George Westinghouse

George Westinghouse: The Man Who Made Electricity Safe

He was twenty-three when he stood in Pittsburgh in 1869 and demonstrated a way to stop a train. Until then brakemen ran along the catwalks of moving carriages turning wheels by hand, thousands were killed or maimed every year, and no train could safely exceed ten cars. George Westinghouse's compressed-air brake ended that — and it was only the first of 360 patents and 61 companies. Two decades later he would beat Thomas Edison in the argument that decided how the modern world would be wired.

A Boy in the Machine Shop

Westinghouse was born on 6 October 1846 in Central Bridge, New York, to Emeline Vedder and George Westinghouse Sr., a farmer who also ran a machine shop. The family name had been Wistinghausen before the emigration from Westphalia by way of England.

He tried to enlist at fourteen when the Civil War broke out and was stopped by his father. In June 1863 his parents relented: he served in the 12th New York National Guard, then the 16th New York Cavalry, reaching corporal, and after an honourable discharge that November joined the Union Navy as an acting third assistant engineer aboard USS Muscoota and USS Stars and Stripes, blockading Southern ports until August 1865. He enrolled at Union College in Schenectady afterwards and dropped out during his first term, bored. His real education was his father's workshop, and at nineteen he had his first patent, for a rotary steam engine. At twenty-one came a car replacer for rerailing derailed cars and a reversible rail "frog" for switching trains between tracks.

The Air Brake

The idea that made him arrived after he witnessed a collision in which two engineers saw each other coming and could do nothing. His first system put a compressor and reservoir on the locomotive and ran a single air line the length of the train, so brakes could be applied everywhere at once. It worked — and it was fatally vulnerable, because a ruptured line meant no brakes at all.

Over the following two years Westinghouse inverted the logic, and this is the move that marks him out. He redesigned the valves so that constant line pressure held the brakes *off*, with a reservoir on every individual car. Now any break in the line — any failure of the system whatsoever — caused the train to stop by itself. As the Library of Congress puts it, the invention "enabled trains to be stopped with fail-safe accuracy." He founded the Westinghouse Air Brake Company in July 1869; the principle he arrived at governs railway braking to this day.

He kept going in the same direction. Signals were oil lamps and switching was manual, so in May 1881 he founded Union Switch & Signal to build automated railway signalling and interlocking, eventually adopted worldwide.

Gas, and an Explosion on the Lawn

In 1883 gas discoveries near Murrysville drew his attention and he drilled on his own Pittsburgh estate, Solitude. Early on the morning of 21 May 1884 the drill struck gas at 1,500 feet and blew the top off the derrick; it took him a week to invent a way to cap it. He then built the distribution business around it, acquiring a dormant charter for the Philadelphia Company and developing more than thirty gas patents in three years. By 1886 it held 58 wells and 184 miles of pipe; by 1887 it served over 12,000 homes and 582 industrial customers. Its descendants include Equitable Gas and Duquesne Light.

The War of the Currents

Westinghouse began in 1884 building his own direct-current lighting system, hiring the physicist William Stanley. Then in 1885 he learned of the Gaulard-Gibbs transformer, which could step alternating-current voltage up for transmission and down again for use — the trick that frees a power station from Edison's roughly one-mile radius. He imported transformers and a Siemens alternator for experiments in Pittsburgh; Stanley, with Albert Schmid and Oliver Shallenberger, turned the Gaulard-Gibbs device into the first genuinely practical, manufacturable transformer. In 1886 Stanley installed a multiple-voltage AC system at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and Westinghouse founded the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company. Within a year thirty more systems followed. By the end of 1887 he was running 68 AC stations against Edison's 121 DC stations built over seven years.

Edison's camp fought back on the ground of fear, campaigning to convince the public that high-voltage AC was lethal and pressing for Westinghouse alternators to power New York's new electric chair. Westinghouse hired the era's finest lawyer to defend William Kemmler, the first man condemned to it, and lost. The technical argument, however, he won: in 1892 J. P. Morgan forced Edison General Electric onto AC and pushed Edison out of his own company.

The decisive assets came from Nikola Tesla, whose brushless induction motor and polyphase distribution patents Westinghouse acquired, completing an integrated AC system his engineers branded the Tesla Polyphase System. Benjamin Lamme, assisted by his sister Bertha Lamme Feicht, made the motor efficient by early 1893. That May, Westinghouse Electric underbid General Electric to light the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago — designing new lamps on Sawyer-Man patents to avoid infringing Edison's — and demonstrated a whole integrated AC system, safe and working, to the American public. The Niagara Falls contract followed in 1895: ten 5,000-horsepower, 25-Hz generators that ran until the plant closed in 1961.

The Employer

In June 1881 Westinghouse became the first major American industrialist to institute a five-and-a-half-day week, making Saturday a half-holiday. He built the planned town of Wilmerding, where workers' houses had running water, electricity, gas and gardens, and ownership was arranged through salary deduction; his firms offered pensions, insurance, and well-lit ventilated factories with medical facilities, in a city otherwise defined by the steel mills. Unlike Edison, who put his own name on his companies' patents, Westinghouse let his engineers keep their names on theirs, regarding it as a matter of dignity. His workers called him "the Old Man." He opposed unions and broke his single strike, at Westinghouse Machine Company in 1903, by hiring replacements — yet Samuel Gompers is reported to have said that if all employers treated their men as he did, the American Federation of Labor would have to go out of existence.

Why George Is Called a Genius

Westinghouse's distinctive quality was systems thinking under the assumption of failure. The air brake is the purest instance: he did not merely make brakes work, he redesigned them so that the *absence* of everything working — a snapped hose, a lost coupling — produced safety rather than catastrophe. That inversion, fail-safe design, is now a foundational principle of engineering, and he arrived at it in his early twenties. The same instinct runs through his electrical work, where his real contribution was not any single device but the assembly of transformer, alternator, meter, lamp and Tesla's motor into one coherent system that could be sold, installed and trusted. Tesla, not a generous judge of men, said in 1938 that Westinghouse "was, in my opinion, the only man on this globe who could take my alternating-current system under the circumstances then existing and win the battle against prejudice and money power."

The honest counter-case is that much of what he is credited with, he bought. The transformer was Gaulard and Gibbs's, improved by Stanley; the motor and polyphase patents were Tesla's; the steam turbine rights were Parsons's, purchased in 1895. His gift was judgement and integration rather than singular original discovery, and he needed first-rate people around him — Stanley, Shallenberger, Lamme — to realise it. He was also not infallible: his Arizona copper venture failed outright. What is not disputed is the 360 patents in his own name, from the 1865 rotary engine to automatic train control in 1918, awarded four years after his death.

Loss and Legacy

The Panic of 1907 cost Westinghouse control of his own electric company; by 1911 he was out of business altogether and his health was failing. He died in New York on 12 March 1914, aged sixty-seven, and was moved in December 1915 to Arlington National Cemetery as a Civil War veteran. Marguerite, his wife of forty-seven years, survived him by three months.

His honours were international and unusually early: the Order of Leopold from Belgium (1884), the Order of the Royal Crown of Italy, France's Legion of Honour (1895), the John Fritz Medal (1905), the presidency of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (1910), the Edison Medal (1911) — an irony he presumably enjoyed — and Germany's Grashof Medal in 1913, the first ever given to an American. Pittsburgh answered with a memorial in Schenley Park and a bridge in his name; the National Inventors Hall of Fame inducted him in 1989. Every time a train stops safely, the argument he settled stays settled.

Achievements

• National Inventors Hall of Fame — 1989
• Educated at Union College
• Worked as entrepreneur and inventor