John Dos Passos died last September, much to the sorrow of this magazine, to which he had contributed frequently in recent years. He had turned from the novel to formal history, but in his youth he had already shown a great flair for bringing the past to life in idiosyncratic "prose poems," of which the following is a fine example.
     --The Editors

   Steinmetz was a hunchback,
the son of a hunchback lithographer.

He was born in Breslau in eighteen sixty-five, 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 hills and the kiss of a girl in love and big evenings spent swilling beer with your friends;

on his broken back he felt the top-heavy weight 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 called The People’s Voice.

   Bismarck was sitting in Berlin like a big paperweight to keep the new Germany feudal, to hold down the empire for his bosses the Hohenzollerns.
   
Steinmetz had to run off to Zurich for fear of going to jail; at Zurich his mathematics woke up all the professors at the Polytechnic;
   but Europe in the eighties was no place for a penniless German student with a broken back and a big head filled 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 steerage on an old French line boat La Champagne,
   lived in Brooklyn at first and commuted to Yonkers where he had a twelve-dollar a week job with Rudolph Eichemeyer who was a German exile from forty-eight an inventor and electrician and owner of a factory where he made hat-making machinery and electrical 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 metallic 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 possible all the transformers that crouch in little boxes and gable-roofed houses in all the high-tension lines all over everywhere.
The mathematical symbols of Steinmetz’s law are the patterns of all transformers everywhere.

In eighteen ninety-two when Eichemeyer sold out to the corporation that was to form General Electric, Steinmetz was entered in the contract along with other valuable apparatus. All his life Steinmetz was a piece of apparatus belonging to General Electric. First his laboratory