by Alan Darling
Note: Charles Steinmetz was the developer of AC Theory and one of the pioneers of today’s electrical grid. He is also the namesake of the IEEE’s prestigious Steinmetz Award. I grew up in the same neighborhood where he once lived, and having been a ham radio operator since I was 14, was also fascinated by our local electrical wizard. I wrote this article for Mohawk Valley USA while still in college.
Charles Steinmetz eyed the new sign in his office at Schenectady’s General Electric angrily. No smoking? His cigars had been his constant companions ever since he had come to Schenectady. He stormed out of the building shouting, “No Cigar, No Steinmetz!” Not wanting to lose their electrical wizard, GE reconsidered, and allowed his cigar to stay.
Like many stories about Charles Steinmetz, this one is not true. “Steinmetz obeyed rules,” says Joseph Steinmetz Hayden, Steinmetz’s adopted grandson who lived with Steinmetz for seventeen years. “Besides, he was very calm. I don’t ever remember him getting that excited or angry.” Members of the press in Steinmetz’s day took one look at the hunchbacked man with a German accent, and immediately painted him as the eccentric genius. This image lingers today. Hidden behind it lies Steinmetz’s unseen accomplishments and a man who his friends remember as warm and compassionate.
Not that his reputation wasn’t completely deserved. Steinmetz often showed off when in the spotlight, and some of his day-to-day activities were a bit unusual. Shortly after he moved to Schenectady in the 1890’s, he and several co-workers moved into a house on Schenectady’s Liberty Avenue. The neighbors became leery of the flashes and strange noises that emanated from Liberty Hall (as the house was soon dubbed). John and Mary, two neighboring crows, came and went freely and Steinmetz often paused to chat with them. Seven alligators lived in a pen just outside the front door, and one time they escaped into the nearby Erie Canal. Six were retrieved, but no trace of the seventh was ever found. Some claim it has grown to mammoth size and still wanders the sewers of Schenectady.
Steinmetz had quickly gone from anonymity to fame. After a nighttime escape from the oppressive Bismarck regime in Prussia, he came to the United States in 1889 at the age of 24. Three years later, he had the electrical world buzzing. He developed a formula that determined the hysteresis loss, the amount of heat released when an electrical motor or generator rotates. Before this formula, the design of electrical apparatus had been mostly guesswork. Now, efficient machines could be easily constructed. General Electric became interested in Steinmetz, so they bought the company he worked for, liquidated it, and transferred him to their main plant.
At Schenectady, Steinmetz polished his alternating current theory, and was the major drive behind its entry into everyday use. Direct current had been the dominant form of electricity, but since it can be transferred just a short distance, only those places within a few miles of a generator could get electricity. Steinmetz’s alternating current made electricity available to all.
Steinmetz knew the power of electricity, and often reminded people of this power. When GE’s new public relations man said that the sale of a very large turbine generator would not be of interest to many people, Steinmetz responded, “Ha!” He told the young man that the generator would produce 80,000 horsepower, which when run 24 hours a day would do the work of over five million men. With the United States’ slave population at 4,700,000 in 1860, Steinmetz declared that the machine would do more work than all the nation’s slaves at the time of the Civil War. Using this angle, the insignificant sale of a turbine generator became front page news.
After several near misses, the Liberty Hall lab burned down in 1901, and Steinmetz replaced it with a beautiful brick house on Schenectady’s Wendell Avenue. In it, he included a fully equipped fireproof laboratory as well as a conservatory stocked with exotic plants, ranging from palms to cactus. A large pool lay in the middle of this greenhouse, and he filled it with fish, eels and water lizards. Disaster once struck the fish pond, when a pair of muskrats invaded the conservatory and ate the inhabitants of the pool.
Steinmetz spent much of his time in the house-laboratory with Joseph LeRoy Hayden, a young engineer from GE. When Hayden married, Steinmetz invited him and his wife Corinne to live in the huge Wendell Avenue home, and after their son Joe was born in 1906, he adopted the Haydens legally. Midge was born in 1909 and Billy in 1910, and Steinmetz soon was called “Daddy” by the children (Hayden was “Pops”). He had always had a soft spot for children, and he pampered the kids as much as Mousie (the pet name Steinmetz had given Corinne) would tolerate, “and usually a little bit more.” He often took them into the lab for electrical magic shows, and he loved to just sit and talk with the children. Joe Hayden remembers him as a teller of vivid horror stories, and the visions of ghosts and vampires he conjured up “usually scared us out of our wits.”
He frequently took the children to his favorite escape, Camp Mohawk, a retreat built on the banks of the Mohawk River near Scotia, New York. Steinmetz played along with the children in the river’s waters and despite his hunchbacked build was surprisingly agile there. He felt more at home in the river, and often created elaborate schemes that somehow always required a visit to Camp Mohawk. Many times, he spread his paper and tables across the front of his canoe, and floated freely as he worked.
As Steinmetz’s fame grew nationally, he became a folk hero locally, and he became active in community affairs. He initiated the electrical engineering department at Union College, and was a favorite professor there until 1913. He even joined a campus fraternity house. In 1911, he was appointed to the Schenectady School Board, and was elected president of that board by its members. Steinmetz went right to work at reforming Schenectady’s schools. When he took office, over one third of the city’s school children were without school accommodations. Steinmetz didn’t stop until there was a seat for every child, and he initiated a health program and programs for the mentally retarded in the schools. He later served on the Parks and City Planning Commission and the City Council.
One summer day in 1920, Steinmetz and a friend looked at what at first appeared to be a burglarized Camp Mohawk. After a glance inside, Steinmetz realized that the burglar had actually been a bolt of lightning, and there he began his study of this powerful phenomenon.
He carefully traced the bolt’s path through the damaged building. At one end, the fragments of a mirror lay scattered across the floor. Steinmetz spent several days piecing the mirror back together, and wound up with a portrait the lightning had etched of itself.
After study of this etching, he constructed a lightning generator so he could study lightning without having to wait for it to strike. At the first public demonstration of his lightning generator, a tiny model village was the target. Steinmetz hurled a powerful thunderbolt at the town, and a thunderous crash boomed. When the smoke cleared, powder and ash had replaced the toy village. This little show brought Steinmetz instant acclaim, and he was proclaimed The Thunderer, Modern Jove and The Man Who Tamed Lightning. Steinmetz is most remembered for his lightning-taming, but he died in 1923 before he truly conquered it. The Thunderer lives on, however. He returned to Joe Hayden last August, when a lightning bolt struck his house.
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Originally published in Mohawk Valley USA, Winter, 1980. All rights have been retained by Alan Darling