The life of Charles Proteus Steinmetz was a true Horatio Alger story. He was born a frail hunchback to parents in the most meager of circumstances. His mother died while he was still a child and he had to face life without the love and protection he so badly needed. Yet, against these odds, he became a great scientist, a benefactor of mankind, and he was revered and honored throughout the world.

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Charles Proteus Steinmetz was born in Germany and came to the USA in 1889.

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

These words, inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, greeted twenty-four-year-old Karl August Rudolf Steinmetz with particular aptness in the spring of 1889. Few men who sought a new start in the New World were as tempest-tossed as he.

True, Steinmetz had never looked worse than on that June day when the steerage passengers of the French ship La Champagne were finally herded ashore after two days' wait at anchor while the upper-class passengers were being processed. He had caught a bad cold during the trip over and his face was swollen badly to make him look even less presentable than usual. As he stepped before his interrogator he drew himself up in a pitiful attempt at dignity.
"Your name?" snapped the official.
"Karl August Rudolf Steinmetz."
The official made a laborious job of writing it down, thus emphasizing its foreignness. Finally he was ready to bark his second question: "Profession?"
"Mathematiker und Forscher."
The official frowned in annoyance. He understood German but he didn't approve of anyone's speaking it. "Do you have money?" he demanded.

Steinmetz stood silent. He guessed it was damning to be without funds, and his pockets were absolutely empty. He didn't wish to lie this first day of his new start, and his silence told the truth. The official made a note to the effect that he was without funds.
"You speak English?" was the next question.
"A few," came the hesitant answer.
"No English," the official commented, writing it on a form.
Then he demanded, "Do you have a job in America?"
Steinmetz didn't understand this question and the official angrily repeated it in German.
"Nein," Steinmetz finally replied.

The official walked over to his superior, pointed out the forlorn Steinmetz and said, "He can't speak English, he hasn't got any money, he hasn't got a job, he's sick, and he's a hunchback!"
The superior nodded. "He can't come in."

The official waved Steinmetz out of the line and pointed toward a door over which was a huge sign that bellowed, in a dozen languages, DETENTION PEN.
What the immigration officials did not know - nor would they have altered their ruling if they had - was that among all his other problems this young man was a political refugee. To return home to Germany meant his immediate arrest and imprisonment.

Steinmetz's involvement with Bismarck's police came about in this way:

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He had been born in 1865 in a brick apartment house on the outskirts of Breslau, a neighborhood that was mostly middle class. Protestant in religion, conservative in politics. The developing political climate and the circumstances of Steinmetz's life combined to place him in eventual opposition to the arrogant and aristocratic "Iron Chancellor".

The day of his birth was an emotional one in the apartment. His father paced nervously in the living room while the mother was attended by a midwife. After some hours the child was born, wrapped in flannel, and carried into the living room. The father noted the child was lying in an awkward position and demanded, "Is . . . is he healthy?"
"Oh yes," the midwife assured him. "The left leg isn't quite straight and there is a small hump on the back, but he'll live all right."

The father closed his eyes in pain and turned to walk away. As he walked he dragged his left leg slightly and there was a hump on his back . . . just as there had been on his father's before him.

Within a very few years it became apparent that if nature had given this child an imperfect body, it had compensated by giving a mind that was more than first-rate. When he was eight and a half years old he entered a classical gymnasium (the equivalent of an American high school) and immersed himself in Latin and mathematics. In his second year he had studied logic and French; in his third Greek and philosophy, Polish and dialectics and Hebrew. He learned his Horace and Homer so thoroughly that for the rest of his life he could recite long passages from the ancient poets. He became a linguist, proficient in five languages but not, ironically, in the one he was so desperately to need on Ellis Island when he was twenty-four.

At seventeen years of age Steinmetz graduated from the gymnasium with such high marks that he was excused from the traditional ordeal of an oral examination. That fall he enrolled in the University of Breslau.

His choice of a university was what shaped his future career, for Breslau was one of the very few schools that bothered to include the study of electricity in its course of physics. No school in all of Germany had a course in electrical engineering, and few students even attended the electrical lectures in the Breslau physics course. Yet, that was the field to which Steinmetz gravitated with single-minded enthusiasm. He didn't then dream he could have a career in a science so insignificant; he only knew that it fascinated him beyond all power to turn aside to more popular studies.

