Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [47]
Like Edison with the electric lamp, Westinghouse was attacking a problem that many had attempted before. There were already more 107 than two dozen patents covering automatic braking systems, including one using compressed air. But Westinghouse was the first inventor to build a practical system and the first to organize for its manufacture. After trials proved the worth of his system, a few wealthy railroad men formed the Westinghouse Air Brake Corporation in 1869. They built a factory in Pittsburgh, capitalized the company at $500,000, and named George Westinghouse president. He was twenty-two years old. In the decade after its invention, the Westinghouse air brake became standard equipment on passenger trains around the world.20
In the early 1880s both Westinghouse and Edison were wealthy industrialists in their early thirties, but the two men played the role very differently. Unlike the smooth-cheeked Edison, Westinghouse cultivated the extravagant facial hair common at the time: bushy side whiskers and a handlebar mustache. Whereas Edison was boyish and playful, Westinghouse, over six feet tall and barrel-chested, was an imposing, stern figure. Most strikingly, Westinghouse avoided granting interviews or being photographed. "When I want newspaper advertising, I will order it and pay cash," he once said. "If my face becomes too familiar to the public, every bore or crazy schemer I meet in the street will insist on buttonholing me." Although the company bore his name, Westinghouse did not attempt to sell himself along with his products. An engineer who worked in the Pittsburgh factory said Westinghouse never struck him "as being a wizard, but he seemed to be a plain human being with lots of initiative, with nerve to attempt difficult things."21
Having conquered the railroad brake industry, Westinghouse went looking for new challenges. According to Thomas Edison's secretary, a fit of pique drove Westinghouse into the lighting business. When Westinghouse tried to interest Edison in a steam engine he had invented, Edison supposedly replied, "Tell Westinghouse to stick to air brakes. He knows all about them. He doesn't know anything about engines." Westinghouse, so the story goes, decided to avenge the insult by competing with Edison.22
108 The true story is more mundane. Westinghouse first met Edison when he visited Menlo Park while looking for an isolated lighting plant for his Pittsburgh house. Edison showed him around the lab, and West inghouse later recalled the visit warmly. He entered the light business not out of spite but for the same reason so many others did: He saw profit and glory in it. Early in 1884 he met a young electrical expert named William Stanley, who had worked for U.S. Electric and other electric lighting companies, and brought him to Pittsburgh to develop an incandescent lighting system. In 1885 and 1886 Westinghouse and Stanley installed isolated lighting plants in hotels in New York and Pittsburgh and built a central station in Trenton, New Jersey. But Westinghouse ran into the same problem that stymied U.S. Electric: His system was too similar to Edison's to be competitive with it.23
DESPITE ITS SUCCESS, Edison's light suffered from a serious weakness. The feeder-and-main and three-wire distribution systems lowered copper costs somewhat, but Edison still could not serve areas more than a mile or so away from the generating plant. There was, though, an inexpensive way to cut copper usage and broaden the service area of a central station: by boosting the voltage.
The behavior of electricity can be thought of in terms of water flowing through pipes. A pump (voltage) drives the flow, the diameter of the pipe determines resistance, and the