GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE

ENGINEER & ENTREPRENEUR

by Brian Roberts, CIBSE Heritage Group

George Westinghouse, 1846-1914

George Westinghouse was born on the 6th October, 1846, in Central Bridge, New York, the son
of George Westinghouse Sr. and Emiline (Vedder). He was eighth out of ten children. His father
was the owner of a machine shop and this probably the reason why son George was talented
with machinery and in business
 The young George Westinghouse Junior

Central Bridge, New York, birthplace of George Westinghouse

 George Westinghouse Senior and his wife Emiline

The Schenectady Agricultural Works of George Westinghouse (Senior)

He was 15 when the Civil War broke out and he enlisted in the New York National Guard until
his parents convinced him to return home. In April 1863, his parents allowed him to re-enlist and
he joined Company M of the 16th New York Cavalry, earning promotion to Corporal. In
December 1864, he resigned and joined the Navy where he served as Acting Third Assistant
Engineer on the gunboat USS Muscoota until the end of the war.

George Westinghouse in the military

 The gunboat USS Muscoota

In August 1865, Westinghouse returned to his family in Schenectady and enrolled at Union
College, but dropping out during his first term. He was still only 19 when he invented a rotary
steam engine and devised the Westinghouse Farm Engine.

At the age of 21, he invented the first of many devices for the railway industry. This was a piece
of equipment (a car replacer) to guide derailed railway carriages or waggons back onto the
tracks. He followed this with his reversible frog, a device used as a railway points switch to
guide trains onto one of two tracks.

In 1867, Westinghouse met and married Marguerite Erskine Walker.

George and Marguerite were married for 47 years and had one son, George Westinghouse III,
who had six children. The couple made their first home in Pittsburgh, later acquiring houses in
Lenox, Massachusetts (where they summered) and in Washington D.C.

The Westinghouse home “Solitude” in Pittsburgh

Mrs Marguerite Westinghouse

 Employees at an early Westinghouse factory

A typical early train crash due to inadequate brakes

 Brakeman stood on top of the railway carriages and freight waggons

Before Westinghouse invented the rail safety brake (and made his fortune), trains were stopped
by brakemen standing on top of the carriages or freight waggons and braking each individually.
It was a dangerous and badly paid job and many men lost their lives, their families receiving no
compensation. Patented by Westinghouse in 1873 it was, in time, adopted by the railway
industry.
After his interests in railway systems, in natural gas distribution and telephone switching,
Westinghouse looked into electrical power distribution. In 1884, he began developing his own
DC lighting system using the services of William Stanley. However, in 1885, he became aware
of European work on AC systems and recognised the advantages of using transformers to step
up the voltage for long distance power distribution and then step down at the consumer. This
method overcame the disadvantages of Edison’s DC system which could only be distributed
about a mile and required multiple generating stations.

In 1885, Westinghouse imported a number of Gaulard-Gibbs transformers and a Siemens AC

Generator from Europe. William Stanley developed these transformers into the first practical AC
design. Then in 1886, Westinghouse established the “Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing
Company” renaming it, in 1889, as “Westinghouse Electric Corporation.” By the end of 1887,
the Company had 68 AC power stations compared with Edison’s 121 DC stations. This led to a
bitter confrontation between the two systems which became known as the Battle of the Currents.

Westinghouse had another rival, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company who had also bought
out a third AC competitor, the Brush Electric Company. They came to an arrangement with
Westinghouse to avoid commercial conflicts. Thomson-Houston paid a royalty to use the
Stanley transformer patent while allowing Westinghouse to use their Sawyer-Man incandescent
lamp patent.

The Westinghouse Electric Company Factory in Pittsburgh, c.1889

The Battle of the Currents ended when Edison insisted on developing DC and refused to have
anything to do with AC, against the wishes of his financial backers, who by 1892 had taken
control of the Edison Machine Works and merged it with Thomson-Houston to form General
Electric.

Westinghouse and the Tesla Polyphase System

George Westinghouse at work

 NIKOLA TESLA & THE AC MOTOR

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) a brilliant electrical engineer, born in Serbia, came to the United
States in 1884, initially working for Thomas Edison who refused to accept new ideas relating to
the possibilities of AC systems and unable, because of his poor grasp of mathematics, to
understand the theory of such systems. Then when Edison failed to pay Tesla a promised bonus
for successfully completing a number of tasks (Edison said it was all a joke), Tesla left.

In 1888, Tesla demonstrated a polyphase brushless AC induction motor, the one item that
Westinghouse needed to market a completely AC power system. Tesla sold George
Westinghouse forty of his patents for $1,000,000 and having learned more about business, after
his bad experiences with Edison, he also negotiated a one dollar per horsepower royalty payment
(though he never did collect the latter). Tesla took a job as a consultant with Westinghouse in
Pittsburgh but disagreed with William Stanley on how to develop his motor. Stanley wanted to
design for a 133 Hz single-phase system which favoured his transformers. Tesla knew that 60 Hz
and a two-phase solution produced a better motor design. So Tesla left and went back to New
York, leaving Westinghouse to develop larger and larger AC machines.

Building electrical machines at Westinghouse

 WORLD’S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION

In 1893, George Westinghouse won the bid to light the World’s Columbian Exposition in
Chicago with an offer of one million dollars using AC, half the cost of Edison’s DC proposal.
Then Edison won a court case, claiming that Westinghouse lamps infringed his patents.
Westinghouse quickly developed an alternative lamp and when the Exposition opened “there
were 86,620 Westinghouse incandescent lamps, powered by Tesla generators, lighting up the
fairground.” This success was instrumental in Westinghouse being awarded the contract for a
giant two-phase AC generating plant, the Adams Power Pant, at Niagara Falls in 1895.

