Roy Buzdor writes:

> Well, you are close, Wirt. ...
>
>  From what I remember of the story, it was Steinmetz, but the
>  company was Ford, not GE.  Henry Ford had hired Steinmetz to
>  wire his plant.  Steinmetz, being a DC enthusiast, designed
>  the dynamos as well as the wiring.  When the system broke,
>  Ford found that none of his engineers could fix it.  He called
>  Steinmetz in on a consult, and after listening to the staff
>  describe the problem, he worked for half an hour and fixed it.
>  He submitted a bill for $10,000.  Ford rejected a bill that
>  high for "half and hour of tinkering", and asked Steinmetz to
>  itemize the bill and resubmit it.  Steinmetz itemized it as:
>
>          Half an hour of tinkering           $50.00
>          Knowing where to tinker          $9,950.00
>                                          ----------
>          Total                           $10,000.00

Ahhh, a challenge... :-)

Nick Demos called this story an "urban legend" a little while ago, but it's
more than that. In its present state in this thread, the way that I related
the story earlier, it's technically known as apocrypha (meaning "hidden away"
in Greek). Apocrypha are stories, literature or history that are not
completely authenticated, but are generally believed to be true. They may
indeed be true, but they cannot be absolutely verified to be so.

There are people on this planet that have a solemn duty to retell stories as
faithfully and as accurately as they possibly can. Most times, these people
are in universities. But there are stories that are so good and so
appropriate to a field of study that they are retold countless times. In the
process, they sometimes get very slightly mutated, even when there are
safeguards in place to ward off intentional exaggeration or alteration of the
stories. But what truly happens to a story, once it becomes extremely
popular, is that it becomes difficult to track down to its original source --
and that's where its authenticity begins to become questioned. Apocrypha
might be best described as "high-class urban legends" that you can almost bet
your boots on.

In whole-organism biology, one of the most famous apocryphal stories is
related to JBS Haldane, one of the founders of modern genetics. It is
commonly related that Haldane was at a meeting in England with clergymen. A
theologian asked Haldane, who was quite famous at the time, what had he
learned from his stuides of natural history about God? Haldane quipped, "That
He had an inordinate fondness of beetles."

This story is apocryphal now in the sense that the clergyman's name and rank
has now been forgotten -- and no one of course wrote the dialog down at the
time. Nonetheless, it is generally believed to be true because it "sounds"
like Haldane, who was a very quick wit -- and because the statement is true:
50 to 70% of all of species on the planet are beetles.

The story is now such that if you go to Altavista and type in the phrase
"inordinate fondness" (with quotes), you'll find hundreds of sites somehow
related to this story. However, in this case, it is possible to trace the
story back to its first publication in a scholarly journal. Its publication
was in "American Naturalist," authored by GE Hutchinson, a person of
impeccable academic credentials. The 1959 paper is famous and has been put up
on the web:

     http://oz.plymouth.edu/~lts/ecology/santarosalia.html

Every field of study has its apocrypha. For the Judeo-Christian bible, the
books of the Bible that are sometimes included and sometimes rejected are
called the Apocrypha, broken into two pieces, the Old Testament and the New
Testament Apocrypha. The OT Apocrypha were part of the original King James
1611 version of the Bible and tend to be still included in the Roman Catholic
and Eastern Orthodox Bibles, although almost no Protestant bible carries
them. These OT Apocrypha are present on the University of Virginia's very
nice Electronic Text Center website:

     http://etext.virginia.edu/kjv.browse.html

The New Testament has even more apocrypha. Additional books of the New
Testament were being written from the time of Christ well into the
1200-1300's. All of this material is "non-canonized" (meaning it's not
included in a standard Bible) and some of it is outrightly rejected as
religious "urban legends," not only non-authenticatible, but also plainly
wrong. But some of it is held in sufficiently high regard that it is used as
background material to the common books of the New Testament. A short article
on the NT Apocrypha is at:

     http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_sd/ntapocr.html

If all of the NT Apocrypha were included in the New Testament, its volume
would be at least double its current size, depending on where you draw the
line.

As to the Steinmetz story, I said earlier that I could find no authoritative
site on the web that I would trust. However, I did relate one graduation
speech from an electrical engineering professor at Cal Poly. And there are
these sites that tell essentially the same story:

     http://www.mindsite.com/pdq/articles.html

     http://www.swcp.com/info/essays/tellstory.htm

the first of which is related by someone from Harvard. These versions are
very similar to the one that I told, the primary difference being that I had
Steinmetz sleeping on a cot next to the dynamo for a few days. I am more sure
that my version is true. I taught power engineering (and that was more
enjoyable than I ever initially imagined it would be) for a few years during
my ten years as a professor of electrical engineering. In the student lounge,
right across from my office, was a picture of Steinmetz, the dynamo in
question, and the cot he slept on, with a caption relating the story.

There used to be someone from Union College in Schenectady, NY that use to
post frequently to this list. If anyone should be able to track down the
accuracy of this story, it is the librarian/historians of Union College. I
have no doubt that they have a sizable exhibit on Steinmetz and his work at
General Electric.

During my search again for Steinmetz sites this evening, I did find a
particularly interesting website belonging to the Yokogawa Company in Japan.
Yokogawa was intimately associated with HP (and may still be) during much of
the time that I used HP's instrumentation.

     http://www.yokogawa.co.jp/Information/Museum/MU_HP_E.HTM

While the lead story concerns the passing of David Packard, his work and
those of Edison, Steinmetz, Thomas, and others appears further down the page.
Similarly, Steinmetz figures so highly in the history of General Electric
that they divide their history into the "Edison Era", followed on directly by
the "Steinmetz Era":

     http://www.ge.com/ibhis0.htm

Wirt Atmar