“St. George” Westinghouse

ON A COLD NIGHT IN FEBRUARY 1871, the New York Central Railroad’s Pacific Express rounded a bend seven miles south of Poughkeepsie, New York. All of a sudden the engineer, Doc Simmons, saw with horror the wreckage of a freight train sprawled across a drawbridge dead ahead. He blew the “down brakes” whistle, and trainmen between the cars jumped to turn their brake wheels. But it was already far too late. The Pacific Express, pride of the New York Central, had hardly begun to slow down when it slammed into the oil-filled tank cars. The locomotive flew off the bridge, dragging a baggage car and several passenger coaches with it into Wappinger Creek. The tank cars ignited, enveloping much of the Pacific Express in flames. Thirty people died, including Simmons, and dozens more were injured.

The tragedy could have been avoided. By the time of the Wappinger Creek disaster, an air brake invented by an obscure twenty-two-year-old inventor named George Westinghouse had more than proved its worth on many smaller lines. The big railroads, however, balked at the expensive installation costs that adopting the air brake would have required. But the crash of the Pacific Express prompted an outcry that could not be ignored. The New York Central almost immediately began equipping its passenger trains with Westinghouse air brakes.

Before Westinghouse invented the air brake, there was no such thing as an emergency stop for trains. A coordinated team of brakemen might take a good half-mile to bring the average train to a complete halt. Even at scheduled stops trains sometimes overshot their stations and had to back up laboriously toward the platform. On freight trains men had to clamber atop boxcars in all manner of weather to strain at brake wheels. Brakemen had an alarming tendency to die; they were thrown off trains, crushed between cars, and consumed in fires.

Thanks to Westinghouse, railroading became less of a demolition derby and more of a sane, reliable form of transportation. In addition to his brakes, his system of compressed-air railroad switches and signals vastly reduced the risk of trains’ colliding. The superintendent of a small Pennsylvania railroad once wrote, “If the men who work the railroads ever choose a patron saint it will be St. George —in honor of George Westinghouse.”

Westinghouse fought his share of dragons. His air brake, his natural-gas business, and his progressive labor practices all met with fierce opposition from entrenched interests. His most public battle pitted him against a towering American hero, Thomas Edison. When Westinghouse challenged Edison’s direct current, which dominated the electric-power market, with a far more economical system based on alternating current, Edison waged an all-out war, portraying Westinghouse as a greed-crazed villain eager to transmit high-voltage death into American homes. But Edison’s relentless propagandizing could not conceal the defects of his own system. When the time came for the widespread electrification of American homes, it happened with Westinghouse current.

Even as a child Westinghouse displayed the two qualities that would characterize his life as an inventor: extreme stubbornness and a strong dislike for needless effort. Young George threw temper tantrums when he didn’t get what he wanted, pounding his head against the ground until bloody. (He used more finesse as an adult; legend has it that one Pittsburgh banker refused to see him about a loan for fear that he would succumb to Westinghouse’s irresistible salesmanship.)

George Westinghouse, Jr., was born on October 6, 1846, in the upstate New York village of Central Bridge, where his father built and repaired farm equipment before moving his business to Schenectady in 1856. Young George was an indifferent student, and George, Sr., worried that his namesake would grow up to become a common tradesman instead of a doctor, lawver. or minister.

Teachers thought him lazy and perhaps a little dim, but the boy’s determined laziness could provoke bursts of ingenuity. Once his father assigned him to cut some iron pipes to length. Instead of doing the job by hand, George mounted the pipe and saw on a steam-powered lathe. He wrapped up several afternoons’ work in a few hours.

His success with the lathe sparked an interest in steam engines. He read every book on steam power he could find at the Schenectady Free Library and wrote to companies for technical pamphlets on their engines. He had his own little workshop in the loft of his father’s shop, and he spent hours there building things: elaborate water wheels, miniature steam engines, a sled, a violin, and a selfpropelled model boat. His father criticized George for wasting his time on “trumpery.”

