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发帖数: 244 | 20 国内人无知也就算了，号称万能的军版也这水平，太掉价了
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinmetz
Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the Wizard of Schenectady
His contributions to mathematics and electrical engineering made him one of
the most beloved and instantly recognizable men of his time.
By Gilbert King
smithsonian.com
August 16, 2011
Steinmetz and his contemporaries (Tesla, Einstein and others) at the Marconi
wireless station in New Jersey. Image courtesy of Wikicommons
He stood just four feet tall, his body contorted by a hump in his back and a
crooked gait, and his stunted torso gave the illusion that his head, hands
and feet were too big. But he was a giant among scientific thinkers,
counting Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison as friends, and his
contributions to mathematics and electrical engineering made him one of the
most beloved and instantly recognizable men of his time.
In the early 20th century, Charles Steinmetz could be seen peddling pedaling
his bicycle down the streets of Schenectady, New York, in a suit and top
hat, or floating down the Mohawk River in a canoe, kneeling over a makeshift
desktop, where he passed hours scribbling notes and equations on papers
that sometimes blew into the water. With a Blackstone panatela cigar
seemingly glued to his lips, Steinmetz cringed as children scurried away
upon seeing him—frightened, he believed, by the “queer, gnome-like figure
” with the German accent. Such occurrences were all the more painful for
Steinmetz, as it was a family and children that he longed for most in his
life. But knowing that his deformity was congenital (both his father and
grandfather were afflicted with kyphosis, an abnormal curvature of the upper
spine), Steinmetz chose not to marry, fearful of passing on his deformity.
Born in 1865 in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), Carl August Rudolph
Steinmetz became a brilliant student of mathematics and chemistry at the
University of Breslau, but he was forced to flee the country after the
authorities became interested in his involvement with the Socialist Party.
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. In just a few years,
Steinmetz would prove his American friend right.
Soon after his arrival, he went to work for Eickemeyer and Osterheld, a
company in Yonkers, New York, and he identified and explained, through a
mathematical equation that later became known as the Law of Hysterisis, or
Steinmetz’s Law, phenomena governing power losses, leading to breakthroughs
in both alternating- and direct-current electrical systems. America was
entering a golden age of electrical engineering, and when Thomas Edison and
General Electric learned what Steinmetz was doing with electric motors in
Yonkers, the company bought out Eickemeyer and Osterheld in 1892, acquiring
all of Steinmetz’s patents as well as his services.
Steinmetz Americanized his name to Charles Steinmetz. He chose Proteus as
his middle name—the nickname his professors in Germany had affectionately
bestowed upon him in recognition of the shape-shifting sea god. In Greek
mythology, Proteus was a cave-dwelling prophetic old man who always returned
to his human form—that of a hunchback. Steinmetz thoroughly enjoyed the
comparison.
In 1894 he arrived in Schenectady, the place he would call home for the next
thirty years, and his impact at General Electric was immediate. Using
complex mathematical equations, Steinmetz developed ways to analyze values
in alternating current circuits. His discoveries changed the way engineers
thought about circuits and machines and made him the most recognized name in
electricity for decades.
Before long, the greatest scientific minds of the time were traveling to
Schenectady to meet with the prolific “little giant”; anecdotal tales of
these meetings are still told in engineering classes today. One appeared on
the letters page of Life magazine in 1965, after the magazine had printed a
story on Steinmetz. Jack B. Scott wrote in to tell of his father’s
encounter with the Wizard of Schenectady at Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant
in Dearborn, Michigan.
Ford, whose electrical engineers couldn’t solve some problems they were
having with a gigantic generator, called Steinmetz in to the plant. Upon
arriving, Steinmetz rejected all assistance and asked only for a notebook,
pencil and cot. According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and
scribbled computations on the notepad for two straight days and nights. On
the second night, he asked for a ladder, climbed up the generator and made a
chalk mark on its side. Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove
a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They
did, and the generator performed to perfection.
Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the
amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the
figure. He asked for an itemized bill.
Steinmetz, Scott wrote, responded personally to Ford’s request with the
following:
Making chalk mark on generator $1.
Knowing where to make mark $9,999.
Ford paid the bill.
Despite his professional successes, there was emptiness in Steinmetz’s life
, which he rectified with a maneuver that helped secure his reputation as
the “Bohemian scientist.” He spent his first few years in Schenectady in a
“bachelor circle” of GE engineers, hiking, canoeing and experimenting
with photography. 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. Hayden began to
cook for Steinmetz, and soon had a cot placed in his boss’s laboratory so
he could nap during their marathon working hours. 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. “He’
s dead,” Steinmetz replied. “He was too lazy to eat.”
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.
“Why don’t you come and live with me?” he asked.
