U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [139]
-324-They drank several mint juleps and Mac didn't say anything about going back to America.
He asked Salvador where his friend, the chief of police, was but Salvador didn't hear him. Then Mac said to
Concha suppose he went back to America without her, but she said he was only joking. She said she liked Vera Cruz and would like to live there. Salvador said that great days for Mexico were coming, that he was going back up the next day. That night they al ate supper at Concha's sis-ter's house. Mac furnished the cognac. They al drank to the workers, to the tradeunions, to the partido laborista, to the social revolution and the agraristas.
Next morning Mac woke up early with a slight head-ache. He slipped out of the house alone and walked out along the breakwater. He was beginning to think it was sil y to give up his bookstore like that. He went to the Ward Line office and took his ticket back. The clerk re-funded him the money and he got back to Concha's sis-ter's house in time to have chocolate and pastry with them for breakfast.
PROTEUS
Steinmetz was a hunchback,
son of a hunchback lithographer.
He was born in Breslau in eighteen sixtyfive,
graduated with highest honors at seventeen from the Breslau Gymnasium, went to the University of Breslau to study mathematics;
mathematics to Steinmetz was muscular strength
and long walks over the hil s and the kiss of a girl in love and big evenings spent swil ing beer with your friends;
on his broken back he felt the topheavy weight
-325-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 cal ed The People's Voice. Bismarck was sitting in Berlin like a big paper-weight to keep the new Germany feudal, to hold down the empire for his bosses the Hohenzol erns.
Steinmetz had to run off to Zurich for fear of
going to jail; at Zurich his mathematics woke up al the professors at the Polytechnic; but Europe in the eighties was no place for a pen-niless German student with a broken back and a big head fil ed 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 steer-age on an old French line boat La Champagne, lived in Brooklyn at first and commuted to Yon-kers where he had a twelvedol ar 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 elec-trical 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 metal ic 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 pos-sible al the transformers that crouch in little boxes and gableroofed houses in al the hightension lines al over
-326-everywhere. The mathematical symbols of Stein-metz's law are the patterns of al transformers every-where. 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. Al 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 so-cialist, let him keep a greenhouseful of cactuses lit up by mercury lights, let him have al igators, 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