Steinmetz

I've mentioned Charles Proteus Steinmetz before:

https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/06/biographies.html

and

https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2022/06/famous-people-meeting-or-not-plus-ultra.html

Steinmetz is not as famous as Tesla (BTW there was an electric vehicle company named after him about 100 years ago - it didn't do well) but Steinmetz may have been as important due to his ability to understand, explain and essentially "make things work", most important among those things was AC machinery.  Tesla may have been able to intuitively dream these concepts up but without those like Steinmetz to engineer the AC machines and systems Tesla's ideas would never have become real.

Anyway I recently came across this concise article on Steinmetz from the  Nuts and Volts website:

https://www.nutsvolts.com/magazine/article/steinmetz_father_of_elec_engineering

One of the reader comments at the end of that Nuts and Volts article mentions this book:

https://archive.org/details/B-001-014-081/mode/2up

I think this must have been the book I read as a kid that made Steinmetz one of my heroes.

BTW, I got the pictures in this post from the "official GE" book:  Men and Volts:

https://archive.org/details/menandvoltsstory00hammrich

And here is a short film of Edison with Steinmetz and others at GE shortly before Steinmetz died:

https://catalog.archives.gov/id/93050

It's easy to see that Edison was as deaf as a post at this time.  As I recall reading, Edison and Steinmetz used Morse code at times to get around Edison's hearing loss by tapping on each other's knee :)

Steinmetz died at the relatively young age of 58 on October 26, 1923, roughly 99 years ago.

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm