George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla

George Westinghouse

Born October 6, 1846

Central Bridge, New York

Died March 12, 1914

New York, New York

Nikola Tesla

Born July 10, 1856

Smiljan, Croatia

Died January 7, 1943

New York, New York

American inventors

"George Westinghouse was a man with tremendous potential energy of which only part had taken kinetic (moving) form.... When others would give up in despair, he triumphed."

—Nikola Tesla on George Westinghouse.

George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla were highly intelligent inventors who together were responsible for a major turning point in the Industrial Revolution, a period of fast-paced economic change that began in Great Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century. Tesla developed a generator, a machine that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy, which made it possible to power motors using alternating current (AC). Westinghouse, having already made a fortune by inventing the air brake, bought the patent Tesla had obtained for his AC motor and then hired him to work at his Pennsylvania manufacturing plant.

Westinghouse stood out as both a great inventor and a shrewd businessman. In an era when railroads were spreading rapidly and a way of stopping long freight trains was critical, there was a great demand for his air brakes. He later made an even more profound contribution by making possible the widespread use of electricity used for lighting, motors, and home appliances.

Tesla was undoubtedly one of the greatest inventive geniuses of the Industrial Revolution. Besides championing AC and developing the generator, he invented an early speedometer and radio-controlled devices. And it can be argued that he invented the radio. Before his death in 1943, Tesla had acquired more than one hundred patents. His famous Tesla coil and other inventions have since become integral to modern technology.

The genius of Westinghouse

George Westinghouse was the son of a modestly successful manufacturer of agricultural machinery. As a boy, George greatly preferred working in his father's shop to going to school. At age ten, his family moved to Schenectady, New York, where George established his own workshop in the attic of the family home.

The story is told that his father agreed to pay George fifty cents a day to cut pipe into specified lengths. Young George agreed, and within just a few hours he invented a machine to do the cutting. It was only the first of many useful George Westinghouse inventions. At age fifteen, he developed a form of rotary steam-engine (one that made a circular motion, rather than the established up-and-down motion of pistons).

During the U.S. Civil War (1861–65), Westinghouse served first in the Union (that of the Northern states) cavalry, then in the U.S. Navy as an assistant engineer. Later, he enrolled in Union College, but dropped out after a year to work on his inventions. In 1865 he patented a device to get derailed railroad cars back onto the rails.

Westinghouse the inventor

Westinghouse was twenty-three years old when he developed the device that would earn him his first fortune: railroad air brakes, which he patented in 1869. Railroads were rapidly expanding as a means of hauling heavy loads of ore, coal, and manufactured goods over long distances, but they had one big disadvantage: to stop a train, brakes had to be applied by hand on each car, plus on the locomotive. This drawback limited the speed and length of trains, and also contributed to frequent accidents. Westinghouse's invention enabled the locomotive engineer to apply powerful brakes along the length of the train, which made trains safer and more manageable, and it also allowed them to run at higher speeds.

Armed with his patent, Westinghouse took the next step and formed the Westinghouse Air Brake Company. His invention made the company a fortune, but it was typical of Westinghouse that he did not stop there; this was just the first of many companies he formed to manufacture and sell inventions, either his own or those of others.

The Life of George Westinghouse at a Glance

1846:

Born in Central Bridge, New York.

1865:

Receives his first patent—for rotary steam engine.

1869:

Patents the air brake; forms Westinghouse Air Brake Company.

1881:

Forms Westinghouse Machine Company.

1882:

Organizes Union Switch and Signal Company.

1886:

Forms Westinghouse Electric Company, later called Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company.

1890:

Begins manufacturing electric motors for railroads.

1893:

Westinghouse Electric company lights the Columbian Exposition (Fair) in Chicago.

1895:

Uses Niagara Falls to generate electricity.

1898–1903:

Organizes subsidiaries in Russia, Britain, France, Germany, and Canada.

1905:

Converts New York City subways and elevated trains to electric power.

1907:

Financial panic (stock market crash and run on banks) causes Westinghouse to lose control of his companies.

1914:

Dies in New York.

1918:

Receives his last patent, four years after his death.

