In what year did Charles Proteus Steinmetz fix Ford's Generator for the famed $10,000 invoice?

Question

[Charles Proteus Steinmetz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Proteus_Steinmetz) is the protagonist of an interesting tale [about fixing a generator at Ford's plant](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinmetz-the-wizard-of-schenectady-51912022/). Unfortunately the Smithsonian Magazine does not state the year in which the incident happened. Some googling around also did not reveal the date. 1. In what year did it happen? 1. How much the $10,000 invoice would cost in February 2018 figures?

Answer 1

Well, the only source for this story is a letter that was published in Life magazine in 1965 and no date was mentioned. There is an entirely different version of the story however that said it didn't happen at Ford at all, but at General Electric. See here...

https://edisontechcenter.org/CharlesProteusSteinmetz.html

Since GE was where Steinmetz spent almost all his career, and they were in the business of building and maintaining generators, this is the higher probability source of the story, and not Ford. It is on record that Ford indeed hired Steinmetz to solve a problem, but it was to fix an issue with headlights in Ford automobiles, and not a generator, and that makes more sense too.

The story is mostly thought of as apocryphal, as many people have borrowed it and changed the circumstances, It can be applied to any expert throughout history. You can still see it popping up on Facebook as an anonymous meme, and is also still used by people in the Union-based trades today as a pride-based tout to the competency of their work.