A beautiful mind redux

Charles Steinmetz with Albert Einstein and other engineers

It’s almost impossible for us to imagine a world without electric power. The very oldest among us might remember a time when kerosene lanterns provided light for cooking and eating and reading. But not many, and then only on rural farms or lake camps in Maine.

The electrification of America began in the late nineteenth century and by 1930 “70% of American households were electrified in the U.S.” according to Wikipedia. The rapidity of this deployment rivals that of the internet in recent years and was driven, as you might expect, by economics.

Both in factories and in homes, electricity was far cleaner and more efficient than the power sources that preceded it. And other than lighting, the most important use of this new power source was rotary force, that is, motors. The advent of electric motors revolutionized American life. Imagine the motors in your home – ceiling fan, dish washer, clothes dryer, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, kitchen blender, air conditioner. In the garden shed there are weed whackers, power saws, sanders, and electric drills. The list is nearly endless.

Likewise in factories the use of electric motors was instrumental in vastly improving industrial output. Lathes and milling machines and drills and grinders – again, an extremely lengthy list. It’s almost impossible to imagine what came before, how we managed to cope without electricity for light and heat and motive force.

Electric motors displaced steam engines and water wheels and even dogs on treadmills as sources of power. And as any kid knows, a lot of elbow grease, as human manual labor was common and cheap and gruelingly used in farming and manufacturing.  The electrical revolution fundamentally changed human life on earth.

And while Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla are famous figures in the history of electrification, a little known German scientist and engineer had enormous direct impact on your life today.

Charles Proteus Steinmetz was born in Germany in 1865 and showed enormous promise as a student in mathematics and physics. He had a beautiful mind but was physically afflicted, having suffering from polio, dwarfism, hunchback (kyphosis), and hip dysplasia. After attending university in Poland, he emigrated to the United States in 1889.

Steinmetz first worked in the burgeoning electricity research and development community in New York City and soon ended up at General Electric, where he was considered a prodigy. While his work contributed to advances in a wide range of electrical theory and application, it is his development of Alternating Current (AC) theory that shaped the world we live in today. AC generators and motors and the transmission lines that move power into our factories and homes were all greatly influenced and facilitated by Steinmetz.

Steinmetz moved from New York to Lynn, Massachusetts, where he continued his work for General Electric. Eventually, he moved once more to Schenectady, New York, another GE site and a community into which he was embraced. Steinmetz served on the Schenectady city council and the board of education, and taught at Union College until his passing in 1923. He was an important part of his adopted community, loved and respected and mourned when he died.

Steinmetz was not an attractive man. He was short and misshapen and often smoked smelly cigars. In our age of beauty worship, he would not compare well to Brad Pitt or George Clooney. But it is undebatable that he had an enormous, positive impact on your life, far more than Brad or George ever will.

There could not be a more powerful example that beauty, indeed, is only skin deep.