Charles Proteus Steinmetz

American engineer and inventor

• Born: April 9, 1865
• Birthplace: Breslau, Prussia (now Wrocław, Poland)
• Died: October 26, 1923
• Place of death: Schenectady, New York

Steinmetz helped lay the engineering foundations for the large-scale use of electric power through his technical achievements, his role as an educator and inspirer of other engineers, and his creation of research and engineering institutions. In the process, he came to personify electrical engineering to a public that understood little of its technical details.

Early Life

Charles Proteus Steinmetz (STIN-mets) was born Carl August Steinmetz in a German city that is now part of Poland. His father, Carl Heinrich Steinmetz, the son of a German Lutheran father and Polish Catholic mother, worked as a clerk and lithographer with the state railways and was a congenital hunchback who passed that disability on to his only son. His mother, born Caroline Neubert, was the daughter of a well-to-do Breslau family of German Lutherans. She died when Carl August was only a few months old.

Reared mainly by his grandmother, Steinmetz had a pleasant and comfortable childhood. His combination of strong intelligence and a weak body directed him to a university education. He enrolled at the University of Breslau as a student of philosophy, specializing in mathematics. The friend who drew him into mathematics, Henry Lux, also drew him into socialism. Steinmetz joined a group of Social Democrats espousing the ideal of Ferdinand LaSalle, who opposed Karl Marx by arguing that socialism could be achieved without revolution, a theme that Steinmetz would develop throughout his life.

Steinmetz’s involvement in both mathematical study and socialism came to a critical point in 1888. Still without a degree, Steinmetz was completing a dissertation based on the geometrical ideas of the German mathematicianBernhard Riemann when he assumed the editorship of the local Social Democratic newspaper. It had already drawn the attention of the police with its antigovernment, though nonviolent, editorial policy. According to Steinmetz’s later recollections, he left the country in 1888 with the police looking for him and the threat of possible prosecution hanging over him.

Steinmetz spent a year in Zurich, Switzerland, where he took the only engineering courses of his career at Federal University but again departed without a degree. He had begun writing technical articles about the new field of electricity; the most promising place to make a career in that field was the United States, where capital and opportunities for electrification were abundant and engineering talent was scarce. With a prosperous friend, Oscar Asmussen, he sailed to New York.

Life’s Work

Steinmetz’s entry into New York Harbor in June, 1889, past the new Statue of Liberty, was in the best Emma Lazarus tradition: Tired and weak (Steinmetz was suffering from a bad cold in addition to his disability), a member of a huddled mass yearning to breathe free, he was still a socialist on the lam, penniless and in shabby clothes, and he spent two days at Ellis Island, where he was nearly rejected for entry into the country. However, he also had assets: the friendship of the wealthy Asmussen and a letter of introduction to an earlier political refugee, Rudolf Eickemeyer, who had long since established himself at Yonkers, New York, as a successful manufacturer of hat machinery and Civil War revolvers. Steinmetz was set with a job as the one-man research and development staff supporting Eickemeyer’s efforts to diversify into the new business of electric motors.

Within only two years, Steinmetz rose to the top of the American electrical engineering profession. His distinctive appearance—his twisted form, less than five feet tall, his neat if grizzled beard and ever-present cigar—became well known first among engineers and soon among that segment of the public that was interested in science and technology. He then changed his name to Charles Proteus Steinmetz, reflecting his confidence in his own powers and his sense that he had made a new life for himself in America. In 1890, he introduced to engineers his law of hysteresis, a formula for predicting the energy lost through magnetizing and demagnetizing the electromagnets used in electrical equipment. This was no academic exercise but a crucial tool for designing generators, motors, and transformers. His accomplishment was repeated in 1893 with his second major contribution to electrical engineering, the use of “imaginary” numbers in electrical calculations, which made it possible to determine the characteristics of complex electrical machines by calculation rather than trial and error.

The unexpectedness of Steinmetz’s rise and the importance of his purely technical work, however, should not be overrated. His patron, Eickemeyer, was a fine inventor who had developed an important new type of electric motor before Steinmetz came along as well as instruments that made it easy for Steinmetz to study hysteresis. The “law” was actually an empirical special case of more general findings arrived at earlier by a British physicist; the imaginary number applications had been anticipated by a Harvard professor. Steinmetz’s greatness lay in communicating these ideas, educating a generation of engineers about them, and inspiring others to use mathematics to solve practical problems. Meanwhile, the electrical inventions of Eickemeyer’s company caught the eye of a giant company created in 1892 to dominate the electrical manufacturing business, the General Electric Company. It followed its consistent policy of buying up competing companies and absorbing good engineers in the bargain by purchasing Eickemeyer’s company and rights to Steinmetz’s services in 1893.

General Electric sent Steinmetz to its second biggest plant, in Lynn, Massachusetts, to serve as a calculator of the electrical characteristics of its products and systems. He was unhappy there, but a reorganization in 1893 sent him to a more congenial setting in Schenectady, New York, where there were plenty of German immigrants and trained engineers. Soon, he was Schenectady’s best-known citizen. Defying his physical weakness, he rode a bicycle, skied, and paddled a canoe. He filled his home laboratory with sparking and glowing electrical apparatus as well as a crow and collections of orchids, cacti, and lizards. His weekly poker games drew General Electric executives and engineers, and his summer cabin drew young protégés. He befriended in particular a young engineer, Joseph Hayden, whom he adopted, and his family. On the job, he moved beyond engineering calculations to consulting.

