Images of an Engineer

I enjoy reading Henry Petroski. In Remaking the World, Petroski relates the story of a friend of a friend who nicknamed him “Steinmetz.” This friend was referring to Charles Steinmetz. The parents of this friend, who himself was inclined toward business and politics and not at all toward science and technology, believed that Steinmetz was “the embodiment of American engineering.”

Karl August Rudolf Steinmetz was born in Breslau, Germany in 1865. He earned a doctorate in mathematics, and immigrated to America in 1889. He joined the General Electric Company, and drew upon his strong mathematical physics background to solve practical problems for which he brought patents for GE. In addition to his employment with GE, Steinmetz joined the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, and published papers that showed that he was in the forefront of his field. One of his many contributions to electrical engineering was the hysteresis loss law that is used to calculate power loss in transformers. He was also the one who introduced and developed the use of complex numbers for calculations involving alternating current (AC). (I was personally surprised to know that he was the first person who introduced it, as this is a powerful tool in electrical engineering for people who are familiar with the field.)

Aside from his ingenuity, Steinmetz was an eccentric person; the combination of the two characteristics made it easy to his mention in the newspapers and popular magazines. GE’s public relations department helped also with this publicity and promoted him as the first who generated the power of lightning in the laboratory as “the very personification of modern electrical development.” Petrsoki commented on this popularity that it gave “the cold, abstract, and sometimes feared new technology a human embodiment.”

With this publicity, lots of photos of Steinmetz in different life arenas were distributed. One of the most famous ones is this picture of him with Albert Einstein. I would like to quote Petrsoki’s comment on this picture:



“The father of relativity stands tall, formal, and self-assured beside the short and stooping, hand-in-pocket and smoking, rumpled and scowling figure who looks to be, ambivalently, both leaning toward the famous scientist and pushing him back with an elbow … In it [Steinmetz] seems complemented only by his standing next to a Nobel laureate, as if the engineer needed a scientist to lean upon. The photograph’s semiotics reinforce the stereotype of the engineer vis-à-vis the scientist, of engineering versus science. In this picture the great engineer Steinmetz is reduced to a caricature of himself; by implication, his achievements is diminished relative to that of the giant he stands beside.

“The Einstein-Steinmetz photo is actually as false as are its implications for the relationship between science and engineering. The great scientists and the great engineer never did pose one-on-one, as they are presented in this photo.”

The photo turned to be fabricated from a group photo that was taken in the occasion of a Radio Cooperation of America-sponsored demonstration of transoceanic telegraph transmission at New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1921.



This is, however, the photo that is most popular for Steinmetz who is considered by some “the embodiment of American engineering.”

I believe this story shows how the public perceives engineers and scientists, and, somehow the relationship between engineering and science. Steinmetz was involved later in his life in a distinguished period of service on the Schenectady Board of Education.

Bibliography:
Petroski, Henry (1997). Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.