Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [46]
Because they were relatively easy—and therefore inexpensive—to install, arc lighting systems spread more quickly than incandescent. The number of arc lamps in service in the United States jumped from 6,000 in 1881 to 140,000 in 1886. New York City followed the national trend during that period, with the number of arc street lights rising from S5 o 7°°> illuminating more than thirty miles of the city's avenues and major cross streets.14
Whereas the arc lighting industry was crowded with competitors, Edison enjoyed a virtual monopoly in incandescent lighting. Through the end of 1886, he controlled four times the market share of his closest competitor, the United States Electric Lighting Company. The mistake of U.S. Electric and Edison's other early rivals was in trying to compete with him directly. They could try to copy his system, but they did not have the Edison brand name and could not match the years of experience of Edison and his men. The competitors offered pale imitations of the Edison system, and most customers were wise enough 105 to choose the original article. Late in 1886, however, a formidable new challenger arrived.15
GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE was born in 1846 (ayear before Edison) in the upstate New York town of Central Bridge. When he was nine, his father opened a shop in Schenectady for making farm machinery and steam engines. The boy found his father's shop much more interesting than school, so he cut class and spent his days designing model powerboats, waterwheels, and other bits of "trumpery," as his father called them. Aside from his deft mechanical touch, young George was known for a volcanic temper and a sometimes misguided devotion to efficiency. A story was told about the day his father whipped George for misbehavior. After the wooden switch broke twice, George choked back his sobs long enough to point out a leather whip that would do the job more competently.16
In 1863, at the age of seventeen, Westinghouse enlisted as a cavalryman in the Union army. Early the next year he transferred to the navy and put his mechanical skills to use on steam-powered gunboats. After the war he enrolled at Union College in Schenectady but did not last long. "He was my despair," one of his teachers recalled. "While the other boys were struggling with German syntax or French pronunciation, he would amuse himself making pencil drawings on his wristbands. His sketches were always of locomotives, stationary engines, or something of that sort." The school dismissed Westinghouse after three months, which was just as well with him, for he could then work on machines rather than draw them on his cuffs. Soon after leaving school, he invented a device for putting derailed trains back on track, as well as a new type of "frog," the mechanism that allowed trains to move from one track to another. Westinghouse persuaded two local investors to finance the manufacture of the devices, and before long he was a partner in a thriving industrial operation.17
While returning home from a business trip one day, Westinghouse was delayed by an earlier head-on collision between two freight trains. He wandered up to inspect the damage and fell into conversation with the chief of the wrecking crew. It was a straight stretch of track, the man explained, and the engineers saw each other, but they could not halt in time. "You can't stop a train in a minute," the man said.18
George Westinghouse
When an engineer needed to halt his train, he used a whistle to signal to the brakeman, who climbed to the roof of a car and twisted a wheel that tightened a chain that pressed the car's brake shoe against the rail. Then he jumped to the next car and repeated the maneuver. It was a slow process even in routine circumstances, and trains often overshot stations and had to back up to the platform. In an emergency, such as when two trains were hurtling toward each other on the same track, they were usually stopped not by brakes but by impact.19
Westinghouse decided to build a better brake. He first tried using steam lines running the length of the train: The