IN OCTOBER 1863, AT THE AGE OF seventeen, Westinghouse joined the Union Army as a cavalryman. He served in northern Virginia, patrolling against Rebel spies and raiding parties without seeing much action. He was promoted to corporal, but in December 1864 he transferred to the Navy, which he thought could make better use of his mechanical skills. (His older brother Albert was killed that same month while leading a cavalry charge.) George got an appointment as acting third assistant engineer aboard the Muscoota and then the Stars and Stripes , both steampowered gunboats assigned to blockade duty on the Potomac. He continued to spend his off-hours tinkering with steam engines and even set up a lathe in his cabin. He was discharged in August 1865.

Not long after the war Westinghouse received his first patent, for a rotary steam engine. The steam engines of his day were of the reciprocating type, producing a back-and-forth motion that, by means of inefficient mechanical connections, had to be converted to rotary motion to do things like turning a steamboat’s paddle wheels or spinning the long drive shafts that ran the machines of his father’s shop. Westinghouse’s patented steam engine converted steam power directly into rotary motion. Unfortunately the engine never actually worked. Nevertheless Westinghouse had found his calling: He was an inventor.

At his father’s urging he enrolled as a sophomore in Schenectady’s Union College. His classes included French, German, geometry, and English. His grades and attendance were spotty. “He was my despair,” said his foreignlanguage professor. “While the other boys were struggling with German syntax or French pronunciation, he would amuse himself making pencil drawings on his wristbands. His sketches were always of locomotives, stationary engines, or something of that sort.” After three months he was dismissed.

WESTINGHOUSE FELT RE lieved to be out of school, but he knew that he was letting down his parents. His late brother Albert had shown signs of promise, but with Albert gone, Westinghouse believed his parents had invested their hopes in him. Albert haunted his dreams.

Returning from Albany by rail one evening, George Westinghouse was stranded for two hours when a pair of cars on a train ahead of him derailed. Workmen armed with crowbars had to tediously pry the cars back onto the tracks. It struck him as appallingly inefficient. If steam power could move train cars down the tracks, why couldn’t it also pull derailed cars back onto them? Back home he began sketching out ideas and soon built a model of what he called a “car replacer,” a set of curved portable rails similar to the frogs that shunted trains from one set of tracks to another. Westinghouse also patented an improved railroad frog, cast from steel rather than iron and reversible so that it could be flipped over and reinstalled when one side wore out. Westinghouse’s improved frogs—the first major application of the new technology of steel casting—lasted about twenty times as long as ordinary ones.

Westinghouse asked his father to finance his scheme to manufacture the devices, but George, Sr., thought it was too risky. What did his son know about the railroad business? Still, he agreed to lend him enough money to cover patent expenses. Westinghouse asked Schenectady’s most prominent businessmen for support, without success until he finally got $10,000 from two real estate investors named Rawls and Wall. They formed a partnership, with Westinghouse serving as a one-man sales force. The business grew quickly.

He had castings made for the frogs and replacers at steel plants in Troy, New York, and Pompton, New Jersey. Returning from the New Jersey plant by train, he struck up a conversation with a young lady named Marguerite Walker of Roxbury, New York. He told her he worked in the railroad industry, a boast that could carry some weight with single young women in those days. He went on to court her with characteristic persistence, and the two were married in August 1867. They had one child, George Westinghouse III, born in 1884.

One day not long after his marriage, Westinghouse was riding to Troy on business when his train ground to an uneven halt, nearly throwing him from his seat. Outside, he saw why his train had stopped. Down the tracks lay the wreckage of two freight trains that had collided. He talked to a bruised brakeman who had been pulled from the wreck. How could two trains collide in broad daylight? he asked. Hadn’t the brakes worked?

The brakes worked fine, the man replied. There just wasn’t time. You can’t stop a train in a moment.

