The Birmingham age-herald., 1907-11-10

The great inventor has tried to move too fast and disaster, the inevitable result, has overtaken him. Westing- house never stops; he is always work ing, thinking out some problems They tell story of him that illustrates the point. He sat in Edward H. Harri- mans office one day discussing with him some one of the thousand and one troubles of the operating railroad man.. This one happened to be in a matter of car construction. Westinghouse had an idea. He left Hartman quite as abruptly as Hartman sometimes leaves his associates when the spirit moves. An hour later and Westinghouse was on his car speeding to Pittsburg,' cov- ering sheet after sheet of paper with rough drawings. By tn time he had reached the plant of the Westing gho ouse companies the drawings had assumed fairly definite shape. Westinghouse sent for one of his chief engineers.
 Make that,a he ordered, turning over a couple of sheets of paper.
 And in another hour Westinghouse was on his way back to New York
 At 15 Westinghouse had constructed a rotary engine and it was not long afterward that he passed his exami- nation for assistant engineer in the navy He continued inNthe naval ser vice until the close of the civil war and then took two years course in col lese. But the mech anical genius was too strong within him for an academic life and he went back to his experi- ments.
 Not long afterward he saw two freight trains come together because the engine of neither one could hold back it's string of cars after the dan ger of collision became apparent, and realized that 1t would be d mighty use- ful thing to have a bralxing arrange ment that could be operated by the engineer.
 The problem was to find suitable motive power for such 8 brake gov erned from an engine cab. Steam was obviously out of the question on ae- count of it's condensation; the applica- tion of electricity to practical me- chanics was then more than a dozen years away. There remained com- pressed air, which had already been availed of to some extent in tunnel bor- ing.
 George Westinghouse had in that day no skilled engineers to wh om he could take a rough drawing and say, Max that" He had no financial allies who might be willing to underwrite a mil-
 
 ing such time as the investing public itself wished to back his inventive en- ergy to that amount. No, he went around to the heads of railroads when his idea of an air brake had developed to what he considered the point of practical application, asking for a chance to demonstrate it on their roads. The railroad men were skepti- cal From one to another young Vest inghouse took his device and was turned down.
 On his behalf New York friend ap- proached old Commodore Vanderbilt to gain him hearing.
 "Does he think he can stop train with the wlnd?' queried the commodore.
 The sponsor for George Westinghouse said he supposed that was the glst of the scheme.
 "Then tell him that I haven't any time to waste on fools," snorted tho builder of the New York Central system.
 At last. in 1S6s Westinghouse got a chance to try out his air brake idea on the Panhandle railroad. of which the official title Is the Pittsburg. Fort Wayne and Chicago It not onfy proved an en- tire success, but, according to fupdamen tai Westinghouse tradition, saved the first train to which 1t waiS applied from a bad wreck in a washout That was rrob- ably what carried George Westinghouse to Pittsburg. He obtained lis first potent on the air brake on April B, 1SC9, and opened a small shop in Pittsburg to manu- fracture sufficient of his appliances for the Panhandle. That shop employed 100 men, as against 170o0 now employed in the Westinghouse plants in that city How he came to employ the other 46,0G0 makes a most interesting story.
 In 1870 Westinghouse went to Europe to introduce his invention. He had mean time invented a controlling device known as triple valve" so that the air could be applied simultaneously on every brake of long train, which was afterward followed by modification that sets the brakes instantly if car breAks away. Having introduced the air brake in Ell rope, its inventor applied the same idea to railroad switches, and then to signals, with such notable success that even the unwilling Commodore Vanderbilt had to recognize the value of the wind if prop erly applied-to other roads than his own.
 It was two score years ago that an engineer whom George Westinghouse sent to Europe to look around came home and reported to his chief that he had secured an option on an appliance where by electric currents of high potentiality could be transformed into currents of practicable voltage. The engineer was Schallenger, whose name has since be- come a familiar one in electric science. Westinghouse listened to the report, cabled to Europe to bind the option and within two hours had started Schallen- berger back for Europe to close the deal, That brought about the introduce tion of the alternating current in this s.raNlk 41..k eatk f.f carrying electricity over considerable dis tances, so that it might do it's work far away from the point of generation.
 Followed then the formation of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing company, and the popular announcement of the new motive power. Straightway an agitation developed, probably not alto gether inspired by concern for public as entrusted with private interest, against the use of the alternating current.
 The older electric companies insisted that the alternating current was far moro dangerous than the direct current, and necessarily that their system of lighting for the application of electricity within a wider sphere had hardly been thought of at that date-was the only one con sistent with safety. By various means of "aoceleration" public opinion was so far stirred up that in some states pro- hibitive legislation was seriously consid- cred but all the time that this was going on the experts in the factory at Pittsburg were developing the apparatus needed for an alternating current plant including generators transformers meas uring instruments and switches, until when bids were solicited for the great un- dertaking of lighting the Worlds Fair in Chicago in 1892 George Westinghouse not only entered the competition. but cap- tured the contract on a bid a million dol- lars less thap his nearest rival. Tn lS9O