Electrical engineer and socialist Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865–1923), born in Breslau, Germany, on April 9, was a public figure of the Progressive Era who tried to engineer a better society by creating an early code of engineering ethics, running for political office, and advocating a technocratic form of socialism. He died on October 26 in Schenectady, New York.

Trained in mathematics and physics, Steinmetz emigrated to the United States in 1889 to avoid being arrested for his socialist activities as a student in Germany. He became a leading researcher in the areas of magnetic hysteresis (a property of the metal cores used in transformers and electrical machines) and theories of alternating currents, electrical machinery, and high-voltage transmission lines. As chief consulting engineer of the newly formed General Electric Company (GE), which he joined in 1893, Steinmetz trained a generation of engineers in the use of advanced mathematics to design electrical equipment...