The trainman’s words stuck with him. Why couldn’t you stop a train in a moment? The lack of fast-acting brakes and the danger of head-on collisions on single-track lines yielded a transportation system that moved with what one railroad historian calls “paralytic sloth.” Railroad trackage in the United States had grown from 35,000 miles at the end of the Civil War to more than 50,000 miles just five years later. But the braking problem put a squeeze on the amount of traffic railroads could put on those tracks.

ON BUSINESS IN CHICAGO, Westinghouse watched a demonstration of an experimental braking system developed by Augustine Ambler of Milwaukee. Ambler’s system forced brake shoes against the train’s wheels by means of a long chain mounted to a windlass in the locomotive. Westinghouse had been toying with a similar idea, but when he examined Ambler’s apparatus, he found it clumsy, and the chain broke on the third test.

Westinghouse drew up plans for a brake that would use steam pressure generated in the locomotive. The steam would drive pistons, which would in turn force brake shoes against the wheels. He built a model; to his dismay it didn’t work at all. He was mystified until he realized that the steam was condensing before it reached the more distant cars.

The solution appeared when he reluctantly let himself be talked into buying a magazine subscription from a young woman who stopped by his father’s shop. Westinghouse had little use for magazines, but the girl pleaded that she was trying to work her way through school so she could become a teacher. The inventor took pity on her and was rewarded when he came upon an article on the construction of a mammoth railroad tunnel through Mont Cenis in the Italian Alps. To place explosives, workers rammed holes in the rock face with drills powered by compressed air. Steam engines couldn’t be used deep in the tunnel, the article explained, because firing the boilers would consume precious oxygen. So engineers used steam-powered pumps outside the tunnel to compress air, then piped the air to the work site.

The principle was basically the same as steam power: A gas—water vapor or air—is compressed, thus storing energy that later can be released by expanding it. With steam engines the pressure is created by boiling water. Compressed-air systems create pressure by shrinking the container that holds the gas, generally by forcing a piston through an airtight cylinder. Since air does not condense except in extreme conditions, pressure will remain high as long as the air remains tightly enclosed.

POWER-ASSISTED BRAKES DID not originate with Westinghouse. Many schemes to harness a train’s momentum for braking had been tried, with little success. Vacuum-assisted brakes were proving to be simple and effective on trains of moderate size. Even compressed air was not a new idea; little in Westinghouse’s 1869 patent had not been anticipated by previous inventors. He succeeded where others had failed because he hit on the best combination of elements, promoted his invention skillfully, continued to improve it in later years, and brought it out when the need was greatest.

Westinghouse built a successful scale model of a compressed-air braking system and again asked his father for financial backing, hoping he might think more highly of his inventions now that railroads were buying his frogs and replacers. But the elder Westinghouse thought the air brake was more trumpery. Meanwhile his son had had a falling-out with his partners, Rawls and Wall. He went to work for Anderson & Cook, a Pittsburgh steel manufacturer, as a traveling salesman and took advantage of his position with the company to promote his new invention. At the conclusion of a sale, he would veer into a discussion of his air brake. His implausible-sounding scheme earned him the nickname Crazy George.

One man who did believe in Westinghouse was his friend Ralph Baggaley, who ran a Pittsburgh foundry. Baggaley paid a prominent railroading authority one hundred dollars for an expert review of Westinghouse’s plans. The consultant prepared a detailed report that concluded that the air brake was worthless. Westinghouse was dejected, but Baggaley tore up the report and burned it. Confident that his friend’s invention would revolutionize railroading, Baggaley put up several thousand dollars to build a prototype air brake system for a locomotive and four cars.

All they needed was a train to test it on. Representatives from several railroads examined the equipment with interest, then were never heard from again. Finally the board of directors of the Panhandle Railroad agreed to test the brake system on one of its trains, on the condition that Westinghouse and Baggaley pay for the installation and any damage that might occur. The partners installed the brake system on the Panhandle’s Steubenville division.

