George Westinghouse

George Westinghouse Jr. was born on October 6, 1846, in the village of Central Bridge in Schoharie County, New York, the eighth of ten children of George Westinghouse Sr. and Emeline Vedder. His father built and sold agricultural machinery, and in 1856 the family moved to Schenectady, where the elder Westinghouse opened a shop making threshing machines and small steam engines ^[2]. The boy spent his free hours among lathes and forges, and by his early teens he was earning wages in his father's works. School bored him; machinery did not.

The Civil War interrupted this apprenticeship. Westinghouse enlisted in the Union cause at fifteen, was sent home because of his age, and returned in 1863 to serve as a cavalryman in the 16th New York Cavalry. In December 1864 he transferred to the Navy, serving as an acting third assistant engineer aboard the gunboat Muscoota until the war ended ^[3]. The naval posting gave him daily responsibility for working steam machinery, experience that proved more useful than any classroom.

After his discharge he enrolled at Union College in Schenectady, but he left during his first year. Formal study held little appeal for a young man who had already filed for his first patent, a rotary steam engine, granted in 1865 when he was nineteen ^[1]. He went back to the family shop and began looking for problems worth solving.

Railroads supplied those problems. After witnessing the slow work of returning a derailed freight car to the track, Westinghouse designed a car replacer, a cast device that guided wheels back onto the rails, and followed it with an improved reversible frog for track crossings made of durable cast steel ^[2]. Selling these inventions took him across the Northeast and taught him the commercial side of engineering: negotiating licenses, protecting patents, and reading what railroad managers actually needed.

What they needed most was a way to stop trains. In the 1860s brakemen ran along the car roofs turning hand wheels on each car in response to whistle signals, a system that was slow, imprecise, and lethal to the men who worked it. Westinghouse read an account of compressed air driving rock drills in the Mont Cenis tunnel through the Alps and saw that air piped along a train could apply every brake at once from the locomotive ^[3]. He patented his straight air brake in April 1869, at twenty-two, and organized the Westinghouse Air Brake Company in Pittsburgh that July ^[1].

A trial run on the Panhandle Railroad near Pittsburgh made the case dramatically when the equipped train stopped short of a wagon stalled on the track. Orders followed, and Westinghouse kept improving the design, most importantly with the automatic brake of 1872, which applied itself if a train broke apart or the air line failed ^[4]. The fail-safe principle embodied in that device became a foundation of railway engineering worldwide.

The air brake alone would have secured his reputation. Congress reinforced its adoption with the Railroad Safety Appliance Act of 1893, which required air brakes and automatic couplers on American trains, and accident rates among railroad workers fell sharply in the years that followed ^[4]. Westinghouse extended his railway work through the Union Switch and Signal Company, founded in 1881, which combined electrical and compressed air technology to interlock switches and signals so that conflicting train movements became mechanically impossible ^[3].

His boldest venture began in the mid 1880s, when he concluded that alternating current, which could be raised to high voltage for cheap long-distance transmission and lowered again for safe local use, would beat Thomas Edison's low-voltage direct current system. He purchased rights to the Gaulard-Gibbs transformer from Europe, set his engineers to improving it, and formed the Westinghouse Electric Company in 1886 ^[5]. Two years later he bought Nikola Tesla's patents for the polyphase induction motor and hired Tesla to help adapt the system, giving alternating current a practical motor and completing the technical argument ^[5].

Edison's camp answered with a publicity campaign portraying alternating current as a killer, a fight remembered as the war of the currents. Westinghouse won it in public view. His company underbid General Electric to light the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 with roughly a quarter of a million lamps, and in 1895 Westinghouse generators at Niagara Falls began delivering power that soon reached Buffalo, more than twenty miles away ^[5]. He also pioneered elsewhere: in the mid 1880s he developed a system for piping natural gas safely into Pittsburgh homes and factories, patenting control and metering equipment that made wide distribution practical, and late in life he acquired American rights to the Parsons steam turbine and pushed turbine-driven generation into central power stations ^[1]. Across his career he received more than 360 patents ^[7].

Westinghouse met Marguerite Erskine Walker on a train in 1867 and married her within months. The marriage lasted forty-seven years, until his death, and produced one son, George Westinghouse III ^[2]. The couple made their principal home at Solitude in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh, where Westinghouse drilled a natural gas well on his own lawn during his experiments with gas distribution, and they later built Erskine Park, a summer estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, which he equipped as a private proving ground for electric lighting ^[3].

Contemporaries described a large, direct, physically vigorous man who preferred the drafting table to the banquet hall. He gave few speeches, avoided reporters, and conducted business face to face. His treatment of employees drew notice in an age of industrial violence: his companies were early adopters of the Saturday half holiday in 1871, and he later introduced pension and relief programs for his workers ^[4]. Friction with organized labor still occurred, but Westinghouse never faced anything like the hatred directed at some of his Pittsburgh neighbors in industry.

Expansion on borrowed money left his electric company exposed, and the financial panic of 1907 forced Westinghouse Electric into receivership. When the company was reorganized, bankers and creditors took control, and by 1911 Westinghouse had severed his active connection with the enterprise that carried his name ^[1]. He remained wealthy through the air brake and other holdings, but the loss of his electrical company wounded him deeply.

Honors arrived as his health declined. The American Institute of Electrical Engineers awarded him the Edison Medal in 1911, a distinction named for his old rival, citing his work in developing the alternating current system ^[7]. He served on a federal commission and continued filing patent applications, working latterly on a compressed air spring for automobiles even as heart disease confined him to a wheelchair.

George Westinghouse died in New York City on March 12, 1914, at sixty-seven ^[8]. Marguerite followed him within three months. Because of his Civil War naval service, both were later reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery ^[3].

Anyone asking who was George Westinghouse can find the answer in two everyday facts: trains stop reliably, and electricity travels hundreds of miles from generator to lamp. The automatic air brake and the alternating current grid, the achievements at the center of any George Westinghouse biography, remain in service in recognizably similar form more than a century after his death ^[1]. Tesla, whose patents he backed when other financiers hesitated, credited him with the courage to carry polyphase power through ridicule and panic to commercial success ^[5].

His institutional legacy proved durable as well. Westinghouse Air Brake continued as Wabtec, Union Switch and Signal shaped railway signaling for generations, and Westinghouse Electric built everything from radio station KDKA to nuclear reactors through the twentieth century. In 1930 some fifty-five thousand employees contributed to a memorial to him in Pittsburgh's Schenley Park, an unusual tribute from workers to an employer ^[6]. He was elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1955 and inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989 ^[7]. Among George Westinghouse facts, one figure serves as a fair summary of the man: a patent record spanning almost five decades, begun at nineteen and continued nearly to his deathbed.