, through his writing, lecturing, and teaching, his method of calculation with complex numbers was universally adopted in work with alternating currents. I will let Kolin Hagar, one of the first radio broadcasters from WGY, set the scene: Then, according to these sources at Fords factory Steinmetz refused all help and after two days of observing the giant machine, made a mark on the generator with some chalk and told the engineers that they needed to remove sixteen windings from the field coil at that point. His experiments led to the law of hysteresis, which deals with power loss in electrical machinery when magnetic action is converted to unusable heat; the constant he calculated (by age 27) has remained a part of electrical engineering vocabulary. The trip exhausted the 58-year-old scientist, and on October 26, back in his home on Wendell Avenue, his grandson Billy brought him breakfast on a tray, only to observe Steinmetz lying motionless on his bed, a physics book by his side. These hereditary problems perpetuated themselves through three generations of males in his family. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. In March of 1922, reporters were invited to General Electric and gathered before a model village that Steinmetz had constructed. In Greek mythology, Proteus was a cave-dwelling prophetic old man who always returned to his human formthat of a hunchback. [2] Hammond, Charles Proteus Steinmetz: A Biography, 221. He founded the Mohawk Aerial Navigation Company, Ltd. The General Electric Research Laboratory. McGraw-Hill, 1962. These were conducted in a football field-sized laboratory at General Electric, using 120,000 volt generators. The Steinmetz car is permanent displayed in the first-floor corridor between the Wold Center and F.W. 533,244, Born I am going to show you a small clip from a documentary made by the Edison Tech club about it, which is why they have so many images of Edison even though Edison never worked at GE nor had anything to do with GEs decisions: What that movie didnt say is that the reason that Whitney created an independent laboratory for the GE research is that an accident burned down part of the stable that Steinmetz and the research group were using for a laboratory in January of 1901. From then on GE used Edisons image as their logo and spokesman and used Steinmetzs image and story as their way to talk about AC without involving the people who were unrelated to GE like Micheal Dolivo-Dobrovolsky, Westinghouse, Stanley, or Tesla. Tesla sailed for America in 1884, arriving in New York with four cents in his pocket, a few of his own poems, and calculations for a flying machine. He was born on April 9, 1865 in Breslau, Germany, (modern-day Wrocaw, Poland) and was educated at the universities of Breslau and Berlin, and the Polytechnic in Zurich, Switzerland, specializing in mathematics, electrical engineering, and chemistry, and teaching mathematics at the same time. The first job he obtained was as draftsman at the Osterheld and Eickemeyer factory in Yonkers, N. Y.; soon he was given charge of all the new and experimental work in the establishment. [citation needed], Faced with an expiring visa, he emigrated to the United States in 1889. [3] A genius in both mathematics and electronics, he did work that earned him the nicknames "Forger of Thunderbolts"[4] and "The Wizard of Schenectady". In 1893 Eickemeyer's company, along with all of its patents and designs, was bought by the newly formed General Electric Company, where Steinmetz quickly became known as the engineering wizard in GE's engineering community. [20] Steinmetz speaks on WGY radio miSci Museum of Innovation and Science, https://nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/schmuse/id/269/rec/167. Steinmetz's connection to Union is further celebrated with the annual Steinmetz Symposium,[32] a day-long event in which Union undergraduates give presentations on research they have done. A piece of wire struck by it vanishes in the dust.[33] But Steinmetz wasnt just interested in a big flash. After a short stay in Zrich he immigrated to the United States in 1889, traveling by steerage. [13] Herbert Wallace A Man Who Knows Success Magazine vol. I could find two sources for this, one from a letter to the editor in 1965 stating that his father told him the story, and another from a radio show at GEs WGY from 1972 on the 50th anniversary of their first show. Once the mansion was finished, Steinmetz filled the greenhouse with orchids, ferns and cacti (he delighted in their strange shapes) and focused on the menagerie of animals he had always wanted. While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Soon, Steinmetz was dining each night in his home with Hayden and his wife, Corrine, a stout, round-faced French-Canadian. At General Electric, Steinmetz gained an expanded opportunity for research and implementation of his ideas. 8-9, (June 1923), 207. Back at General Electric, he brought in a gigantic apparatus, then another. [5] Steinmetz's equation,[b][6] Steinmetz solids, Steinmetz curves, and Steinmetz equivalent circuit[7] are all named after him, as are numerous honors and scholarships, including the IEEE Charles Proteus Steinmetz Award, one of the highest technical recognitions given by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers professional society. In typical magnetic materials, the Steinmetz coefficients all vary with temperature. [8] Guy Bartlett. Charles Proteus Steinmetz, Inventor. www.yonkershistory.org. This wasnt as much as an all-boys club as you might think as there were several women and many children that would visit regularly, including Ernst and Eskil Bergs sister Julia, Millers sister Florence, a neighbor named Mrs. Krueger who was basically the den mother of this whole mad group and Steinmetzs half-sister Clara who would often stay for long periods until the craziness of the situation became too much when she would escape to her own devices in New York.