On the day of the demonstration, in April 1869, chance offered up a dramatic test of the brake system. As the train emerged from a tunnel under Pittsburgh’s Grant’s Hill, Westinghouse and Daniel Täte, the engineer, spotted a horse-drawn wagon stopped at a crossing up ahead. The driver lashed the two horses, trying to get them to move. The horses bolted, tossing the driver from the wagon and onto the tracks. Täte turned the brake valve, and the train screeched to halt just a few feet from the terrified driver.

The Panhandle officials aboard the passenger car were vastly impressed. Westinghouse’s father remained dubious. “As I have repeatedly told you,” he wrote, “one lesson in life that I have learned is to stick to things I know something about, and to leave the rest to others. I know nothing about railroads. Neither do you. I think you would be wise to avoid speculating with your future, especially as now you have a wife to support.”

THREE MONTHS LATER WES tinghouse, Baggaley, the superintendent of the Panhandle Railroad, and several other leading Pittsburgh railroad men formed the Westinghouse Air Brake Corporation, capitalized at $500,000. Westinghouse, not yet twenty-three years old, was named president of the company. Over the next five years the company built air brakes for more than 2,200 locomotives and 7,200 cars. Westinghouse set up affiliate companies in Britain, France, and Russia.

Westinghouse’s air-brake factory in the Turtle Creek Valley, east of Pittsburgh, served as the nucleus of a planned community built by the company. The town of Wilmerding included parks, schools, and a hospital. A progressive employer by the standards of his era, Westinghouse was among the first to give workers a half-day off on Saturdays and to provide pensions and health care. His generous wages and policies infuriated other industrialists. He would have hated today’s corporate downsizing. He once suggested that a group of idled employees be put to working sawing boards into hexagons rather than be laid off.

Westinghouse’s companies remained resolutely nonunion during his lifetime. The labor leader Samuel Gompers once said, “If all employers of men treated their employees with the same consideration he does, the American Federation of Labor would have to go out of existence.”

WESTINGHOUSE CONTIN ued to refine the air brake in the 1870s and 1880s. His first air brake had a major drawback: Any hole in the brake pipe, or any accidental separation of the train cars, resulted in a loss of air pressure that rendered the brakes useless. His automatic air brake, introduced in 1874, solved this problem. It added an auxiliary reservoir of compressed air to each car. The engineer applied the brakes by reducing rather than increasing pressure in the main brake pipe, which ran the length of the train. By means of Westinghouse’s patented triple valve, a reduction of pressure in the main brake pipe opened the auxiliary reservoirs, which released their supply of compressed air into the brake cylinders, thus actuating the brakes. The new configuration meant that a rupture in the main brake pipe or the accidental separation of train cars would trigger the brakes automatically.

Improved brakes were just the first of Westinghouse’s innovations in railroad safety. In his time, as today, a single set of tracks commonly served trains traveling in either direction, with widely spaced sidings to let them pass each other. Railroads also had to allow for trains traveling in the same direction at different speeds. Avoiding collisions required careful scheduling and, often, long delays while one train waited for another to pass. More than once a careless dispatcher found that he had inadvertently sent two trains hurtling toward each other. With no way to warn the trains, he could only telegraph the nearest doctor or hospital and tell them to prepare for the worst.

Some railroads used the block system, whereby tracks were divided into discrete blocks ranging in length from half a mile to several miles. When a train entered a new block, a signalman at the junction would telegraph the signalman at the next junction, who would raise a danger signal for oncoming trains. The system was prone to human error, of course, and because of the manpower requirements, railroads could afford to establish signal stations only along a few well-traveled routes.

THIS STATE OF AFFAIRS OF fended Westinghouse’s sense of efficiency. In the 1880s and 1890s he took out a series of patents, and purchased a number of existing patents, to create what he called an “electro-pneumatic” system of switches and signals. These were operated remotely by an electric current passing through wires or through the railroad track itself—an idea patented by William Robinson of Pennsylvania in 1872. Cylinders of compressed air provided the motive power to raise and lower the signals or switch the tracks. A break in the current would automatically raise a danger signal.

