An Appreciation of George Westinghouse

Canadian writer Herbert N. Casson offers this brief admiration of George Westinghouse.

I invite you to spend five minutes in reading the story of George Westinghouse for the following reasons:

(1) He was an INVENTOR who built up a company with $60,000,000 assets.

(2) He was an EMPLOYER who had 50,000 workers who never went on strike.

(3) He was a MAN who became rich and famous, but who remained simple, friendly and useful to the last day of his life. …

Westinghouse was born poor... His father was a sort of carpenter-farmer, in a tiny village.

He was born in 1846; and it is worth mentioning that for a year before his birth his father was engaged in the invention of a threshing machine. There were prenatal influences that destined the baby boy to be a great inventor.

At school young George Westinghouse was a failure; at least, so the teacher said. He was a big, clumsy boy, a ready fighter and with a will and temper that made him uncontrollable.

He was always at the foot of the class; and his parents and the teacher wondered what would ever become of him. Like Darwin, Edison, Clive, and many others, he was an “ugly duckling” who grew up to be a swan.

Whenever he could he ran away from school and made engines out of wood with his jackknife. Usually, his father caught him and smashed the engine.

At last, one of his father’s workmen took pity on the boy and fitted up a little workshop in a hayloft where his predatory father could not find George.

At fourteen he quit school and became a worker for his father for fifty cents a day. Even this amount was too much, so his father thought, as the lad spent his time trying to invent a machine to do his work.

“His one desire,” said his puzzled father, “is to avoid work.”

At seventeen he became a soldier in the Civil War. He joined the cavalry because he thought riding would be easier than walking; and he was greatly disappointed when he found he would have to care for his own horse.

At nineteen he went to college, but he felt as much out of place as a fish in a bag of feathers. “He was my despair,” said one of the Professors. His brain craved creative work, not the memorizing of dead languages.

So, on the advice of the Head of the college, young Westinghouse went back home and became a mechanic. He worked for his father for $2 a day.

At twenty, very luckily, he was in a railway wreck. Two coaches jumped the track and the line was blocked for two hours.

At once he thought of an invention to put the cars on the track in half an hour. He patented this and actually found two men who bought a share in the patent for $5,000 apiece.

This was the beginning of his real career. From that moment, he spent his whole life in inventing improvements for railways.

At this time, too, he fell in love. He met a beautiful girl named Marguerite Walker in a railway coach—all his good fortune came from railways. He courted her and married her; and she became the inseparable partner of all his failures and successes.

She, in her own way, was fully as clever and original as he was himself. She was always more to him than all the world. She stood with him all through life and followed him quickly in death.

Soon after his marriage Westinghouse saw another railway wreck. Two trains had collided, head on. The track was level and straight. He asked why the collision had happened.

“The two engineers saw each other, but they couldn’t stop,” said the stationmaster. “They hadn’t time. You can’t stop a train in a moment.”

Westinghouse still asked why. He studied the old-fashioned hand-brake system and found it was hopeless.

Some better way was needed, so that the driver could stop his own train. He studied this problem for months. He tried using a long chain, tightened by the driver, but it was too clumsy. He tried steam, but it was affected by heat and cold.

Then came a lucky accident. One morning a young woman came into his office, asking for subscriptions to a magazine called “The Living Age.”

She asked Westinghouse. He refused rather roughly and she turned away sadly. He noticed that she was gentle and timid, and he regretted his roughness. He called her back and gave her $2.

“You may send me your magazine for a few months,” he said.

Soon the first number came and Westinghouse, who had never been a reader, was surprised to find an article that solved the brake problem.

The article was entitled, “In the Mont Cenis Tunnel.” It was written by an English engineer, and it told how the tunnel had been dug by the use of compressed air.

This engineer told how compressed air was carried 3,000 feet in a pipe and used to drive a drill through the solid rock of Mont Cenis.

Westinghouse shouted with joy. Here was the hint he had needed. If compressed air could be used to drive a drill, why could it not be used to operate the brakes of a train?

He threw everything else aside and hurled himself into the task of making the first airbrake. In a few weeks he had one finished. It worked. In a jiffy he had become one of the greatest inventors of the world.

Of course, he had the usual difficulties that confront every pioneer. The railway men thought he was a hare-brained fool. His own father refused to lend him any money for such child’s-play as an air-brake.

Westinghouse tramped from one railway office to another, and was treated as a mild lunatic by most railway managers. “Stopping a train by wind! What next!”

At last he found a railway man who had courage and sense—W. W. Card, of the Panhandle Railway.

Mr. Card agreed to allow Westinghouse to make a trial, on condition that he paid all his own expenses.

By this time Westinghouse had no money at all, but he agreed. Then he ran around among his friends and borrowed every penny he could get. A young man named Ralph Baggaley gave him the most help at this time.

A trial run was made. The driver was a keen young man named Daniel Tate; and just before the start, Westinghouse tipped Tate a $50 note.

“Give the brake a fair chance, Dan,” he said. This was all the money that Westinghouse had, and it was borrowed.

Then came a bit of pure luck. The trial train was running at thirty miles an hour when a teamster drove across the track a short distance in front. The driver lashed the horses, but they reared backwards and flung him between the rails.

Tate turned on the air-brake. The train stopped—four feet from the prostrate driver. Such was the sensational debut of the air-brake. After that, there were plenty of orders and plenty of $50 notes.

Three years later, Westinghouse visited England and had a second battle with railway managers. His best friend was Engineering, which took his side from the first. And his first order came from the Metropolitan District Railway of London.

By 1881 the air-brake had become the standard brake. Westinghouse had a large factory at Pittsburg. At thirty-five he had become rich and famous.

He lived thirty-three years longer and every year was packed with new ideas and inventions. He plunged into electrical work and gas engines. He grew new factories as a farmer grows corn.

As his men said, “No one can ever guess where the Old Man will break out next.”

He was not spoiled by his success. He was strong-willed and dominating, as every strong man must be; but he never lost touch with his workers.

His workers were more loyal to him than his bankers and he lost the financial control of his business.

Once his workers offered to take half-pay, because they knew he was in need of money. At another time his men raised $600,000 to help him carry on at a time when he was pinched.

Earnest, tense, honest, fair, aggressive, optimistic, energetic, courageous—such was George Westinghouse. He was proud of his workmen. He trained them and worked beside them. He loved work and working people. And when he died in 1914, his pallbearers were eight old mechanics, who had been his fellow-workers for more than forty years.