upon him the middle name "Proteus," as a testimony to his many mental angles. Anyhow, though christened Carl August Rodolf, he let all that go and took in preference the cognomen thus bestowed upon him by the university club. Throughout his life and record in America he was known only as Charles Proteus-curiously felicitous in the case of one so closely identified with the highest manifestations ever attained of the protean power he was to shape and direct for a quarter of a century.

Steinmetz entered Breslau University in 1882, when in his eighteenth year, and seems to have forged ahead rapidly in his undergraduate work. The time approached for graduation, and the thesis to be presented for his doctorate degree in philosophy had already been written and accepted. Its alluring title may be given: "On Involuntary Self-Reciprocal Correspondences in Space Which Are Defined by a ThreeDimensional Linear System of Surfaces of the Nth Order."

Adhesion to such safe lines of thought and speech would possibly have found him still at Breslau; but his insatiate reading and passion for investigation had carried him far beyond the University courses or the scientific literature in his father's little library. He had become affected by the fever of Socialism and was even editing a small Socialistic sheet, when its

boldness attracted the attention of the indignant university authorities. The paper was confiscated, several suspected students were arrested and imprisoned; and things looked very black for the ardent young editor himself, as marked man. His own arrest was imminent. But he contrived to slip stealthily over the border into Austria. Switzerland was decidedly safer than autocratic Austria. Thither he proceeded swiftly until he reached Zurich, where he resumed his studies at the famous Polytechnicum.

Possibly there came a little help from home, but at best he made a dismally scanty living with his pen and as a tutor. Here occurred the good luck-or shaping providence-that put Steinmetz in touch with a young American, Oscar Asmussen, who during his studies at the Polytechnic also fell in love with a Swiss girl. Asmussen's uncle, his guardian, a wealthy Californian, was very angry when the news reached him, and ordered Oscar to return to the United States immediately. There must have existed a strong friendship between the two youths, for Oscar at once, as he decided reluctantly to start homeward, offered to defray the expenses of the trip also for Steinmetz. This only meant passage in the steerage, but it sufficed.

As for the little political exile, he was now realising his childish game of "Going to America," and in after life, when crossing the Atlantic in the best accommo

dations available had ceased to be a novelty, he often said that the trip in the steerage was the most pleasant one he had ever had. Throughout life his simpler austere tastes were easily satisfied. When Steinmetz arrived at the port of New York on the French liner, "La Champagne," the immigration inspectors might well have been excused if they had debarred him, for in addition to his ordinary physical defects, and absolute poverty, he had a badly swollen face. The pleadings of Asmussen strongly reinforcing his own, at last made the forbidding gates of Castle Garden swing inward, and together the lads secured cheap lodgings in Brooklyn. Soon after that, Asmussen brought over his sweetheart from Switzerland, and was married. This, as very often happens, broke up the partnership, the comrades soon separated, and so far as is known never met again. Kindhearted friend, Asmussen, having played a very significant part, drops out of the story for ever. To sum it all up in the delightful comment of Steinmetz himself: "I am indebted to Prince Bismarck for the fact that I have devoted my life to the study of electricity, and also for the fact that I have done my work in the United States."

With one or two letters of introduction in his pocket to electricians in New York, Steinmetz did not find employment readily. He was a stranger in a strange land, his appearance was most unattractive, his rasp

ing, staccato English speech was detestable. But once again good luck befel him, and he met that kindly, goodnatured German-American, Rudolph Eickemeyer, a versatile inventor, manufacturer and electrical pioneer. As one of the creators of the American hatmaking industry, he had built up large works at Yonkers. But he was more notable as a marked illustration of the manner in which electrical development summoned its recruits from an endless variety of other arts and sciences in a day when there was not a single study course in electrical engineering in all America.

Quaint and tender old Eickemeyer, impressed with the weird personality and winning ways of the little German, of whom even then it might have been said, as it was later, that he had "the faculty of being entertaining always," gave him a job at $2 a day in the Osterheld & Eickemeyer drafting room, rather however to make abstruse electrical calculations than to exhibit any skill as a draftsman. It was still the day of the "direct current" for every electrical application in light, heat and power. The later period of "alternating current" utilisation with which the work and success of Steinmetz were to be so closely associated had barely begun. But even while working on direct current dynamos, motors and street cars, Steinmetz, mere supernumerary in a factory in a minor

Hudson River town, began to lead alternating current thought and discussion, and his articles published also in England and in Germany began to attract admiring comment and discussion. Out of that has since grown a whole "Steinmetz Library," nine large volumes of electrical books, steadily in demand.

He often said that it was one of the most stimulating experiences of his life, in the way of personal association, to meet in the Eickemeyer shops, the late Stephen D. Field, nephew of the Atlantic Cable hero, Cyrus W. Field, and himself an electrical pioneer of the very first order. Beginning a brilliant career as a telegraph operator in his native Berkshire Hills, Massachusetts, as early as 1868, "Steve" Field built in California two small electric motors with the idea of applying them to the operation of street cars on the steep hills of San Francisco. In that city also he used electric power, as early as 1878, to drive an elevator. A year later he filed an application for the first American patent on an electric railway energized by current from a dynamo.

In 1883, the Field and Edison railway interests were consolidated, and that same year the first American electric railway for commercial operation was opened by Field at the Chicago Railway Exposition, carrying for fare nearly 30,000 passengers to whom regular railway tickets the first electrical-were