Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the Wizard of Schenectady (2011)

I remember reading a book on Steinmetz when I was in high school. I was really awed by this guy and the stuff he did. Before Nicola Tesla was one of my idols, Charles Steinmetz was the major figure in engineering who I was enamored with.

As I recall from the book, he went on a trip once, and forgot to take his log tables (this was back when lots of math was done using printed tables of logarithms). He sent a request to have his secretary have his printed log tables delivered to him, but by the time they arrived, he'd worked them all out and recreated the tables himself from scratch.

Edit: I think this is the book in question, if anybody is looking for more on Steinmetz. There's also a much more recent biography of Steinmetz that I haven't gotten around to reading yet. So there are at least two books on him available.

https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Tamed-Lightning-Steinmetz/dp/...

Excerpt: "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."

Fun fact: General Electric in Schenectady is represented by zip code 12345

Elementary Lectures On Electric Discharges, Waves And Impulses, And Other Transients

Is a very interesting readable book he wrote

>"One Friday afternoon in 1921, Steinmetz hopped in his electric car and headed off for a weekend at Camp Mohawk"

I wonder what he would have made of the fact that people are arguing about whether electric cars are practical almost 100 years later.

This is a good article. The anecdote about Henry Ford’s generator probably isn’t true though: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/