On the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a chalk mark on its side. They did, and the generator performed to perfection. He asked for an itemized bill. Steinmetz became close friends with one of lab assistants, a thin, young blond man named Joseph LeRoy Hayden, as they developed the first magnetic arc lamp, later used to light street corners.
When Hayden announced that he intended to marry and find an apartment nearby, Steinmetz had an idea. By the turn of the twentieth century, Steinmetz had started construction on a large house on Wendell Avenue, in the area where GE executives lived. A collector of rare plants, he had it designed with a greenhouse, as well as a laboratory, where he planned to work as much as possible to avoid going into the office.
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. Like a mischievous boy, he was fascinated with anything that was lethal, and he gathered alligators, rattlesnakes and black widow spiders.
The inventor Guglielmo Marconi once asked about Steinmetz about his Gila monster. Soon, Steinmetz was dining each night in his home with Hayden and his wife, Corrine, a stout, round-faced French-Canadian. The house was too large for Steinmetz, and the Haydens suspected what might be coming. Finally, Steinmetz turned to Corinne. Joseph Hayden was all for it. It would make their long working hours more convenient, and the house offered space he and Corrine could never afford on their own.
Corrine was reluctant, but Steinmetz gently wore her down. Corrine Hayden then outlined the terms of their cohabitation—Steinmetz would pay only for his share of expenditures.
The men would simply have to drop everything and sit down to the table. His father worked for the government railway service, and Karl was encouraged to attend the university and pursue his intellectual curiosities.
He had been deformed since birth and had lost his mother at the age of one year but found solace and excitement in the affairs of the mind. He entered the university at Breslau in and specialized in mathematics and the physical sciences. He also read widely in economics and politics, and in he associated himself with the Socialist party in Breslau.
As he pursued his scientific education, he also continued his political activities, a pattern he was to continue throughout his life. As ghost editor of the Breslau Socialist newspaper, People's Voice, Steinmetz attracted the attention of the police. In , just as he had finished the work for his doctor's degree, he learned of plans for his arrest and fled to Switzerland. It was where he said he thought best. But GE still frequently used him as a consultant.
Steinmetz laboriously traced the problem to a faulty part and marked it with a piece of chalk. The appalled and shocked GE managers required an itemized invoice for such a huge bill.
He also liked to remind engineers that his initials CPS also stood for cycles per second — emblematic of AC — which was his best understood and explained subject. Near the end of , Steinmetz became the part-time head of the Electrical Engineering Department at Union. He happily held this position for 10 years, serving without pay. He had the best of both worlds by combining teaching each morning with laboratory work for GE each afternoon at his home.
Steinmetz was ever the humanist, believing that receiving only technical training is not real education at all. Steinmetz always began with simple concepts and evolved on a step-by-step basis toward more difficult and involved ideas. But he failed to realize why all of his students did not immediately understand just how logical his step-by-step approach was. Nonetheless, he offset this with great patience and the student always came first.
This made him so popular with students that they made him a Phi Gamma Delta fraternity brother. Steinmetz died of heart failure on Oct. By that time, he had amassed over patents.
When he died, Henry Ford bought the camp where Steinmetz spent his summers frolicking with friends and especially children. He moved it to The Dearborn Institute in Michigan. New York Governor Alfred E. Need to brush up on your electronics principles? These multi-part series may be just what you need!
Everything for Electronics. Forum Blogs Feedback Techforum Newsletter. Popular Stories Wirespondence! Steinmetz, who altered his name in an effort to become more "American," began researching the laws of magnetic hysteresis, which refers to the delay in the change of the magnetic field that occurs each time the alternating current that creates this field reverses, resulting in loss of power.
Steinmetz established a fundamental law of magnetism known as the "Law of Hysteresis" or, "Steinmetz's Law" that was published in the American Institute of Electrical Engineering's "Electrical Engineer" magazine in At the age of 27, he became well known in his field for this discovery, which for the first time allowed engineers to calculate and minimize losses of electric power due to magnetism in their designs.
This would lead to feasibility of AC being widely used in place of direct current, which was limited in that it was inefficient to transmit over long-distance power lines. High-voltage AC, however, could carry electricity hundreds of miles with the use of a transformer, which can make low-voltage current into high-voltage current, and vice versa. Thomas Edison had founded the General Electric Company in and hired Steinmetz in , sending him first to the plant in Lynn, Massachusetts and then to Schenectady, New York, where he served as a consulting engineer for the rest of his life.
As head of the calculating department and later head of the engineering consulting group, he invented a number of devices including an efficient AC generator, the three-phase electrical circuit, and the metallic electrode arc lamp.
Over a period of 20 years he authored volumes on the theory of alternating current and created an impressive body of work on the subject, which has been used to teach engineering students ever since. He became very active in the local community as well, heading up the School of Electrical Engineering at Union College from to and continuing to teach there until
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