If my memory is still functioning, Paul Harvey told this story on several
different occasions in his "The Rest of the Story" stories.

L.A.Barnes

Wirt Atmar wrote:

> 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