George Westinghouse – prolific inventor

If you ever wish to know more about the history of electrical appliances, and do a search, there is little possibility of your missing the name of George Westinghouse. His achievements included several mechanical as well as electrical devices.

Westinghouse was an American entrepreneur and engineer who, among many other things, created the railway air brake and authored several inventions in the electrical industry. 

He received his first patent when he was just 19 years old – a patent for a rotary steam engine. He also built the Westinghouse Farm Engine. 

Isn’t that kind of news to you? It was, to me, when I began researching his life. I had known about George Westinghouse primarily as the man who developed electrical systems and electric railways. 

Then I discovered that Westinghouse had invented a wide range of things, from grain and seed winnowers, improvements in steam engines, improvement in steam-power-brake railway wagon couplings and in valves for fluid brake-pipes, in pneumatic pumps to switch and signal apparatus, and electrical distribution systems. The full list is available here: LINK.

Westinghouse’s career as an inventor began pretty early, at an age when in today’s day and age people are still completing their college education. 

Before he had completed age 21, Westinghouse had invented a ‘car replacer’, a mechanism to bring derailed railway wagons cars back onto the tracks, and a ‘reversible frog’, a device used with a railroad switch to move trains from one track to another.

His father ran a small company that made farm equipment. After a fire destroyed their workshop in Central Bridge, New York, they moved to Schenectady, also in New York State, where his father built a successful factory on Dock Street along the Erie Canal.

Young George was so interested in tinkering with things in his father's factory that he often skipped school. Not only was the older Westinghouse’s factory growing, some of the best craftsmen in the country lived nearby since the Schenectady Locomotive Works was located there. George had the opportunity to watch them and learn from them.

One of Westinghouse’s first inventions was a rotary steam engine, but it did not succeed. So, in 1885, he bought rights to a 10-horsepower (7.5 kilowatt) turbine developed a little earlier by British engineer Charles. He then improved the Parsons technology, and increased its scale.

In 1898 Westinghouse demonstrated a 300-kW unit, replacing reciprocating steam engines in his air-brake factory. In 1899 he installed a 1.5-megawatt unit for the Hartford Electric Light Company.

After that, he developed steam turbines for ships. Large maritime turbines were most efficient at about 3,000 rpm, but an efficient propeller operated at about 100 rpm. The mismatch between the two made it necessary for ships to install reduction gearing. But reduction gearing that could operate at high rpm at high power was difficult because a slight misalignment would cause an accident. 

So Westinghouse and his engineers devised an automatic alignment system that made it possible for large ships to use turbine power.

Westinghouse developed his first major invention, the rotary steam engine, the machine invented by James Watt, one of the 18th century pioneers of the Industrial Revolution. The invention was based on the idea that a steam engine channeling steam pressure through a spinning axis was more efficient than the reciprocating steam engines of the time. His invention is related to the steam turbine which came along later in the 1880s.

He went on to make a number of other inventions, although he found it very difficult to sell his inventions to companies, even after successful demonstrations.

You might wonder what inspired him so early to create novel gadgets. His inspiration came from his urge to improve the life of people around him. 

Take this example. When he was still in his late teens, he witnessed a bad train accident. The engine drivers of the two trains saw each other, but were unable to stop their trains in time. They could not because the brakes then available on the trains could not bring trains to a sudden halt. 

In those days, whenever a train had to stop, ‘brakemen’ had to run from coach to coach, on catwalks atop the coaches, applying the brakes manually on each car. We can hardly even imagine such a scenario today, thanks to Westinghouse. 

He saw the accident happen, sitting in a train behind one of the unfortunate other trains, and resolved to do something about preventing such accidents.

At age 22, he invented a railway braking system using compressed air. This system used a compressor on the locomotive, a reservoir and a special valve on each car, and a single, flexible pipe running the length of the train, which both refilled the reservoirs and controlled the brakes, allowing the engineer to apply and release the brakes simultaneously on all cars. 

Westinghouse patented the system on 28 October 1873. But before that, in 1869, he created the Westinghouse Air Brake Company (WABCO) to make and sell the invention. 

Thanks to the brakes Westinghouse designed, trains were able to carry heavier loads and move more quickly and more safely. 

Not only was the invention adopted by nearly all railways, even modern trains use brakes based on this design. The design of fail-safe air brakes is also used on heavy trucks.

But this was not his first invention. 

Westinghouse served as a private in the US cavalry for two years during the American Civil War and then served as Acting Third Assistant Engineer in the Navy in 1864. Following that, he attended college for just three months in 1865, and dropped out soon after winning his first patent – for a rotary steam engine – on 31 October 1865.

The rotary steam engine was based on the concept that a steam engine channeling steam pressure through a spinning axis was more efficient than the reciprocating steam engines of the time. This invention later led to the steam turbine that was developed in the 1880s.

Westinghouse had a long list of inventions to his credit. As many as 361 of them! That’s the figure I got from the US Library of Congress. For a list of some of these inventions, go here (LINK):

So his coming up with air brakes was in line with his inventiveness. But an even bigger achievement was to follow the invention of air brakes. And that was the harnessing of alternating current for the distribution of electricity.

Westinghouse advocated the use of alternating current, or AC current, for electric power distribution when it became possible to distribute electricity in the early 1880s. He invested his resources into designing, making and selling AC devices. And here he came into conflict with another big name in the world of electricity. 

Who was that? 

It was Thomas Alva Edison, who was selling direct current systems for power distribution, and who today gets more mentions in school textbooks than does Westinghouse. 

That difference of opinion about which is better, AC or DC, marked a sometimes bitter debate between Edison and Westinghouse. You can read a more detailed account of their fight here.

Edison’s company eventually merged with the bigger Thomson-Houston Electric Company to create General Electric, which went on to become the biggest company in its industry worldwide.

But Westinghouse gave Edison a run for his money. By 1904, there were more than 9,000 employees in Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's biggest plant; and an additional 3,000 workers elsewhere.

Then came the financial panic of 1907, which caused Westinghouse to lose control of the companies he had founded. In 1910, he found his last major concern, the invention of a compressed air spring for taking the shock out of automobile riding. 

By 1911, he had severed all ties with his former companies.

Westinghouse's developed heart conditions, and his health declined during his last last few years. He was bedridden for several years, and had to use a wheelchair to move around. He passed away on 12 March 1914.

Westinghouse represented a time when engineers invented things, and then turned businessmen as they began to make the products of their inventions. They were entrepreneurs of a very different order compared with several heads of the companies who followed them. 

Of course, they lived in a different age, when many of the technologies we take for granted today were still taking birth. People could potter around in workshops and come up with things that were original and very useful in path-breaking ways. 

Today the sweep of technology has become so vast, and the depth so deep that it takes many years for people to study what was done in the past so that they can build on it rather than try and re-invent the proverbial wheel.