Three years earlier Thomas A. Edison had brought out his incandescent electric lamp, and Nikola Tesla, twenty-six, was now beginning research that was to lead to a radical new motor and a system for transmitting electricity over great distances. The world was on the doorstep of the electrical age. Steinmetz appeared at the right moment in history.

German undergraduate life was gay and lusty. Great emphasis was placed upon physical prowess and there were clubs dedicated to mountain-climbing, swimming, rowing and, of course, dueling. A saber wound on a young man's face was a badge of honor proclaiming that his courage had been tested.

The deformed young man who hitched himself shyly about the campus the first days of the term was obviously not a candidate for any of these clubs, but he was determined not to be cheated out of all social life. He met all eyes with a tentative but ingratiating smile and after the first shock of his appearance had worn off, he received smiles in return. He even received an invitation to join a student club, the mathematical society.

The members of this society had a deep interest in mathematics; being young, they were also dedicated to beer-drinking and revelry. One night each week they met in the back room of a restaurant at eight o'clock and for two hours drank beer and held learned discussions about their academic speciality. At the end of two hours, songs replaced discussion. By midnight the society had dwindled considerably, and by two a.m. only a handful remained. This small group usually adjourned to one of the "Vienna cafes" to drink coffee until morning. Steinmetz was one of the few always to greet the dawn.

It was not only to win acceptance that Steinmetz stayed with the revelers; he enjoyed every minute of it. His ordered and intense mind needed relaxation in frivolity, and within his frail body there was a lustiness of spirit that won the respect of his fellows. Before the first college year was half over he knew he had carved himself a place in campus life. It may not have been a position of complete equality, but it certainly was one of special affection. He learned the terms of his acceptance during a ritual meeting called by his society for the purpose of giving each member a nickname.

It was the tradition that the senior members of the society give the first-year men a nickname by which they were to be called for the duration of college. Often the name stuck for a lifetime. Steinmetz set out for the meeting with some misgivings, for he had heard that frequently the names were not tender.

The first-year men were lined up before the society and one by one called forward to be named. Steinmetz was third in line and much too nervous to hear what the first two were named. When his turn came he stepped three paces forward, clicked his heels, and came to attention. His twisted little body made a parody of Prussian formality.

The chairman looked at him, smiled and raised his stein.
"Half a glass to Proteus," he intoned. "Proteus the versatile, the everchanging, who knows economics, classics, and mathematics, who can answer questions on every subject."

"To Proteus!" the assembly echoed and lifted their steins.

Steinmetz bowed and sat down, determined to keep all emotion from his face. Flattering words had accompanied the name, but he knew the Odyssey from beginning to end. According to Homer, Proteus was a prophetic old man of the sea who was full of wisdom and could discourse on all things past, present, and future. He lived in a cave on the island of Pharos, near the mouth of the Nile, and he could change himself into many shapes; now a lion, now a serpent, a leopard, a tree, even fire and water. But his human body, to which he always returned, was that of an old hunchback!

For better or worse, Steinmetz was to be called Proteus for the rest of his college years. Perhaps there was some cruelty in the nickname, but there was truth in it too. It was a truth he could not escape, a truth he carried on his back for all to see, a truth he had to live with, preferably with good grace.

For the rest of the evening young Proteus answered quickly and easily to his new name and told a great number of jokes.

In the 1880's Germany was making a rapid change from a feudally organized agricultural country to a modern industrial state, and the transition was accompanied by harsh political coercion. The "Iron Chancellor" Bismarck had little use for democracy and all opposition was met by columns of goose-stepping soldiers and prison sentences. The country seethed with resentment and revolt, much of it centering among the faculties and students of the universities. Steinmetz, preoccupied with mathematics, remained naively unaware of the ferment until his second year.

Introduction to the underground opposition came to him from a most unforeseen quarter. One of his close friends was a student named Henry Lux, nicknamed Hinz. Hinz was a member of the mathematical society and a part of the small group that visited the Vienna cafes after the meetings. He was the gayest of companions, singing in a fine baritone voice and having a great supply of quips and jokes. He was thought to be slightly superficial, perhaps, but a diverting companion and always welcome.