From the British railways Westinghouse borrowed the concept of interlocking switches, which were connected so as to make it physically impossible to put two trains on a collision course. A blindfolded switch operator pulling levers at random might bring traffic to a halt, but he couldn’t send two trains running toward each other. Westinghouse founded the Union Switch & Signal Company in 1881 to manufacture his electro-pneumatic system.

While most high-traffic lines saw the value of his signaling system, his air brake took much longer to find widespread use. Cost was the biggest obstacle, but there was another consideration. The air brake wasn’t practical for most freight trains because they were generally much longer than passenger trains—up to fifty or more cars, compared with perhaps a halfdozen for passenger trains. The problem was activation speed. On huge freight trains it took too long for the brakes toward the rear of the train to activate, so as each car slowed down, it would be slammed by the car behind it. Freight trains thus continued to rely on hand brakes, with their dismal safety record.

In the 1880s a railroad industry organization, the Master Car Builders Association, pushed hard for the development of a workable, standardized automatic brake for freight trains. The association held a series of trials in Burlington, Iowa, in 1886 and 1887. A number of brake systems competed, including a new Westinghouse air brake.

Westinghouse had managed to reduce the activation time on a fifty-car train from twenty seconds to six. He had also improved the stopping power of the individual brakes. He didn’t have time to test the new system before sending it off to Burlington, and it turned out that the more powerful brakes overcompensated for the quicker activation speed. The test train jarred badly in the trials. A test of emergency stopping sent passengers flying (7#8220;observers and recorders in the rear car were shot promiscuously the length of the car,” as a biographer describes the scene). One man broke a leg.

The clear winners of the Burlington trials were brake systems activated by electric controls, which allowed brakes to be applied simultaneously at many points along the length of the train. Westinghouse himself tested a brake system with electrically operated valves, but he remained convinced that electrical connections could not yet be relied upon to withstand the punishment endured by the typical freight train.

AFTER THE 1887 BURLING ton trials he went back to Pittsburgh determined to perfect a fast-acting, all-pneumatic freight-train brake. By the end of the year he had rolled out his “quick-action” automatic air brake. He took a fifty-car train—nearly half a mile long—on a demonstration tour of major railroad centers and duplicated many of the tests of the Burlington trials. He improved the activation speed so that it took only about two and a half seconds to engage the rearmost brakes. The stopping distance at twenty miles per hour was just two hundred feet.

The performance of the quick-action brake prompted the Master Car Builders Association to amend its report on the Burlington trials, noting the existence of a superior freight-train brake that did not depend on electrical connections. The railroad industry soon adopted the quick-action brake.

Even as he continued his railroading innovations, Westinghouse was moving into a new industrial field. In the 188Os prospectors found a large reserve of natural gas beneath the Pittsburgh suburb of Murrysville. One local manufacturer began using gas for its operations, but piping it in from Murrysville proved enormously expensive. Westinghouse consulted some geologists and guessed that there might be natural gas beneath Solitude, his large estate in Homewood, on the eastern edge of Pittsburgh.

He was right. Near Westinghouse’s stables, workers drilled some 1,500 feet into the earth and encountered a huge deposit of natural gas. The first eruption blew off the top of the drilling derrick and propelled a great geyser of water, gravel, sand, and mud into the air. The workers capped the well and placed a sixty-foot pipe on top of it. Later, as a demonstration, the gas was ignited with oil-soaked rags, and the pipe spouted a hundred-foot column of flame that gave off enough light to read a newspaper by more than a mile away.

Westinghouse thought that the natural gas might light Pittsburgh’s streets and fuel its industries. The trouble was that it flowed from wells erratically, under enormous pressure. Pipeline leaks sent gas creeping invisibly and odorlessly through the ground and into enclosed spaces. A lot of people feared that Westinghouse’s plan might engulf the city in a holocaust.

To reduce the danger of explosion, Westinghouse transported the gas through progressively larger pipelines, steadily reducing the pressure. He added a second, outer wall to the pipelines at joints. This extra space collected escaping gas; if pressure in this outer layer built up to a certain level, an automatic escape valve would harmlessly vent the gas into the atmosphere at strategic locations.