[6]. Such occurrences were all the more painful for Steinmetz, as it was a family and children that he longed for most in his life. 5 Summary. Doctor Steinmetz served the Institute as vice-president (1896-98), manager (1892-95; 1898-1901) and as committeeman at various times; he also contributed papers frequently to Institute meetings and publications, his first, in 1892, "On the Law of Hysteresis," marking a new epoch in electrical science. Steinmetz was a lifelong agnostic. Steinmetz responded with a note that simply said, Making chalk marks on generator $1, Knowing where to make mark $9,999, Total due $10,000.[36]. In all, he patented some 200 electrical inventions. He had already used his mathematical calculations to determine that lightning was not useful for commercial purposes, noting that it may have immense power (he calculated around 600 million horsepower) but it only lasted for two-millionths of a second. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Copyright 2023 Kathy Loves Physics | Powered by Kathy Loves Physics. As I said before, GE was delighted and decided to use this meeting to promote the company and worked overtime to promote the Steinmetz-Edison connection and the story of Steinmetz, which is why they photoshopped that picture of Einstein and Steinmetz so it looked like it was just the two of them. Charles Steinmetz was born Karl August Rudolf Steinmetz on April 9, 1865, in Breslau. But the first commercial electricity was direct current. This accomplishment was largely responsible for the rapid progress made in the commercial introduction of alternating-current apparatus. He went first to Zurich, then, in 1889 arrived in the United States. Charles Proteus Steinmetz, original name Karl August Rudolf Steinmetz, (born April 9, 1865, Breslau, Prussiadied Oct. 26, 1923, Schenectady, N.Y., U.S.), German-born American electrical engineer whose ideas on alternating current systems helped inaugurate the electrical era in the United States. Steinmetz fostered the development of alternating current that made possible the expansion of the electric power industry in the United States, formulating mathematical theories for engineers. [16] Steinmetz was therefore delighted when in 1911, Schenectady actually elected a socialist mayor named George Lunn. This was his last major project at the General Electric Company, where he had become head of the engineering consulting department. In his old photographs with the Berg brothers, Steinmetz labeled them as his family, however, with the Haydens this was finally true and in 1905, Steinmetz formally adopted Roy Hayden. Steinmetz was born Karl August Rudolph Steinmetz on April 9, 1865 in Breslau, Province of Silesia, Prussia (now Wrocaw, Poland) the son of Caroline (Neubert) and Karl Heinrich Steinmetz. One result of Steinmetzs growing reputation was his employment by General Electric Company in its consulting department. Only four feet tall in real life, his middle name Proteus, was named after the Greek god who could take on any shape or size. Meanwhile, Steinmetz, who always liked to live communally, became particularly close to a shy young engineer named Joseph LeRoy Roy Hayden. He developed theories for alternating current that made possible the expansion of the electric power industry in the United States. Once assembled, he studied the pattern and was convinced that the shattered mirror revealed the lightnings path of electrical discharge. Note that this guy is not Nikola Tesla but instead the engineer John Carson who I mention in my video about the history of FM radio (he is the one who said that FM wouldnt work to remove static and said, static, like the poor will always be with us)[26] Many years after the event GE claimed that Steinmetz and Einstein hung out for hours after this and talked about science, engineering, and socialism. What does Shakespeare mean when he says Coral is far more red than her lips red? In 1901, Steinmetz was elected president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and in 1902, he was awarded an honorary degree from Harvard 1902. Cornell University Professor Ronald R. Kline, author of Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist,[12] contended that other factors were more directly involved in Steinmetz's decision to leave his homeland such as being in arrears with his tuition at the university and life at home with his father, stepmother and their daughters being tension-filled. By then, Edison was nearly deaf, and Steinmetz tapped out a message on Edisons knee in Morse Code. [39], In May 2015, a life-size bronze statue of Charles Steinmetz meeting Thomas Edison by sculptor and caster Dexter Benedict was unveiled on a plaza on the corner of Erie Boulevards and South Ferry Street in Schenectady. Omissions? Steinmetz then decided that as he was so often called to look at special problems, GE should form a special consulting department that was composed of the best specialist engineers so that they could swoop down and deal with any emergency. Charles Steinmetz: Unions electrical wizard. Union College Magazine, November 1, 1998. Floyd Miller. What is the importance of inventory policy? Other awards include the Certificate of Merit of Franklin Institute, 1908; the Elliott Cresson Medal, 1913; and the Cedergren Medal, 1914. Opportunity for research and implementation of his socialist and environmental beliefs who ensured that they grew up in a apparatus... 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To 100 million volts, where he had adopted a new American name: Proteus.
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