Westinghouse had been able to see the "big picture" of how things work. He realized that his air brake was not just a brake, but a system for controlling trains. This led to his next invention: a railroad signaling system that used electricity to tell locomotive engineers when to stop and when to go. As railroads were just developing, many stretches of the railroad had just one pair of rails, so trains had to stop at designated places to allow for the passage of oncoming trains. Like the air brake, Westinghouse's signaling system was an almost immediate success. It also introduced him to the potential of electricity.

Westinghouse the businessman

Westinghouse was not just a great inventor. The history of the Industrial Revolution is filled with stories of inventors who were never able to make money from their ideas, demonstrating that cleverness in design or engineering is only half the formula for success. The other half is establishing and running successful business enterprises, which Westinghouse did.

The key to success for Westinghouse was to form a new company right after he patented a new invention, to make sure that he would benefit from the idea. He applied the principle not only in the United States, but overseas as well, establishing companies in the major European countries to manufacture and sell his system of automatic air brakes for railroads.

Westinghouse's inventive genius did not prevent him from recognizing the importance of other inventors' contributions. In 1888 Westinghouse acquired the rights held by another inventor, Nikola Tesla, to develop and use alternating current (AC) instead of the direct current (DC), which was favored by the already famous Thomas Edison (1847–1931). Westinghouse invited Tesla to come work for him and provided him with sophisticated research facilities.

Nikola Tesla and the age of electricity

Nikola Tesla could easily fill the role of a classic mad scientist. He imagined things that other men could not, such as the possibility of transmitting voices through the air (ultimately leading to the invention of the radio). Tesla was sure he had received communications from intelligent creatures from other planets, and he boasted that he could split the Earth in two like an apple. He was afraid of women wearing pearl earrings, and his idea of how to behave at a dinner included calculating the cubic volume of the food on his plate.

It would be a mistake, however, to let a discussion of his odd behavior overshadow the profoundly useful and practical inventions Tesla created. It was fortunate for the world, and perhaps for Nikola Tesla as well, that George Westinghouse brought practicality to bear on Tesla's unique mind.

Tesla was born in 1856 in the small town of Smiljan, which is today located in the country of Croatia but was then part of the empire of Austria-Hungary. His father was a minister, and his mother had a reputation for being inventive. Tesla attended schools in his hometown and in the nearby city of Gospic, and he later studied at universities in Europe. In 1881 he found a job at the Central Telegraph Office in Budapest, Hungary, and while there invented a telephone amplifier (which intensifies a weak electrical current). The following year he moved to Paris, France, to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, owned by Thomas Edison.

Working for Edison

In 1884 Tesla left Europe for the United States, equipped with four cents and a job offer from Thomas Edison, who was already widely recognized as a top American inventor responsible for the spread of electricity throughout the country. But the twenty-eight-year-old immigrant from Croatia had a difference of opinion with Edison regarding the distribution of electrical currents: the subject was direct current (DC) versus alternating current (AC). Tesla explained to Edison his plans for a motor based on AC, which he found to be less problematic than DC and capable of higher voltage. Edison insisted that Tesla's designs for this new motor were impractical and dangerous.

Despite the differences of opinion, the new immigrant worked for Edison for a year, designing DC motors for the Edison Machine Works in New York City. The two inventors also had radically different approaches to their work: Edison was famous for inventing by tinkering and testing, and Tesla's approach was to imagine solutions in his head, and then to build them.

Tesla was eventually let go from Edison's labs. The differences in style were too great, and Tesla's insistence on AC threatened Edison's deeply held belief in DC.

Teaming up with Westinghouse

Almost immediately, George Westinghouse bought Tesla's patent rights to motors and transformers that used AC. Westinghouse offered Tesla a job in the Westinghouse laboratories as well as future royalties (a percentage of revenue or profits earned in the future) for the use of his ideas.

Westinghouse and his new employee launched a huge struggle with Edison over the issue of whether DC or AC would dominate. Eventually, alternating current won out, principally for two reasons: using alternating current, it was possible to send electric power over wires for many miles, whereas direct current could travel for only about two miles. Second, alternating current, unlike direct current, could be sent in a great concentration and then powered down at the far end.