He applied to Pittsburgh’s city council for permission to lay gas mains. Certain business interests objected to giving Westinghouse a monopoly on transporting gas through the city, so he agreed to let other natural-gas providers use his pipelines for a nominal fee.

The availability of cheap, plentiful natural gas in Pittsburgh attracted new iron and steel manufacturers to the city. Meanwhile Westinghouse was following with interest the emergence of a new way of bringing light into people’s homes. In December 1880 he and Marguerite watched a demonstration of electric lighting at Thomas Edison’s laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey.

A drawback of Edison’s system was that his low-voltage direct-current power lines dissipated energy so quickly that customers could be no more than a few city blocks from a generating station. New Yorkers living near Edison generator stations complained about the constant traffic of wagons hauling in coal and removing ash, as well as the noxious black smoke.

High-voltage currents could transmit power efficiently over long distances. A power system using highvoltage power lines would require far fewer generator stations, but there was no easy way to adjust the voltage of a direct current.

Not so with alternating current (AC). In the mid-1880s Westinghouse learned about a device called a secondary generator, or transformer. Invented by Lucien Gaulard of France and John Dixon Gibbs of Britain, the transformer received a strong lowvoltage alternating current and turned it into a weaker high-voltage current, or vice versa.

For the long-distance transmission of electric power, a transformer could be used to “step up” an alternating current to a suitably high voltage. At the receiving end, some distance away, one or more step-down transformers would lower the current’s voltage for use in electric lighting.

William Stanley, a young engineer for Union Switch & Signal, championed alternating current. His boss was skeptical at first. “Westinghouse … seems to have regarded Stanley as rather unstable and visionary, full of chimerical projects,” writes Thornas Commerford Martin in a biography of Edison. But the success of the Gaulard-Gibbs transformer in demonstrations in Great Britain and Italy eventually convinced Westinghouse of the potential of alternating current. He bought American rights to the device in 1885.

THE GAULARD-GIBBS TRANS former, however, was expensive to manufacture. It had to be assembled mostly by hand. Westinghouse greatly simplified the design by replacing Gaulard and Gibbs’s stamped copper disks with insulated copper wire, which could be wound around the transformer’s iron core by machine.

Stanley was ready to take over from there, but Pittsburgh’s soot and smoke caused respiratory problems. He told Westinghouse that he was moving to Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where he had lived as a boy. Westinghouse found Stanley indispensable to his electric-lighting project, so he set up a laboratory in Great Barrington where Stanley could continue his work.

In only three months Stanley built a generator station in Great Barrington. He ran a power line to an old building in the town of Lawrenceville, four miles away. After twelve transformers stepped the 3,000 volts down to 500, the current was fed to 400 incandescent lamps.

Westinghouse soon had his first paying customer for the electric-lighting system. A company offered to buy all the equipment and use it to light houses, streets, and businesses in Buffalo, New York. Within three years of its founding in January 1886, the Westinghouse Electric Company grew from 200 to more than 3,000 employees.

Thomas Edison, still committed to direct-current lighting, didn’t like it one bit. When Westinghouse made plans to offer electric service in New York City, the Wizard of Menlo Park fought back with an epic smear campaign. The Edison General Electric Company (which became just General Electric after an 1892 merger) rented billboard space and took out magazine and newspaper ads condemning alternating current as a grave menace to the human race. An Edison engineer, Harold Brown, electrocuted dogs with AC in public demonstrations and contrived to have New York State employ the “Westinghouse current” to execute criminals. Accidents happened, inevitably, and newspapers abetted Edison’s campaign with hysterical headlines such as ELECTRIC WIRE SLAUGHTER and ANOTHER LINEMAN ROASTED TO DEATH .

Westinghouse and Edison sparred in print. Responding to an article by Edison in the North American Review , Westinghouse wrote, “The alternating current will kill people, of course. So will gunpowder, and dynamite, and whiskey and lots of other things; but we have a system whereby the deadly electricity of the alternating current can do no harm unless a man is fool enough to swallow a whole dynamo.”