As General Electric’s chief consulting engineer, he provided problem solving and advice for all of the company’s departments. He gained fame as an oracle, but a closer look shows that he was not particularly adept at putting his finger on key trends. For example, he did not recognize the system of polyphase alternating current as the key to modern electrification, and he badly underestimated the industry’s ability to develop high-voltage transmission systems. He made some two hundred patented inventions, but only one of them, a new type of streetlight, had any substantial commercial success. In the narrow realms of invention and consulting, his impact on the electrical art was not as great as that of such now-obscure contemporaries as his General Electric colleagues William LeRoy Emmet and Ernst Alexanderson, his Westinghouse rival Benjamin Garver Lamme, or the independents Nikola Tesla and William Stanley.

It was as educator and inspirational motivator that he truly shone. He wrote twelve books, including the classic Theory and Calculation of Alternating Current Phenomena (1897), an often-reprinted textbook. He published more than two hundred articles, in everything from mass periodicals to the Physical Review. While still an employee at General Electric, he accepted a professorship in electrical engineering at Schenectady’s Union College and created a first-rate department that he then turned over to one of his protégés, Ernest Berg.

Steinmetz received an honorary degree from Harvard in 1899, and its accompanying citation for him as “the foremost expert in applied electricity of this country and therefore the world” captures in its hyperbole and chauvinism some of the reasons for which America embraced Steinmetz as a public figure. He enjoyed and used the publicity. For example, he used his eminence to sponsor within General Electric the first industrial laboratory devoted in part to true scientific research (1900) and one of industry’s best engineering laboratories (1907).

Steinmetz had completed his major technical work by 1910 (a later and highly publicized experiment in making lightning in the laboratory was a useful engineering exercise that does not rank with his earlier work). His interest in socialism, dormant since the 1890’s, revived. He became a leader of the local Socialist Party that took over Schenectady’s city government in 1912. In the posts as head of the Board of Education, head of the Parks Commission, and president of the Common Council, he led efforts to build schools and parks that greatly improved the quality of life in that city.

Steinmetz still espoused evolutionary socialism, but now it was colored by his industrial experience. His major statement of that view, the book America and the New Epoch (1916), emphasized cooperation and organization as the keys to socialism. The large corporation and its methods would gradually blend with the state and turn it into a cooperative commonwealth run by experts who were above politics.

This brand of corporate socialism may have disappointed his more doctrinaire colleagues. He and other members of the reformist wing were briefly expelled from the party, though he was taken back and ran in 1922, unsuccessfully, on the Socialist Party ticket for the post of state engineer. Steinmetz showed that he had not adopted reform socialism out of cowardice or a need to conform. From the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 until American entry into World War I in 1917, he argued the proneutrality case with a vigor dangerous for one so obviously of German descent. After the war, he also voiced a number of unpopular or extreme positions in newspaper articles and interviews. His predictions and advocacies ranged over electric vehicles, the capabilities of the varied European “races,” the coming energy crises and biological revolutions, and a widely publicized exchange of letters with Vladimir Ilich Lenin about the electrification of the Soviet Union. Never of strong constitution, he died after a brief illness in Schenectady in 1923.

Significance

Steinmetz was a brilliant engineer and inventor, but his emergence as the individual embodying the profession of electrical engineering for the American public during the early twentieth century was attributable to more than his brilliance. Electricity was a glamorous new technology with a theory inaccessible to the public. People needed to personify it, and the novelty of a small, misshapen man commanding lightning caught their fancy. He was indeed a leader in the application to electrical engineering of new methods of applied mathematics and organized research, but the same could be said of a half-dozen contemporaries whose names remained unknown. His true greatness was as an educator, explainer, and motivator. Those strengths, along with his distinctive appearance, an immigrant background personifying the melting-pot myth, an adherence to a personal and nonradical brand of socialism, and (especially posthumously) the support of the publicity machine of his long-time employer, the General Electric Company, won for him renown that went far beyond technology.

Bibliography

Alger, Philip, and Ernest Caldecott, eds. Steinmetz the Philosopher. Schenectady, N.Y.: Mohawk Development, 1965. A valuable collection of Steinmetz’s essays on political, social, and educational topics. Perhaps best summed up by one essay’s title: “The Bolsheviks Won’t Get You if You Do Watch Out.”

Hammond, John Winthrop. Charles Proteus Steinmetz: A Biography. New York: Century, 1924. The most comprehensive summary of Steinmetz’s life, written by a General Electric publicity writer who worked with him at Schenectady. Uncritical in its admiration for the subject. Makes little attempt to put either the technical work or the political and social ideas in perspective. A combination of useful primary material and mythmaking.

Kline, Ronald R. Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Intellectual biography that attempts to deconstruct some of the mythology surrounding Steinmetz.

Lavine, Sigmund A. Steinmetz: Maker of Lighting. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1952. Another recycling of the Hammond material.

Leonard, Jonathan Norton. Loki: The Life of Charles Proteus Steinmetz. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1929. This account by a science journalist is somewhat livelier than Hammond’s book, but it contains little additional information, beyond puncturing one or two myths. (Steinmetz worked for a salary, not as myth would have it, in exchange for a checkbook given him by General Electric.)

Miller, John Anderson. Modern Jupiter. New York: American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1952. Again, the Hammond material and approach, but supplemented somewhat by material made available by the Steinmetz heirs and a former assistant. Though the author is an engineer, he does little to clarify Steinmetz’s technical role. Perhaps because he is an engineer, he does little to clarify Steinmetz’s socialism.

Steinmetz, Charles Proteus. America and the New Epoch. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1916. Steinmetz here made his fullest exposition of his brand of socialism. Argues that the era of competition is dead and that the era of cooperation has succeeded it. Corporations and government must blend together to form a corporatist state ruled by large organizations where the distinction between public and private has vanished.