For Tantrums & Hard Work

Last week in Schenley Park, Pittsburgh, a strangely assorted crowd stood about a new bronze statue. In the group were famed financiers in custom-made clothes, old workmen whose trousers showed a bag at the knees through the newly acquired press, young mechanics with large browned hands. All of them were there to honor the late great George Westinghouse, inventor, industrialist. Many present had worked with him, had known him as "The Old Man," whose impetuous, unreasoning temper and whose wholehearted consideration were amazing contradictions. The statue, erected by Westinghouse employes and friends, memorialized the genius which, though lately overshadowed by publicity for Thomas Alva Edison, was one of the . main generators of the Electrical Age.

George Westinghouse was born in Central Bridge, N. Y. on Oct. 6, 1846. His father kept a machine shop where George's brothers worked dutifully after school. George, however, enjoyed neither the machine shop nor the school. In both places people were always telling him what to do. After he grew up he said, "I have always known what I wanted, and how to get it. As a child I got it by tantrums; in mature years, by hard work."

His unfailing confidence in his ability to do and get what he wanted, was largely responsible for the ultimate success of his more radical inventions and industrial developments. Ideas for inventions flashed suddenly into his mind, were worked upon unceasingly until a whole industry had developed. Twice, because he was held up by train wrecks, he conceived ideas to improve rail transportation. His first wreck, when he was 20, resulted in an appliance to replace derailed cars and a reversible steel frog which could be used instead of the ineffective cast iron frogs common at that time. His second accident, when he was 21, suggested the possibility of an airbrake instead of the unwieldy chain brake which had to be set one-half mile before the train stop. When he was sure of the success of his airbrake, he told the idea to Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who answered him by saying, "What! Stop a locomotive with wind? I have no time to talk with fools." These three inventions started him on a long list of achievements: automatic railway signals and switches, the jet steam turbine, first automatic central telephone exchange, a gas meter, a pipe system for transmitting natural gas. Although he at first distrusted the dependability of electricity and worked for years on his airbrake so he could make the action of the brake fast enough without using electricity, he eventually became known as one of the chief exponents of alternating current. In 1892 he became associated with Edward Dean Adams in his project for the development of power from Niagara Falls (TIME, May 27, 1929). He built alternating current generators on the design perfected by Georges Forbes, Scottish professor-inventor. He fought enthusiastically the champions of direct cur rent who, led by Edison and Lord Kelvin, insisted that the high voltages of alter nating current were too dangerous to make up for the advantages of easier and cheaper transmission. With every invention George Westinghouse organized a company to make and sell his product. He formed Westinghouse Air Brake Co. (1869), Westinghouse Machine Co. (1880, later became Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Co.), Union Switch & Signal Co. (1881), Philadelphia Co. (1884), Westinghouse Electric Co. (1886). Today the Westinghouse name, which was guarded carefully against personal publicity by George Westinghouse, is attached to industries which employ 70,000 people in U. S., Canada, Europe and Japan.

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