It was after one of the all-night rounds of the cafes that Steinmetz discovered how he had misjudged Hinz. They were walking slowly back to their rooming houses in the early dawn, walking slowly because Steinmetz could not walk fast, and Hinz was suddenly quiet and apparently deep in thought. Several times Steinmetz was aware of receiving a long and measuring look from his companion and at last the silence was broken.
"Karl," Hinz said, refraining from the Proteus nickname that had been used during the evening. "Have you given much thought to politics?"
"No," Steinmetz admitted, "I haven't."

Hinz slowed his step and glanced behind. The streets were empty in all directions, yet the young man went through the ritual of avoiding eavesdroppers. When he spoke again his voice was low, conspiratorial. "We have a Socialist club in town, a study group, and I think you would find it most interesting. Some remarkable people belong and I've been talking to them about you and everyone has agreed to invite you to our next meeting. You'll hear some challenging ideas, Karl."

Steinmetz was not only flattered at the thought of people discussing him, he was also eager for "challenging ideas." He accepted the invitation.

Two nights later he and Hinz set out for a middle-class residential section of town and again there was the ritual of avoiding non-existent eavesdroppers, spies, and agents provocateurs. It was quite melodramatic and by the time they arrived at their destination and Hinz rapped a special signal on the house door, Steinmetz's pulse was fast with excitement.

The door was opened first a crack, then wide. They stepped inside. Eight people, divided equally among college students and townspeople, were drinking tea in the small parlor and Steinmetz received a flatteringly warm reception. He knew the students by sight on campus. Despite their various and prosaic backgrounds, they were all welded together by an ideal that lifted them out of themselves, made them appear wiser than they were, braver than they were, stronger than they were.

Theirs was not the harsh, class-war dogma of Karl Marx, but the old-fashioned socialism that visualized a brave new world in which there would be no war, no poverty, no exploitation of man, no hate. That night Steinmetz became a Socialist. He was nineteen years old.

The university of Breslau required six years of study for a degree. For five and a half years Steinmetz did brilliant academic work and his professors prepared to graduate him with highest honors. Throughout this time he continued to work with the Socialists, speaking and studying - and for a time even editing their local newspaper, The People's Voice. Membership had grown slowly but enough so that the college students were able to form their own club, independent of the townspeople's association.

In Steinmetz's final year the club did something that revealed that, for all their secret passwords and secret knocks and whispered conversations, they were not really revolutionary Socialists at all, but college boys playing at it. Included in the club were two medical students who were leaving Breslau to complete their studies in a large hospital. A farewell meeting was to be held and it was decided to commemorate the occasion by having a group photograph taken. They made an appointment at the studio of a commercial photographer and upon arrival two members were carrying a large and very heavy package. They removed the wrappings to reveal a marble bust of Ferdinand Lassalle, the deceased founder of the German Socialist Party.
"He's a member of our club, isn't he?" demanded one of the students.
"Of course he is!" came a chorused reply.
"Then he should be in the picture, shouldn't he?"

Again there was enthusiastic agreement. There were nine members of the club and when they grouped for the picture, five sat in the front row on chairs, and four in the back with Lassalle's bust in the middle.

A print of the picture went to each club member and then the photographer asked to display it in his shop window. The club granted permission.

This bravado did not escape the vigilance of the Imperial Government. The police knew that Lassalle was the founder of the Socialist Party, and they naturally concluded that the young students grouped around the marble bust had embraced the outlawed doctrine. The photograph was confiscated and a relentless drive undertaken to indentify and find grounds for the arrest of every man in the picture.

The young hunchback was perhaps the easiest of all to identify, and suddenly Steinmetz discovered he was being shadowed. The police questioned his friends and associates. They studied The People's Voice to clip and study the articles that came from his pen. Slowly and carefully they put together evidence that would imprison him. In February 1888 they had their case and were ready to move.

Just as they were on the point of arresting him, Steinmetz's friends learned of the plan and dashed to warn him. They told him that he had to leave the country, or most certainly face a long prison term if he stayed. He was on the threshold of completing a notable university career and about to receive the highest honors with his degree. To flee now was to surrender all he had worked so long and hard to achieve. It was a bitter choice, made no more palatable by the sudden knowledge that he didn't really want to be a politician at all. He was, in heart and mind, a scientist and he wished to be left in peace to study. But it was now too late to alter the course of events he had set in motion.

