on his broken back he felt the topheavy weight of society the way workingmen felt it on their straight backs, the way poor students felt it, was a member of a socialist club, editor of a paper called The People’s Voice.
Bismarck was sitting in Berlin like a big paperweight to keep the new Germany feudal, to hold down the empire for his bosses the Hohenzollerns.
Steinmetz had to run off to Zurich for fear of going to jail; at Zurich his mathematics woke up all the professors at the Polytechnic;
but Europe in the eighties was no place for a penniless German student with a broken back and a big head filled with symbolic calculus and wonder about electricity that is mathematics made power
and a socialist at that.
With a Danish friend he sailed for America steerage on an old French line boat La Champagne,
lived in Brooklyn at first and commuted to Yonkers where he had a twelvedollar a week job with Rudolph Eichemeyer who was a German exile from fortyeight an inventor and electrician and owner of a factory where he made hatmaking machinery and electrical generators.
In Yonkers he worked out the theory of the Third Harmonics
and the law of hysteresis which states in a formula the hundredfold relations between the metallic heat, density, frequency when the poles change places in the core of a magnet under an alternating current.
It is Steinmetz’s law of hysteresis that makes possible all the transformers that crouch in little boxes and gableroofed houses in all the hightension lines all over everywhere. The mathematical symbols of Steinmetz’s law are the patterns of all transformers everywhere.
In eighteen ninetytwo when Eichemeyer sold out to the corporation that was to form General Electric, Steinmetz was entered in the contract along with other valuable apparatus. All his life Steinmetz was a piece of apparatus belonging to General Electric.
First his laboratory was at Lynn, then it was moved and the little hunchback with it to Schenectady, the electric city.
General Electric humored him, let him be a socialist, let him keep a greenhouseful of cactuses lit up by mercury lights, let him have alligators, talking crows and a gila monster for pets and the publicity department talked up the wizard, the medicine man who knew the symbols that opened up the doors of Ali Baba’s cave.
Steinmetz jotted a formula on his cuff and next morning a thousand new powerplants had sprung up and the dynamos sang dollars and the silence of the transformers was all dollars,
and the publicity department poured oily stories into the ears of the American public every Sunday and Steinmetz became the little parlor magician,
who made a toy thunderstorm in his laboratory and made all the toy trains run on time and the meat stay cold in the icebox and the lamp in the parlor and the great lighthouses and the searchlights and the revolving beams of light that guide airplanes at night towards Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Los Angeles,
and they let him be a socialist and believe that human society could be improved the way you can improve a dynamo and they let him be pro-German and write a letter offering his services to Lenin because mathematicians are so impractical who make up formulas by which you can build powerplants, factories, subway systems, light, heat, air, sunshine but not human relations that affect the stockholders’ money and the directors’ salaries.
Steinmetz was a famous magician and he talked to Edison tapping with the Morse code on Edison’s knee
because Edison was so very deaf
and he went out West
to make speeches that nobody understood
and he talked to Bryan about God on a railroad train
and all the reporters stood round while he and Einstein
met face to face,
but they couldn’t catch what they said
and Steinmetz was the most valuable piece of apparatus General Electric had
until he wore out and died.
Janey
The trip to Mexico and the private car the Mexican government put at the disposal of J. Ward Moorehouse to go back north in was lovely but a little tiresome, and it was so dusty going across the desert. Janey bought some very pretty things so cheap, some turquoise jewelry and pink onyx to take home to Alice and her mother and sisters as presents. Going up in the private car J. Ward kept her busy dictating and there was a big bunch of men always drinking and smoking cigars and laughing at smutty stories in the smokingroom or on the observation platform. One of them was that man Barrow she’d done some work for in Washington. He always stopped to talk to her now and she didn’t like the way his eyes were when he stood over her table talking to her, still he was an interesting man and quite different from what she’d imagined a laborleader would be like, and it amused her to think that she knew about Queenie and how startled he’d be if he knew she knew. She kidded him a good deal and she thought maybe he was getting a crush on her, but he was the sort of man who’d be like that with any woman.
They didn’t have a private car after Laredo and the trip wasn’t so nice. They went straight through to New York. She had a lower in a different car from J. Ward and his friends, and in the upper berth there was a young fellow she took quite a fancy to. His name was Buck Saunders and he was from the panhandle of Texas and talked with the funniest drawl. He’d punched cows and worked in the Oklahoma oilfields and had saved up some money and was going to see Washington City. He was tickled to death when she said she was from Washington and she told him all about what he ought to see, the Capitol and the White House and the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and the Old Soldiers’ Home and Mount Vernon. She said to be sure to go out to Great Falls and told him about canoeing on the canal and how she’d been caught in a terrible thunderstorm once near Cabin John’s Bridge. They ate several meals together in the dining car and he told her she was a dandy girl and awful easy to talk to and how he had a girl in Tulsa, Ok., and how he was going to get a job in Venezuela, down at Maracaibo in the oilfields because she’d thrown him over to marry a rich dirtfarmer who struck oil in his cowpasture. G. H. Barrow kidded Janey about her fine handsome pickup and she said what about him and the redheaded lady who got off in St. Louis, and they laughed and she felt quite devilish and that G. H. Barrow wasn’t so bad after all. When Buck got off the train in Washington he gave her a snapshot of himself taken beside an oilderrick and said he’d write her every day and would come to New York to see her if she’d let him, but she never heard from him.
She liked Morton, the cockney valet, too, because he always spoke to her so respectfully. Every morning he’d come and report on how J. Ward was feeling, “’E looks pretty black this mornin’, Miss Williams,” or, “’E was whistlin’ while ’e was shavin’. Is ’e feelin’ good? Rath-er.”
When they got to the Pennsylvania Station, New York, she had to stay with Morton to see that the box of files was sent to the office at 100 Fifth Avenue and not out to Long Island where J. Ward’s home was. She saw Morton off in a Pierce Arrow that had come all the way in from Great Neck to get the baggage, and went alone to the office in a taxicab with her typewriter and the papers and files. She felt scared and excited looking out of the taxicab window at the tall white buildings and the round watertanks against the sky and the puffs of steam way up and the sidewalks crowded with people and all the taxicabs and trucks and the shine and jostle and clatter. She wondered where she’d get a room to live, and how she’d find friends and where she’d eat. It seemed terribly scary being all alone in the big city like that and she wondered that she’d had the nerve to come. She decided she’d try to find Alice a job and that they’d take an apartment together, but where would she go tonight?