The Chicago Exposition

The Westinghouse Alternating Current Switchboard at the Chicago Fair

A Westinghouse display at the Chicago Fair

 NIAGARA FALLS POWER STATION

In 1897, the famous Lord Kelvin (centre) visited George Westinghouse

Lord Kelvin had previously been head of the Commission to advise on whether the Niagara
Power Plant should be DC or AC. He favoured DC until having visited the Columbian
Exposition he became convinced of the superiority of AC. Westinghouse was awarded the
contract for the Niagara Falls Power Station in 1893

The opening of the first phase of the Niagara Falls hydroelectric power plant in 1896
Niagara Falls Power Station which transmitted AC at 22 kV to Buffalo some 22 miles away
and later to New York a distance of over 300 miles

The Edward Dean Adams Power Station at Niagara Falls with ten 5000 horsepower
Tesla-Westinghouse AC generators
 Mrs Marguerite Westinghouse

Mr and Mrs George Westinghouse

APPENDIX I: WESTINGHOUSE U.S.PATENTS
 APPENDIX II: BENJAMIN G. LAMME

Benjamin Garver Lamme, 1864-1924

He spent the whole of his working life with Westinghouse, making significant technical
contributions to the success of the Company in the fields of electrical engineering

Lamme was born on a farm near Springfield, Ohio, on the 12th January, 1864 and from an early
age experimented with machinery. In 1883, he graduated from the Olive Branch High School
near New Carlisle in Ohio and then entered Ohio State University, gaining an engineering
degree in 1888.

In 1889, Westinghouse employed him for his Philadelphia Natural Gas Company in Pittsburgh,
but a few months later transferred him to the Westinghouse House Electric Company, where he
took over the project of developing a practical version of Nikola Tesla’s patented induction
motor. Lamme came up with a more efficient design and, over several years, designed a variety
of electric motors and generators. He designed the 5000 kW giant hydroelectric generators for
the Adams Power Plant at Niagara Falls.

Lamme spent many years; often working at night, developing advanced analysis and
computational methods for designing and predicting the performance of electrical machines. In
this task, he was aided by his sister Bertha, who also had an engineering degree from Ohio State.
(Bertha Lamme was the nation’s first woman electrical engineer).
 Westinghouse generators at the Niagara Falls Power Plant

Benjamin Lamme designed much of the equipment for the Westinghouse exhibit at the Chicago
Columbian Exposition of 1893. He became Chief Engineer at Westinghouse in 1903 and held
that position for the rest of his life.

Westinghouse Exhibit at the Colombian Exposition

On 16th May, 1919, Lamme received the IEEE Edison Medal “For Invention and Development
of Electrical Machinery.” Then on 12th January, 1923, Lamme was the first recipient of the
Joseph Sullivan Medal by Ohio State University.

Lamme, who never married, died in Pittsburgh aged 60, on the 8th July, 1924. In his will, he
established the Lamme Medal of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers to recognise
members for “meritorious achievement.” His will also provided for the American Society for
Engineering Education to award a Gold Medal for achievements in technical teaching.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

1979 Seizing the Moment (Age of the Inventor-Entrepreneur), EPRI Journal, Electric Power
Research Institute, Palo Alto, California, March
1999 The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century: Nikola Tesla, Forgotten Genius of
Electricity, Robert Lomas, Dowager Books
2001 Tesla: Master of Lightning, Margaret Cheney & Robert Uth, MetroBooks, USA
2010 Westinghouse: The Life and Times of an American Icon [DVD, Region 1, NTSC]
2013 Westinghouse, Full Feature Documentary by Inecom Entertainment Company, USA
[Available on You Tube, duration 1 hour 50 minutes]
2016 George Westinghouse: The History of Electricity, Mary Bells (website)
------ George Westinghouse, Wikipedia
------ Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Wikipedia
------ Benjamin G Lamme, Wikipedia
------ G Westinghouse Jr., U.S. Patent Office Records
------ B G Lamme, U.S. Patent Office Records

In 1885, Westinghouse bought rights to the Parson’s steam turbine and improved the technology.
2010 Westinghouse: The Life and Times of an American Icon [DVD]
 EPILOGUE

George Westinghouse resigned from the company he founded in 1907 and by 1911 was no
longer active in business, due to declining health.

George Westinghouse died on the 12th March, 1914, in New York City at the age of 67. He was
initially interred in the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx in New York City. As a Civil War
veteran he was removed from Woodlawn in December 1915 and buried at the Arlington
National Cemetery. His wife Marguerite, who survived him by three months, was also buried
initially at Woodlawn, before being reinterred at Arlington.

Westinghouse secured 361 patents, the last four years after his death. This compares with over
1000 patents by Edison, who patented everything designed by one of his employees in the
Edison name, whereas Westinghouse allowed patents to be granted in the name of the employee
responsible.

In 1918, his former home Solitude was razed to the ground and the land donated to the City of
Pittsburgh to establish Westinghouse Park. In 1930, the Westinghouse Memorial, funded by his
employees, was placed in Pittsburgh’s Schenley Park, while in 1932 the Westinghouse Bridge,
near the site of his Turtle Creek factory was named in his honour. In 1986, his boyhood home
and birthplace in Central Bridge, New York, was added to the National Register of Historic
Places.
Headstone at the Arlington Grave of George Westinghouse and his wife

The George Westinghouse Memorial in Schenley Park, Pittsburgh

The George Westinghouse Centenary Celebration Medal, 1846-1946