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Commentary
by Dr. Gerhard Falk |
Charles
Proteus Steinmetz (1865 - 1923)
Karl August Rudolph Steinmetz was born to a
Jewish family in Breslau, Germany. (Today, Breslau is in Poland and is called
Wroclaw). In his later years, he called himself Charles Proteus. Proteus
was the mythical sea god among the ancient Greeks.
Steinmetz, like his father and grandfather, was deformed at birth. He was
a dwarf and had a hunchback and hip dysplasia (deformity of the hip), like his
male ancestors.
As a high school student, Karl astonished his teachers because of his
exceptional mathematical ability. In 1883, Steinmetz enrolled in the University
of Breslau to study physics and mathematics. On completing his undergraduate
degree he enrolled in the doctoral program, but could not finish because the
Prussia police sought to arrest him for having become active in the Socialist
club at the university. Like so many German Jews at that time, Steinmetz had
little to do with Judaism but was greatly influenced by socialism. In fact, many
of the socialist writers and leaders at that time were former Jews like Karl
Marx (1818-1883).
Since socialism was outlawed in Prussia, Steinmetz fled to the United
States after first spending a year in Switzerland. Here he went to work for
Rudolf Eickemeyer, who owned an engineering firm in Yonkers, N.Y. Almost at once
he published in the field of magnetic hysteresis (the lag of an effect behind
its cause).
Because Eickemeyer developed transformers and other electrical devices,
the Eickemeyer firm was bought by General Electric, which had just been formed.
This made Steinmetz an employee of General Electric. In that capacity Steinmetz
lectured and published on the mathematics of alternating currents. This was new.
It had not been done before. Steinmetz enabled engineers to develop motors based
on mathematics, so that they could now create on paper the best possible motor
instead of using trial and error.
When General Electric moved to Schenectady, N.Y. in 1894, Steinmetz was
appointed head of the mathematics department. This allowed him to solve any
problems encountered by engineers and to work on his own projects. One of these
was the creation of artificial lightning in his laboratory. His lab was the size
of a football field and the lighting towers had 120,000 volt generators (volts
are named for the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta).
Steinmetz remained single all his life. He lived with a family of friends
and devoted himself to the study of electricity. In the course of his life he
held over 200 patents, including the inductor dynamo. Twelve biographies of
Steinmetz are now in print and his name is included in the National Inventors
Hall of Fame.
There can be little doubt that Steinmetz created the dominance of General
Electric in its field and that he was a Jew of major proportions, although he
was less than five feet tall.
Shalom u’vracha.
Dr. Gerhard Falk is the author of numerous
publications, including Fraud
(2007).
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