STEINMETZ, CHARLES PROTEUS (1865-1923), American electrical engineer, born at Breslau, Germany, April 9, 1865. He was educated at Breslau, Zurich and Berlin, specializing in mathematics, electrical engineering and chemistry. His activities as a Socialist led him into difficulties with the authorities, and, after a short sojourn in other countries, he emigrated in 1889 to the United States and found work with the Osterheid and Eicke meyer factory at Yonkers. In 1893 when that factory was ab sorbed by the General Electric Co., Schenectady, he was given an appointment as consulting engineer. His knowledge won him speedy promotion and he soon became recognized as one of the outstanding electrical geniuses of America. After 1902 he served also as professor of electrical engineering at Union College.
Steinmetz regarded his three greatest contributions to electrical science to be : (I) his investigations on magnetism resulting in his discovery of the law of hysteresis, which enabled losses of electric power due to magnetism to be accurately forecast before starting the construction of motors, generators, transformers, and other electrical apparatus employing iron; (2) the development of his symbolic method of calculating alternating-current phenomena which simplified an extremely complicated field, understood by few, so that the average engineer could work with alternating current, an accomplishment which was largely responsible for the rapid progress made in the commercial introduction of alternating current apparatus; (3) his investigation of lightning phenomena which resulted in his theory of electrical transients, and opened the way for his development of lightning arresters to protect high power transmission lines. Though primarily a mathematical genius
and a student of theory, he had some 200 patents to his credit, including improvements on generators, motors, transformers, in electrochemical operations, and the invention of the induction regulator, the method of phase transformation and the metallic electrode arc lamp. Besides a large number of scientific papers he was the author of a number of standard text-books. He died at Schenectady, N.Y., Oct. 26, 1923.
See J. W. Hammond, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, a biography (1924) and J. N. Leonard, "Steinmetz, Jove of Science," in World's Work, vol. 53, nos. 2, 3 and 4 (1929).