A MIGHTY ELECTRICIAN.
Steinmetz Is Not Yet Forty Years Old and
Has Taken Out Over One Hundred
Patents.
Charles P. Steinmetz, chief expert at the Schenectady Electrical Works, was born in Breslau, Germany. Though he is only forty years old, he has already taken out more than one hundred patents for electrical devices, and some of these are of immense value.
His father was a railroad employee, and on German railroads the pay is small and the duties exacting. But the father managed to send his son to the University of Breslau, and here he distinguished himself in mathematics and chemistry, and spent his leisure time in chemical and mechanical experiments at home.
At that time the German government was making an effort to stamp out socialism, and laws of unusual severity were passed against those who advocated it. Bismarck, who headed the anti-socialist movement, saw to it that the laws were vigorously enforced. The natural result was a reaction against the conduct of the government, and the universities became permeated with socialism.
Steinmetz, then a boy of seventeen, was drawn into the work of socialistic agitation, and he became the editor of a paper during a period when the real editor was in prison for lèse majesté.
The paper was finally suppressed, and Steinmetz's connection with it was reported to the university authorities. Then he received information that a warrant was out for his arrest and he fled to Zurich, Switzerland. Here he supported himself by tutoring, and by writing for electrical magazines and for a daily paper.
The articles for the daily paper paid him two dollars a week. His income was pitifully small, but he managed to save a few dollars, and, meeting with a young American from San Francisco, he decided to relinquish his ambition to become a professor of mathematics in some German university. He then emigrated to America.