Who Was George Westinghouse? The Air Brake Inventor Who Took On Edison

George Westinghouse made trains safe with the air brake, then bet on alternating current against Edison. His life, the War of the Currents and Niagara Falls.

George Westinghouse (1846–1914) was an American inventor, engineer and industrialist based in Pittsburgh. He is remembered for two things above all: the railway air brake, which made long trains safe to stop, and his early bet on alternating current (AC), which put him in direct competition with Thomas Edison's direct current (DC) business. Over his career he received 360 patents and founded 61 companies, many of which still exist. If you know Edison and Tesla, Westinghouse is the third man in the story, and in many ways the one who turned Tesla's ideas into a working industry.

A farm-machine workshop and a Civil War teenager

Westinghouse was born on October 6, 1846, in the village of Central Bridge, New York. His father, George Westinghouse Sr., was a farmer and machine-shop owner, and the family name had been anglicized from the German Wistinghausen. As a boy he worked in his father's shop, which made farm equipment, and he showed a talent for both machinery and business.

When the Civil War began in 1861, the 14-year-old tried to run away to enlist, but his father stopped him. Two years later his parents let him join the army; he rose to corporal in a New York cavalry regiment and then served in the Union Navy as an acting third assistant engineer on the gunboat USS Muscoota. After the war he enrolled at Union College in Schenectady, lost interest and dropped out in his first term. School was not where he learned; the workshop was. He was 19 when he received his first patent, for a rotary steam engine, and at 21 he invented a "car replacer" for putting derailed railroad cars back on the track.

Why the air brake mattered

In the 1860s, trains were stopped by brakemen who ran along the tops of the cars and turned the brakes by hand, one car at a time. It was slow and dangerous work, it limited trains to about ten cars, and thousands of brakemen were killed or injured every year. Westinghouse had seen the result of a collision in which two engineers saw each other coming on the same track and still could not stop in time.

In 1869, at 23, he publicly demonstrated a braking system that used compressed air. A compressor and air tank on the locomotive fed a single pipe along the whole train, so the engineer could apply and release the brakes on every car at once. The first version had a weakness: if the pipe broke, the train lost its brakes. Over the next two years he and his engineers turned the idea inside out. Now constant air pressure held the brakes off, and any break in the line made the brakes come on automatically, so the train stopped. That principle, known today as fail-safe design, is why the invention spread to railways around the world.

He was proud of it to the end. In 1904 he said that if people one day said he had contributed something to civilization and to the safety of human life with the air brake, it would be enough. He went on to build signaling and track-switching systems and founded the Union Switch and Signal Company in 1881.

From natural gas to electricity

In 1884 Westinghouse drilled for natural gas on his own Pittsburgh estate, called Solitude. The crew struck gas at 1,500 feet and the blast blew the top off the derrick; it took him a week to find a way to cap it. He then built a business to pipe gas to homes and factories, and by 1887 his Philadelphia Company served more than 12,000 homes.

Moving gas safely through pipes led him to think about moving electricity. Edison's DC systems used low voltage, which meant a power station could only serve customers within about a mile. Transformers, developed in Europe by Lucien Gaulard and John Gibbs, could "step up" AC to high voltage for long-distance transmission and then "step it down" for homes. In 1885 Westinghouse imported several of their transformers and a Siemens generator to experiment in Pittsburgh. His engineer William Stanley improved the design, and in 1886 Stanley lit homes and shops in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, with the first multiple-voltage AC system, stepping 500 volts down to 100. The same year Westinghouse founded the company that became Westinghouse Electric.

The War of the Currents

Growth was fast. By the end of 1887 Westinghouse had 68 AC power stations, compared with 121 DC stations that Edison had built over seven years. Edison and his company answered by encouraging the public belief that high-voltage AC was deadly. Edison even suggested that a Westinghouse generator be used in New York State's new electric chair, and in 1890 the first electric chair was in fact powered by a Westinghouse AC generator. Westinghouse hired a top lawyer to defend William Kemmler, the first man sentenced to die in it, but the defense failed.

The battle was not decided by fear but by engineering and money. Westinghouse bought the rights to Nikola Tesla's AC induction motor and his polyphase patents, which gave him a key part of a complete AC system. In 1892 the financier J. P. Morgan pushed Edison's company to switch to AC and merged it with Thomson-Houston to form General Electric, which effectively ended the War of the Currents.

Chicago 1893 and Niagara Falls

In 1892 Westinghouse won the contract to light the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago with alternating current, underbidding General Electric. Because Edison's bulb was patented, he had to develop a new lamp quickly, based on the Sawyer–Man patent he had bought. The fair showed the American public that a fully integrated AC system was safe and reliable.

That success helped his company win the job of building generators at Niagara Falls. The plant opened in 1895 with ten 5,000-horsepower generators, and the station remained in operation until 1961. Long-distance AC from a great waterfall was the proof of concept for the power grid we still use.

What kind of boss was he?

Westinghouse was unusual for his time. In 1881 he became the first American industrial employer to give workers a five-and-a-half-day week, making Saturday afternoon a holiday. His company town of Wilmerding had houses with running water, gas and electricity, and his workers had a pension and insurance system. Engineers who invented things at his companies kept their names on the patents; unlike Edison, he did not put his own name on all of them. His workers privately called him "the Old Man".

He was also stubborn. When he said he was trying to build a kind of perpetual motion machine, Lord Kelvin told him it would break the laws of thermodynamics. Westinghouse answered that even if it failed, he would still have a heat pump he could patent and sell.

Losing the company, keeping the respect

The financial panic of 1907 forced him out of control of Westinghouse Electric, and by 1911 he had left business entirely. He died in New York on March 12, 1914, at 67, and as a Civil War veteran he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery; his wife Marguerite, whom he had met on a train in 1867, died three months later. Ironically, in 1911 he had received the Edison Medal for his work on the alternating current system. Tesla later said Westinghouse was the only man on earth who could have taken his AC system and won the battle against prejudice and money.

Learn with George Westinghouse: English phrases

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to put the brakes on	to slow or stop something	The bank put the brakes on his spending.
fail-safe	designed to stay safe if something breaks	The new brake was fail-safe.
to bet on something	to choose it and risk a lot on it	He bet on alternating current.
a war of words	a public argument	The two companies fought a war of words.
to win someone over	to make someone agree with you	The Chicago fair won the public over.

Try this: Write three sentences about a decision you made, using "to bet on" and "to win someone over".