His mother was dead but his father still lived in the old apartment, quietly going about his work and bearing the pain of his own deformity in silence and dignity. Steinmetz went to him before dawn, sat on the edge of the bed and gently woke him.
"Father, I'm going out of town."
The little man sat up quickly, blinking the sleep from his eyes. "Is anything wrong, Karl?"
"No, nothing at all. I'm simply going to visit some college friends and I have to catch an early train."
"How long will you be gone?" The father was not entirely reassured.
"Only a few days. I'm sorry I woke you up but I didn't want you to worry."
"All right, Karl, I won't worry," the father promised. "But take care of yourself."

They embraced and then the young man quickly left. He walked quickly and jerkily to the railroad station and stepped aboard a train headed for the Austrian border.

He spent a miserable, poverty-stricken year in Zurich, Switzerland, eking out a living by tutoring the children of wealthy families and writing occasional scientific articles. He made friends with a Dane by the name of Oscar Asmussen, and when that young man decided to go to America in the spring of 1889 he had little difficulty convincing Steinmetz he should go along. Surely, Steinmetz thought, the New World would not be so harsh a place as the Old.

But he didn't reckon with the officialdom of Ellis Island.

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The Immigration official pointed toward the detention pen and barked, "In there to await deportation as an undesirable alien."

Steinmetz didn't understand all the words, but the gesture was unmistakable and so was the significance of the room to which he was being sent. Deportation to Germany, to Bismarck's police, to prison, and all because nine high-spirited young men had posed for a photograph with a marble statue.

During this dialogue, Oscar Asmussen had been busy with another official some yards away. Now that he had been cleared for entry, he turned to look for his friend and found him shuffling dejectedly toward the Detention Pen.

"Karl . . . Karl, where are you going?" he cried.
"I am to be deported as an undesirable alien," Steinmetz said dolorously.
"Ha!" Asmussen snorted. "We'll see about that."

Asmussen was no older than Steinmetz but he was a world traveler and more sophisticated in the ways of petty bureaucracy. Assuming an arrogant and patronizing manner, he said to the immigration official, "Mr. Steinmetz is one of the most distinguished mathematicians in Europe and is here to consult with certain American concerns about various electrical phenomena." At this point he removed a large roll of bills from his pocket. "I am carrying his money for him. We have several appointments in New York, so please approve his admission promptly."

The admission was approved and as the two friends walked out of the building and toward the ferry that would take them across the harbor the Manhattan, Steinmetz exclaimed, "Oscar, what did you say in there? What magic words did you use to get them to change their minds?"
"I said you were a rich and distinguished scientist."
"Ach," said Steinmetz, "I have no money at all. I do not even know where I shall sleep tonight."
"I have relatives in Brooklyn. We'll move in with them for awhile."
"You think they will welcome me, a stranger?"

Asmussen threw his arm around his friend's narrow back and laughed. "Didn't you know that all Danes are crazy?"

The relatives in Brooklyn welcomed Steinmetz just as if he too were a Dane. They not only sheltered and fed him during the first weeks but gave him English lessons so that he might be better equiped to look for a job.

His first application was to the Edison Machine Works, where he was promptly turned down.
"It seems to me there is a regular epidemic of electricians coming to America," the plant superintendent grumped. A few years later the General Electric Company, offspring of Edison's manufacturing companies, was to bring some of its most difficult problems to Steinmetz, but now the young man was turned from the door.

Steinmetz burst into the apartment one evening to announce a significant event to his friend.
"Oscar . . . Oscar! I'm going to become an American citizen."
"Congratulations!" his friend exclaimed.
"I just decided this afternoon. If I'm going to make my living in America I think I should be an American."
"I know your new country will be very proud of you," Oscar said.
"Let's hope you're right. But one thing I know already, I'm proud of my new country." He smiled wryly. "There are no Bismarck police here."

The following month he appeared before the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization to take out his first papers. He was given a form to fill in and the very first blank was for his name. He thought that over for a long time, his pen poised. Karl August Rudolf Steinmetz was his name, but he didn't write it down. It sounded so German and he was becoming an American. He would keep his last name, of course, but he decided to anglicize Karl, and for his first name he wrote down Charles. What about a middle name? Suddenly, without consciously willing it, he saw the pen form the word Proteus. He looked at the name and smiled with wry and affectionate memory.
Proteus, the old man who could assume many forms but who was a hunchback most of the time by choice. He let the name stand and, with a flourish, completed his signature.