Maybe he overstated his case a little. One of the most vocal champions of alternating current was Frank Pope, an electrician, author, and patent attorney. Pope was killed by alternating current in 1896 while supervising the conversion of the Great Barrington generators from steam to waterpower.

NEVERTHELESS, THE AD vantages of the Westinghouse system clearly outweighed its overblown dangers. By 1890 annual sales of the Westinghouse Electric Company totaled more than four million dollars. In 1892 Westinghouse underbid General Electric to provide power for 180,000 incandescent lamps at the following year’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

General Electric retaliated with a lawsuit claiming that the lamps Westinghouse planned to use infringed on Edison’s patent. Westinghouse knew that General Electric had a strong case, so he and his engineers mounted a crash program to develop an entirely new incandescent lamp.

The General Electric lawsuit hinged on the method by wliirh the airtieht bulb was sealed. Westinghouse and his crew got around this by adapting a design for a lamp with two pieces that fitted together like a bottle and stopper. The seal was imperfect, and the bulbs had to be replaced often, but they allowed Westinghouse to meet his contract.

Later that year Westinghouse once again beat GE, winning a contract from the Cataract Construction Company to build three 5,000-horsepower hydroelectric generators at Niagara Falls. Westinghouse enjoyed complete victory in 1896, when General Electric admitted defeat and offered a deal to exchange patent rights.

AC power increased the reach of a single generator from a few city blocks to many miles. This created a demand for more powerful generators. The engines that powered the generators of the early electric era were still of the reciprocating type, using steam pressure to drive a piston back and forth. But Westinghouse had never given up on the idea of rotary steam power. Over the years he had tinkered with rotary engines, and for a time he had used an experimental rotary engine to power one of his shops.

In 1895 he heard about a steam turbine invented in Great Britain by Charles Parsons. (Turbines work by directing high-velocity jets of steam against curved blades affixed to a rotating shaft.) Parsons had built a steam turbine that powered a large oceangoing vessel, the Turbinia .

Westinghouse bought American patent rights to the Parsons turbine, and he and his engineers proceeded to adapt its design to electrical generation. In 1899 Westinghouse equipped his airbrake factory with 300-kilowatt Westinghouse-Parsons turbogenerators. The following year he sold a 1,500-kilowatt turbogenerator to the Hartford Electric Light Company. Steam turbines quickly rendered reciprocating generators obsolete; they were smaller, lighter, and cheaper and needed less fuel, oil, and maintenance.

SINCE HIS EARLIEST DAYS WES tinghouse had managed to triumph over skepticism, lack of funds, and determined opposition from some of the country’s most powerful men. When defeat finally came for him, it was from within his own organization, as Westinghouse Electric ran into serious cash problems in the 189Os. The company had bought a number of small electrical concerns that were running at a loss. It also poured a great deal of money into research and development, including the commercial development of Nikola Tesla’s alternating-current motor, which allowed AC to be used not just for lighting but to drive machinery. In 1893 the company faced a ten-million-dollar debt just when a nationwide financial crisis had put a stranglehold on credit.

A new stock offering met with a tepid response, so Westinghouse begged a group of prominent Pittsburgh bankers for a loan. They agreed to help on the condition that they be allowed to appoint a hard-nosed general manager who would rein in expenditures, particularly on Westinghouse’s costly research projects—a charge that must have recalled his father’s complaints that he was wasting his time on trumpery.

