George Westinghouse and the Air Brake

In April eighteen sixty-nine, a twenty-three-year-old engineer named George Westinghouse demonstrated a new invention on a passenger train running between Pittsburgh and Steubenville, Ohio. The train came out of a tunnel, and the engineer spotted a horse-drawn wagon blocking the track ahead at a station. He grabbed for the new brake. The train stopped ten feet from the wagon.

What Westinghouse had invented was the railroad air brake, a system that used compressed air to apply brakes simultaneously to every car in the train from a single control in the locomotive. Before his invention, trains stopped car by car, with brakemen stationed on each one turning hand wheels on command. Long trains were essentially uncontrollable in an emergency. Accidents were catastrophic and common.

Westinghouse incorporated the Westinghouse Air Brake Company on September twenty-eighth, eighteen sixty-nine, the same year. He was backed by Alexander Cassatt, later president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who understood exactly what it meant. The air brake made longer trains possible, which made heavier loads possible, which made the railroad economy of the Gilded Age possible. Westinghouse received United States patent number eighty-eight thousand nine hundred and twenty-nine for the device.

That was only the beginning. Between eighteen seventy and nineteen hundred, Westinghouse founded over a dozen companies, many headquartered in Pittsburgh. He built a manufacturing complex in East Pittsburgh that employed tens of thousands of workers. He championed alternating current electrical systems in the so-called War of Currents against Thomas Edison, bringing Nikola Tesla's patents into the Westinghouse Electric Company and winning the contract to light the Chicago World's Fair of eighteen ninety-three.

His plants in East Pittsburgh and nearby Forest Hills became the birthplace of modern electrical infrastructure. The man who stopped a runaway train electrified half the world.