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. Hayden had come to cherish Steinmetz’s eccentricities, and he
understood that the Bohemian scientist really yearned for a family of his
own. Corrine was reluctant, but Steinmetz gently wore her down.
“If we move in with you,” she eventually told him, “I must run the house
as I see fit.”
“Of course, my dear,” Steinmetz replied, stifling a huge grin. Corrine
Hayden then outlined the terms of their cohabitation—Steinmetz would pay
only for his share of expenditures. She would prepare and served meals on a
regular schedule, no matter how important his and her husband’s work was.
The men would simply have to drop everything and sit down to the table.
Steinmetz agreed to all of Corrine’s terms.
The living arrangement, despite some awkward starts, soon flourished,
especially after the Haydens began to have children—Joe, Midge and Billy—
and Steinmetz legally adopted Joseph Hayden as his son. The Hayden children
had a grandfather, “Daddy” Steinmetz, who ensured that they grew up in a
household filled with wonder. Birthday parties included liquids and gasses
exploding in Bunsen burners scattered decoratively around the house. Not
much taller than the children who ran about his laboratory and greenhouse,
Steinmetz entertained them with stories of dragons and goblins, which he
illustrated with fireworks he summoned from various mixtures of sodium and
hydrogen in pails of water.
In 1922, Thomas Edison came to visit Steinmetz. By then, Edison was nearly
deaf, and Steinmetz tapped out a message on Edison’s knee in Morse Code.
Edison beamed, and the two continued their silent conversation in front of
bewildered reporters.
Steinmetz’s fame only grew in the years he lived with the Haydens on
Wendell Avenue. 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.
One Friday afternoon in 1921, Steinmetz hopped in his electric car and
headed off for a weekend at Camp Mohawk, where he’d built a small house
overlooking Viele Creek. When he arrived he’d discovered that lightning had
damaged the building and shattered a large silver glass mirror. He spent
the entire weekend painstakingly reconstructing the mirror, placing the
slivers between two panes of glass. Once assembled, he studied the pattern
and was convinced that the shattered mirror revealed the lightning’s path
of electrical discharge. Back at General Electric, he brought in a gigantic
apparatus, then another. There were thunderous crashes at odd hours of the
night. The city was abuzz with speculation. What exactly was the Wizard of
Schenectady doing in Building 28?
In March of 1922, reporters were invited to General Electric and gathered
before a model village that Steinmetz had constructed. In a noisy and
explosive demonstration witnessed by Edison himself, Steinmetz unveiled a
120,000-volt lightning generator. With a showman’s flourish, he flipped a
switch and produced lighting bolts that splintered large blocks of wood,
decimated the steeple on a white chapel and split a miniature tree.
Reporters were awestruck. The following day, a headline in the New York
Times proclaimed, “Modern Jove Hurls Lighting at Will.” Steinmetz’s work
led to the measures used to protect power equipment from lightning strikes.
But toward the end of Steinmetz’s life, according to his biographer,
Jonathan Norton Leonard, “his scientific work had become rather like a boy
’s playing with machinery.” He had by then earned the respect of
electrical engineers for his contributions to the field, but Steinmetz, at
the peak of his celebrity, simply could not help but delighting in the kind
of pseudo-science he would have scorned earlier in his career. Proteus was
as happy as he’d ever been in his life.
In the fall of 1923, Steinmetz and his family traveled west by train,
stopping to see the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and the actor Douglas Fairbanks
in Hollywood. 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. In his sleep, doctors said, his heart had
failed. The Wizard of Schenectady was gone.
Sources
Charles Steinmetz Papers, Schenectady County Historical Society, Schenectady
, New York.
Books: John Winthrop Hammond. Charles Proteus Steinmetz: A Biography.
Kessinger Publishing, 2006. Ronald Kline. Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist
. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Floyd Miller. The Man Who Tamed
Lightning: Charles Proteus Steinmetz. McGraw-Hill, 1962. Jonathan Norton
Leonard. Loki: The Life of Charles Proteus Steimetz. Doubleday, 1929.
Betty M. Adelson. The Lives of Dwarves: Their Journey from Public Curiosity
to Social Liberation. Rutgers University Press, 2005. Walter Hines Page,
Arthur Wilson Page, The World’s Work: A History of Our Time, Volume 8.
Doubleday, Page & Co., 1904.
Articles: “Modern Jove Hurls Lightning at Will.” New York Times, March 3,
1922. “As ‘Proteus’ He Changed His Shape” Life, April 23, 1965. “
Letters to the Editors.” Life, May 14, 1965. “Charles Steinmetz: Union’s
electrical wizard.” Union College Magazine, November 1, 1998. “Charles
Proteus Steinmetz, Inventor.” www.yonkershistory.org.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinmetz-the-wizard-of-schenectady-51912022/#7TJ6Flk8wJCiHfdq.99
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