Westinghouse and Edison fought bitterly over the issue of AC versus DC. Edison tried to convince government authorities that alternating current was dangerous and should be banned. (At one point, opponents of alternating current used a Westinghouse AC generator to electrocute a condemned prisoner in New York State to demonstrate its danger.) But the greater practicality of alternating current, especially the ability to distribute it over long distances from a centralized generator, became more important. AC remains the worldwide standard into the twenty-first century. The symbolic end of the struggle came in 1917, when Tesla won the highest honor awarded by the American Institute of Electric Engineers. Ironically, it is called the Edison Medal.

More original ideas

Tesla's development of alternating current was just the start of a long string of inventions. His partnership with Westinghouse gave him the opportunity to design what may have been Tesla's greatest achievement: the world's first hydroelectric generating plant. Completed in 1895 and located in Niagara Falls, New York, the plant distributed electrical current to Niagara Falls and to Buffalo, New York, some twenty-three miles away. In 1897, Westinghouse and Tesla astounded people attending the World's Fair in Chicago by using an AC generator to flip on lights throughout the fair grounds.

The Basics of Electricity

What we call electricity is the flow of electrons, particles that are smaller than atoms. Flowing electrons are so small that they can squeeze between atoms and thereby flow through a length of wire. This flow of electrons is called the current, and it goes in a circle—from where it started and back again—in what is called an electric circuit.

Electrons find it easier to flow between the atoms of some materials than of others. With copper, for example, it is fairly easy for electrons to squeeze between the atoms—which is the reason that copper is most often used in electric wires.

The degree of difficulty in pushing through the atoms is called resistance. Think of trying to shove through a crowd of people. Big, heavy adults jammed into a small space would be harder to get through than a group of kids playing on a playground. When it's hard to get through the crowd of atoms, the electrons create heat (similar to the way friction creates heat when two objects are rubbed together). The more resistance there is to the flow of electrons, the more heat is generated. In fact, wires that generate a lot of resistance get so hot they glow. In a lightbulb, for example, the circuit includes a very thin wire called the filament. With a large number ofelectrons trying to shove through at the same time, the filament glows brightly, which is how lightbulbs give light. When the thin filament eventually breaks (from being heated and cooled a number of times), it breaks the circuit. The bulb has "burned out." The flow of electricity can be used to create heat by increasing the resistance to the flow—the principle used in an electric toaster or oven.

There is another feature of electric current that is also highly useful. If wire is wrapped around a nail and electricity is sent through the wire (from a flashlight battery, for example), the nail becomes a magnet. Magnets can be used to push or pull things made of metal. This is the basic principle of the electric motor: a coil of wire is magnetized, and the magnetism is used to move the parts of the motor and create a rotating motion. This can be done with tiny motors, and also with huge ones (such as those used in electric train locomotives).

Unlike steam engines or engines powered with gasoline, electric motors can take electricity from wires, such as the ones inside buildings, as well as wires strung overhead along railroad tracks. An electric train, therefore, does not need to carry its own fuel—it can be sent to the train through the wires.

Tesla began working with increasing electric current that changed directions more frequently, called high-frequency. This resulted in the creation of waves that could transmit energy through the air, which is the basic principle of radio and television. He invented a device called the Tesla coil that was still used a century later in radios and other devices. (This work is the basis for the claim that it was Tesla, not the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi [1874–1937], who invented the radio. In 1943 the U.S. Supreme Court disallowed a key Marconi patent for radio technology, recognizing Tesla's earlier work.) Tesla also worked on the principle of the X ray at the same time as the German scientist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845–1923), who is generally recognized as discovering X rays. Tesla used the ability to transmit energy through the air to develop the earliest version of a remote control.

In 1899 Tesla established a research laboratory in the town of Colorado Springs, Colorado, about sixty miles south of Denver (in part, it was thought, to avoid destroying New York City with his experiments in high voltage). Using funds invested by the New York banker J. P. Morgan (1837–1913; see entry), Tesla worked on transmitting free energy through the air on a global scale. When Morgan heard more about Tesla's experiments, he is said to have asked: "If anyone can draw on the power, where do we put the meter?" (In other words, how can we get people to pay for this?) It was the end of Morgan's financial support.

During his stay in Colorado Springs, experimenting with wireless transmitters (that is, radio), Tesla insisted he had
received a message from another planet or galaxy. While wireless transmission of messages on Earth could be demonstrated, interplanetary communications were difficult to believe. Along with some of his personal habits—such as showing a strong fear of germs—Tesla acquired the reputation of an extreme eccentric, even as his inventions were lighting the world.

