Bob writes:

> The engineer reluctantly took the challenge. He spent a day studying the
huge
>  machine. At the end of the day, he marked a small "x" in chalk on a
>  component of the machine and proudly stated, "This is where your problem
is."
>
>  The part was replaced and the machine worked perfectly again.
>  The company received a bill for $50,000 from the engineer for his service.
> They
>  demanded an itemized accounting of his charges.
>  The engineer responded briefly:
>  One chalk mark                 $1
>  Knowing where to put it   $49,999

This seems to be my day for heaping trivia on top of trivia.

Actually, the story is true (but a little inflated). The engineer was Charles
P. Steinmetz, a mathematical genius and electrical engineer. He had just
signed on with the General Electric company in Schnectady, NY, where GE was
installing its newest, largest alternating-current dynamos. I don't specially
remember the date, but I'm going to guess that it was just about a hundred
years ago, in 1895-1899.

When GE when to turn on one of the newly manufactured large dynamos, it's
power output was wildly low -- and was getting very hot internally. It was
clear that there was something significantly wrong with the stator windings.
Opening up the case to correct the problem was going to be a massively
expensive process. Indeed, it might have been best just to scrap the dynamo
altogether. As a last resort, GE asked Charles Steinmetz to see if he could
deduce where the problem lay. Steinmetz moved a cot next to the dynamo and
worked, ate, and slept next to the machine for several days. From the phasor
angles of the dynamo's output and simple physics, he eventually calculated
where the exact location of the short in the windings had to be. When they
torched open the casing, they found he was exactly correct.

Steinmetz then sent GE a bill for $10,000. When GE objected and wanted an
itemized billing, he wrote back: $1 for chalk to mark the dynamo casing,
$9,999 knowing where to mark."

I looked around on the web for just a very brief time, but I couldn't find an
authorative page recounting the story, but there is this:

     http://www.wkkf.org/Resources/Speeches/1295.htm

However, the story is part and parcel of the lore of every electrical (power)
engineering curriculum and it is recounted in universities everywhere
religiously.

Wirt Atmar