52 Facts About George Westinghouse

George Westinghouse is best known for his creation of the railway air brake and for being a pioneer in the development and use of alternating current electrical power distribution.

George Westinghouse founded the Westinghouse Air Brake Company in 1869.

George Westinghouse Electric won the contract to showcase its AC system to illuminate the "White City" at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

George Westinghouse went on to install the world's first large-scale, AC power generation plant at Niagara Falls, New York, which opened in August 1895.

Ironically, among many other honors, George Westinghouse received the 1911 Edison Medal of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers "for meritorious achievement in connection with the development of the alternating current system".

The George Westinghouse ancestors came from Westphalia in Germany, moving first to England and eventually emigrating to the US.

From his youth, George Westinghouse displayed a talent for machinery and business.

George Westinghouse was encouraged by his father and was assigned tasks in the Westinghouse Company workshop.

George Westinghouse produced farm equipment such as the Westinghouse Farm Engine.

George Westinghouse earned a promotion to the rank of corporal before being honorably discharged in November 1863.

George Westinghouse further developed his skills in his father's company shop.

George Westinghouse was just 19 when he received his first patent for a rotary steam engine.

In 1868, George Westinghouse moved with his wife to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to access better and less expensive steel for the manufacture of his railroad frogs, and there he began to develop his recently invented railroad air brake concept.

In May 1881, George Westinghouse founded the Union Switch and Signal Company to manufacture, market, install, and maintain these innovative control systems, which were eventually adopted by railroads around the world.

George Westinghouse was encouraged to develop a system to deliver gas to heat and light area homes and businesses.

That year, George Westinghouse acquired a dormant utility charter for "The Philadelphia Company", and over the next three years, he developed devices and secured more than 30 patents for this technology.

George Westinghouse used the Philadelphia Company to develop gas wells and to promote gas usage both for commercial and residential purposes.

In 1889, as his involvement with the generation and distribution of electricity was surging, George Westinghouse resigned as president of the Philadelphia Company, but he remained on its board.

In 1884, George Westinghouse began developing his own DC domestic lighting system and hired physicist William Stanley to help work on it.

In 1885, George Westinghouse became aware of the concept of an electrical transformer introduced by Frenchman Lucien Gaulard and Englishman John Gibbs.

George Westinghouse recognized AC's potential to achieve greater economies of scale as a way to create a truly competitive electrical system, instead of simply piecing together a barely competitive DC lighting system just different enough to get around Edison's patents.

In 1886, with George Westinghouse's backing, Stanley installed the first multiple-voltage AC power system in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

The George Westinghouse company installed thirty more AC-lighting systems within a year, and by the end of 1887 it had 68 alternating current power stations compared to 121 DC-based stations Edison had installed over seven years.

George Westinghouse had to deal with another AC rival, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, which had constructed 22 power stations by the end of 1887 and by 1889 it had acquired another competitor, the Brush Electric Company.

George Westinghouse tried to block this move by hiring the best lawyer of the day to defend William Kemmler, the first man scheduled to die in the chair.

The new lead lenders demanded that George Westinghouse cut back on what looked to them like his excessive spending on the acquisition of other companies, research, and patents.

Also in 1891, George Westinghouse built a hydroelectric AC power plant, the Ames Hydroelectric Generating Plant near Ophir, Colorado which supplied AC power to the Gold King Mine 3.5 miles away.

In May 1892, George Westinghouse Electric won the bid to power and illuminate the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago with alternating current, substantially underbidding General Electric to get the contract.

George Westinghouse Electric started branding their complete polyphase AC system as the "Tesla Polyphase System", announcing Tesla's patents gave them patent priority over other AC systems and stating their intention to sue any patent infringers.

George Westinghouse felt that existing reciprocating steam engines were clumsy and inefficient, and he wanted to develop rotating engines that would be more elegant.

In 1895, George Westinghouse bought rights to the Parsons turbine, and his engineers improved its technology and increased its scale.

In 1898, George Westinghouse demonstrated a 300-kilowatt generating unit, replacing reciprocating engines in his air-brake factory.

George Westinghouse hoped to invent a better way to mine and extract copper from "lean" ores that were not particularly rich in the metal.

George Westinghouse was unsuccessful in this project: no new copper reduction process was found and the mine was not profitable.

George Westinghouse had founded the town of Duquesne to use as his company headquarters; it is a ghost town.

George Westinghouse began to work on heat pumps that could provide heating and cooling.

When George Westinghouse claimed he was after a perpetual motion machine, the British physicist William Thomson, one of his many correspondents, told him that such a machine would violate the laws of thermodynamics.

George Westinghouse replied that might be the case, but it made no difference.

George Westinghouse was the first industrial employer in the United States to give workers a five-and-a half day work week, starting in June 1881.

All these accommodations, at George Westinghouse's expense, were considered highly innovative at the time, especially in contrast to the conditions endured by workers in the nearby steel mills.

An indication of his progressive attitude was that when George Westinghouse engineers invented things, they were allowed to keep their names on the patents, though assigning rights to use them to the company.

George Westinghouse viewed this as part of the dignity of man and part of his intellectual property.

George Westinghouse did not reject workers who belonged to a union, but he did not like collective bargaining arrangements where his workers might strike for issues not related to conditions at his own factories.

George Westinghouse responded by immediately hiring replacements for those employees who walked out.

In 1867, George Westinghouse met Marguerite Erskine Walker on a train, and they married in August of that year.

George Westinghouse, being a veteran himself, hosted an evening of dinner and entertainment for more than 5,000 attendees at the newly constructed, but not yet active main buildings of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in East Pittsburgh.

George Westinghouse took on the expenses of the necessary building preparations and all the expenses of transporting people to and from the site by rail.

George Westinghouse remained a captain of American industry until 1907 when the financial panic of 1907 led to his resignation from control of the Westinghouse Electric company.

George Westinghouse died on March 12,1914, in New York City at age 67.

George Westinghouse was initially interred in Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, NY then removed on December 14,1915.

George Westinghouse had been initially interred in Woodlawn but removed and reinterred at the same time as George.

George Westinghouse was deeply appreciated by his colleagues and employees.