Westinghouse declined the loan and took his case to a Wall Street banking house, August Belmont and Company, which nursed Westinghouse Electric through a financial reorganization. The deal put the company back on a secure footing, but only temporarily. Seeing vast opportunities in electrification, the company embarked on an aggressive expansion. Westinghouse borrowed heavily to finance the expansion and paid large dividends to pump up stock prices. When another financial panic hit the nation in 1907, Westinghouse Electric fell more than forty million dollars in debt. An economist of the era called the fall of Westinghouse “in point of size, the most considerable mercantile failure America has ever witnessed.” The company went into receivership, and a group of bankers assigned to reorganize it appointed a new board of directors. Westinghouse stayed on as the nominal president, but with sharply limited powers. He clashed repeatedly with the new chairman. In 1910 the directors urged Westinghouse to take a six-month leave of absence. He ended up resigning.

ALL WAS FAR FROM LOST. HE still had control of the airbrake company and Union Switch & Signal. With his son he developed a successful compressed-air shock absorber for automobiles. In 1912 the American Institute of Electrical Engineers honored Westinghouse for his work on the development of alternating-current systerns by awarding him its Edison Medal, named after Westinghouse’s bitter rival.

His doctor diagnosed heart trouble in 1913 and ordered rest. Westinghouse retired to his vacation home in Lenox, Massachusetts. He spent time fishing at a nearby pond, and one day his rowboat capsized, throwing him into the chilly water. He came down with pneumonia and never fully recovered. He was designing an electrical wheelchair when he died of heart failure on March 12, 1914.

At his death Westinghouse had some four hundred patents to his name. His enormous success gradually made him less of an inventor-engineer and more of a manager and entrepreneur. Yet his heart remained on the shop floor. A long-time friend, the mechanical engineer Samuel T. Wellman, recalled, “I have many times seen him stop and show the workmen that what they were doing was wrong, and then he would take hold and show them the right way.

“He cared little for music, art or amusements,” Wellman continued. “His favorite recreation was the working out of some new mechanical problem. Many a night after spending the evening with his guests I have known him to work until the small hours of the morning with pencil and paper over some new idea that had come to him.”

He impressed those around him with his unflagging energy, contagious enthusiasm, and manners that were nearly always impeccable. He disapproved of gossip and off-color remarks. Once, when he authorized a subordinate to hire some new staff members, he said, “There is but one rule that I must insist upon. I want you to employ none but gentlemen.” When away from Pittsburgh on business, he would talk with his wife daily by telephone.

“George Westinghouse had unlimited faith in himself,” Wellman wrote. Eut so often had Westinghouse proved his doubters wrong that he sometimes had difficulty realizing when he himself was mistaken.

FOR A NUMBER OF YEARS he tried to build a machine that would convert atmospheric heat into mechanical energy, generating more energy than was used to power the machine. Even the eminent British scientist Lord Kelvin despaired of convincing Westinghouse that the scheme was hopeless. A Westinghouse engineer wrote an explanation of how the proposed machine violated the laws of thermodynamics, “not for the purpose of dissuading you from experimenting (as I believe you would probably never feel entirely satisfied without making the experiments) but in the hope that it may enable you to interpret the results which vou are likely to obtain.” As Francis Hodgkinson, who had worked with Westinghouse on the steam turbine, put it, “He was an innate mechanician, but his knowledge of thermodynamics seemed limited.”

The fierce temper that had dogged Westinghouse in childhood never entirely disappeared, but he rarely stayed angry for long. “When he occasionally expressed himself more emphatically than necessary,” another employee recalled, “it was his habit, within a day or two, to make sure that cordial relations had been restored.”

Today the Westinghouse Electric Corporation is a multibillion-dollar giant. In addition to electric power, the company has vast holdings in broadcasting, including the CBS television network. The air-brake company and Union Switch & Signal endure, though they have diminished with the restructuring of the railroad industry.

The Westinghouse logo, a series of giant blinking neon Ws, looms over downtown Pittsburgh from the slopes of Mount Washington. It is clearly visible, thanks to the decline of steel-making and cleaner smokestack emissions. If he were alive today, George Westinghouse might miss all the murk that once defined the city; he saw it as the life-giving breath of robust industry. He once stood with an associate at his electric works, watching the distant smoke rising from the steel mills and from his own air-brake factory. Gesturing toward the dark spectacle, he said, “Isn’t it beautiful?”