George Westinghouse

George Westinghouse Jr. was born on October 6, 1846, in Central Bridge, New York, and died on March 12, 1914. He was a prolific inventor, engineer, and industrial entrepreneur who worked out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His most famous achievements are the railway air brake and early work on alternating current (AC) power distribution. Over his lifetime, he earned 360 patents and founded 61 companies, many of which are still operating.

In his youth, Westinghouse showed a knack for machinery and business. His father, a farmer and machine shop owner, gave him tasks at the family workshop, which made farm equipment like the Westinghouse Farm Engine. The family originally came from Westphalia, Germany, moved to England, and then to the United States, where the surname was anglicized from Wistinghausen. When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, the 14-year-old tried to run away and enlist, but his father stopped him. In June 1863, his parents allowed him to join the 12th Regiment of the New York National Guard and later the 16th Regiment of the New York Cavalry. He was promoted to corporal and honorably discharged in November 1863. A month later, he joined the Union Navy, serving as an Acting Third Assistant Engineer on the gunboat USS Muscoota and then on the USS Stars and Stripes, both used to blockade Southern ports. After his discharge in August 1865, he returned home and enrolled at Union College in Schenectady but dropped out during his first term. He continued honing his skills in his father’s shop. At 19, he got his first patent for a rotary steam engine. At 21, he invented a car replacer—a device to guide derailed train cars back onto the tracks—and a reversible “frog,” a rail junction piece for switching trains between tracks. In 1868, he and his wife moved to Pittsburgh to get cheaper, better steel for manufacturing his railroad frogs, and there he began developing his air brake concept.

Westinghouse’s invention of a compressed-air braking system transformed railroads worldwide. He had seen the aftermath of a collision where two engineers saw each other but couldn’t stop in time because of the existing brakes. At that time, brakemen had to run along catwalks on top of cars and apply brakes manually, a dangerous and inefficient process that limited trains to ten cars and killed thousands of brakemen each year. In 1869, at age 23, Westinghouse publicly demonstrated his new system in Pittsburgh. It used an air compressor and reservoir in the locomotive, with a single compressed-air pipe running the length of the train and flexible connections between cars. This let the engineer apply and release brakes on all cars at once. The Westinghouse Air Brake Company was chartered in July 1869. Though the system worked well—it even prevented a serious accident in front of witnesses—it wasn’t fail-safe: a rupture or disconnection in the air line left the train without brakes. Over the next two years, Westinghouse and his engineers fixed this by inverting the process. They designed valves so that constant pressure in the lines kept the brakes disengaged, and they added an air reservoir to each car. With this improvement, any break in the line automatically stopped the train.

Building on these early inventions, Westinghouse turned to railway signaling and track-switching systems. Previously, signals used oil lamps and switching was done by hand. His designs changed that. In May 1881, he founded the Union Switch and Signal Company to make, market, install, and maintain these systems.

In the early 1880s, Westinghouse developed inventions for safely producing, transmitting, and using natural gas, which sparked a whole new energy industry. Around the same time, he saw the potential of alternating current for electric power distribution. In 1886, he founded the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which directly competed with Thomas Edison’s direct-current system. Westinghouse Electric won the contract to light the “White City” at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago using AC. The company then built the world’s first large-scale AC power plant at Niagara Falls, New York, which opened in August 1895. Among many honors, Westinghouse received the 1911 Edison Medal from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers for his work on the alternating current system.