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The Inspiring Feats of Charles Steinmetz, the “Engineer’s Engineer”
- mindcrime 5y agoEverybody has their "celebrity heroes" of science & engineering I suppose. For some it's Nikola Tesla, for others maybe Thomas Edison, Alan Turing, Charles Babbage, Richard Feyman, Albert Einstein, whoever. For me, my first "celebrity hero" was Charles Proteus Steinmetz. I somehow stumbled across a biography of him in the library at my high-school, and was just totally enamored with Steinmetz. As I recall, there was a story about how we went out boating or something once, and decided to scribble out some calculations while he was out there. To his dismay he realized he'd left his log tables back at the office. Somehow he sent a message to someone to fetch them for him... and by the time they got back, he'd worked out all the log tables by hand and gotten back to work on whatever it was he was working on. Definitely an "engineer's engineer". And for what it's worth, my second "celebrity hero" was Nikola Tesla. I wonder if the two ever met? Something like that would probably make for an interesting "alternate history" novel, or an episode of Doctor Who.