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Not in all America could there have been a better job for Steinmetz than the one he got in Yonkers, New York, at Mr. Rudolf Eickemeyer's small manufacturing firm. Not only was he propelled into that branch of electrical science that was to lead him to his great success of later years, but he found in Rudolf Eickemeyer an understanding friend.

Many projects were undertaken by Steinmetz, and he bent over his drawing board to grapple with problems such as the design for a motor intended to operate a "vertical trolley", or an "elevator". This was at the request of Norton P. Otis, who was eventually to organize the Otis Elevator Company. The motor that Steinmetz drew and Eickemeyer designed was shunt-wound, the first of its type ever produced.

But of all the projects undertaken, the one that intrigued Eickemeyer most was that of designing ironclad dynamos and motors of sufficient size and power to propel a trolley car. This was a wildly radical idea at the time, for the public was firmly convinced that a horse hitched to the front of the car was more reliable than anything Eickemeyer and Steinmetz could produce with wires and iron.
And the public was almost right.

Eventually three electric streetcars were equipped with the motors built in Eickemeyer's Yonkers factory. They were operated in Sunday trial runs on the Steinway Road in Brooklyn.
Gradually, Steinmetz solved the problems turned up by each Sunday's trial run - all but one, the basic one that had plagued electrical manufacturers for years, the motor itself. Each motor was built and, if it overheated, was torn apart and rebuilt. Mass production of large motors was impossible under these conditions.

All Steinmetz had been asked to do was make a drawing of a motor already designed, but he was a man aflame with scientific enthusiasm and he threw himself at the basic problem. Eichemeyer, to his everlasting credit, recognized genius and relieved the little man of his drafting chores and gave him a small electrical research laboratory of his own. It was here that Steinmetz made his first revolutionary discovery in electrical engineering and called it the "Law of Hysteresis". This discovery produced the first murmurs of his later thundering fame.

In the AIEE meeting scheduled for January 19, 1892, the attendance was light, for there was no indication that anything out of the ordinary was to happen.
A strange-looking little man was scheduled to give a paper on "hysteresis", but no one had ever heard of the man or guessed the import of his paper. And things looked even less promising when Steinmetz took the stage.

His unpressed suit was ill-fitting, he had forgotton to remove an enormous pair of overshoes, and his pants were caught in the tops of them. When he began to read his paper, his voice was high in pitch, singsong in expression and overlaid with a heavy German accent. He was difficult to listen to, but what he said began to take hold of that meeting and electrify it. Every engineer present began to feel a personal excitement as he realized that the funny-looking little man on the platform was giving him a new tool to work with.

"In most electrical apparatus, magnetism is used. Sometimes the magnetism remains constant, as in the fields of direct current machines (DC); sometimes the magnetism alternates, as in transformers.
When the magnetism alternates, it consumes power. Such power consumption means loss of efficiency and results in heating. It is therefore of importance to the builder of electrical apparatus to make the designs so that this loss of power by alternating magnetism (called "hysteresis") is as small as possible. However, the laws of this power loss were entirely unknown at this time, and many engineers even doubted its existence . . . . I had to calculate and design an alternating current commutator motor (AC) . . . I knew there would be a loss of power in the alternating magnetism of the motor, and I wished to calculate this "hysteresis loss", to get the efficiency of the motor . . . . I derived mathematically a law, the "law of hysteresis" showing how the hysteresis loss increases with the increase of magnetization . . . "

When the meeting ended there was loud applause and everyone crowded around Steinmetz to congratulate him. But the little man wasted no time basking in praise. The following day he returned to work on a second paper giving complete data on the magnetic characteristics of all magnetic materials then known.

One winter day an engineer from another concern came to consult Steinmetz about a problem and when he had climbed the three flights of stairs and entered the research laboratory, he was amazed to find the pot-bellied stove without fire and the little scientist working in an overcoat, heavy cap, and boots. His hands were blue with cold and from time to time he rubbed them briskly to return flexibility to his fingers so that he could manipulate a pencil.

They discussed the visitor's problem and Steinmetz made some suggestions that seemed to solve it. As the man was about to leave, he couldn't help asking the question that had bothered him all during the visit.
"Mr. Steinmetz," he said, "why don't you build a fire in the stove?"
"Oh, that?" Steinmetz exclaimed, as if aware of the cold for the first time. "A mouse had some babies in there and they are not yet old enough to move."

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