How Paperweights Emerged from the Desk of Necessity
By Henry Petroski
Objects that keep papers from blowing around demonstrate the role that resourcefulness can play in the design process.
This Article From Issue
July-August 2016
Volume 104, Number 4
Page 216
DOI: 10.1511/2016.121.216
The electrical engineer Charles P. Steinmetz (1865–1923) was legendary as a special consultant on the staff of the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, making seminal contributions to the transmission of alternating current. He was a nonconformist who enjoyed wrestling with technical problems at his cabin located on the Mohawk River just outside the city. An iconic photo (see closing image pair, below) shows him working away in his undershirt, hunched over a makeshift desk in the form of a board set athwart the gunwales of a canoe floating on the water. Among the items on the desk-board are a box of pencils, a number of open books and reports (one of them often being the tables of logarithms upon which he relied for calculations), and the sheets of paper on which he was writing. It has been said that Steinmetz kept rocks in his canoe to weigh down the papers, although none were in use on this apparently windless day.
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