Bringing major change to the twentieth century

George Westinghouse had licensed about forty of Tesla's patents, and he went on to build one of the great industrial empires in the United States. Royalties paid by Westinghouse helped fund Tesla's continuing experiments.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Westinghouse was said to have employed fifty thousand people in fifteen companies in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The value of his companies was about $120 million (about $6.4 billion in 2000 prices), many times the amount of Tesla's personal wealth.

Westinghouse's activities were by no means limited to the inventions of Tesla. Westinghouse was active in several areas, from building huge generators to create electricity to making home electric appliances. It was Westinghouse who built the powerful electric motors that displaced both steam and petroleum as the power for railroad locomotives, thus combining the business of making the trains move (motors) and stop (air brakes), with the signaling system that told the locomotive engineer when to do one or the other. And it was Westinghouse who developed the system used today to distribute electricity by combining the ideas of Tesla and a device based on work by Lucient Gaulard of France and John Gibbs of Britain and perfected by William Stanley (1858–1916), an American electrical engineer employed by Westinghouse.

Panic and decline

In 1907 a financial panic hit the New York Stock Exchange. Investors lost confidence in the future and started selling stocks. People also worried that their paper currency would become worthless if banks could not convert it into gold, and they started rushing to the bank to get gold while they could. The panic of 1907 marked a major transformation in the Industrial Revolution. After that point, finance emerged as even more important than engineering (designing new machines) or manufacturing. Without large sums of money, businesses could not afford to keep operating, regardless of how clever their machines or how efficient their manufacturing.

Although Westinghouse was famous for forming a new company to accommodate every new invention he made or that he licensed from others, new businesses required capital (monetary investments or loans). As a result of the financial crisis in New York, Westinghouse was suddenly expected to pay back his loans. Unable to come up with the cash, Westinghouse was forced to hand over stock, losing control of his industrial empire. By 1911 Westinghouse stopped playing an active role in the companies he had founded.

His declining business fortunes did not extinguish his inventive light, however. In 1910 he founded another company, his last, to exploit a new type of spring to take the jolts out of automobiles. The invention came to be called the shock absorber.

In his last two years of life, Westinghouse's health declined, and he was forced to use a wheelchair; he responded by working on an invention for an electric-powered version. Westinghouse died on March 12, 1914. Four years after his death a patent he had applied for was finally granted, bringing the total number of patents he received to 361.

Tesla's end

Westinghouse's business misfortunes also affected Nikola Tesla. Westinghouse could not afford to pay the generous royalties the partners had agreed upon earlier. In the meantime, Tesla had turned his attention to projects that proved far less practicable than his earlier work. He lived in a two-room hotel suite in New York City, continuing to conduct research and write magazine articles but exhibiting increasingly eccentric behavior and gradually fading into obscurity.

Tesla died in New York City in January 1943 at age eighty-six. He had few friends and little money, despite receiving hundreds of patents in his lifetime.

For More Information

Books

Aaseng, Nathan. The Problem Solvers. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publications, 1989.

Cheney, Margaret. Tesla: Man Out of Time. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001.

Hunt, Inez, and Wanetta W. Draper. Lightning in His Hand: The Life Story of Nikola Tesla. Hawthorne, CA: Omni Publications, 1981.

Levine, I. E. Inventive Wizard: George Westinghouse. New York: J. Messner, 1962.

O'Neill, John J. Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla. Hollywood, CA: Angriff Press, 1981.

Seifer, Marc J. Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla: Biography of a Genius. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Pub., 1996.

Thomas, Henry. George Westinghouse. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1960.

Periodicals

D'Alto, Nick. "Edison, Tesla, and the Battle of the Currents: Should Electricity be AC or DC?" Odyssey, February 2002, p. 20.

Johnson, Jeff. "'Extraordinary Science' and the Strange Legacy of Nikola Tesla." Skeptical Inquirer, Summer 1994, p. 366.

Johnson, Jeff. "Nikola Tesla: Genius, Visionary, and Eccentric." Skeptical Inquirer, Summer 1994, 368.

Johnson, Jeff. "Tesla's Inventions: A Critique." Skeptical Inquirer, Summer 1994, p. 372.

Leone, Marie, et al. "Edison and Tesla: The Founding Fathers of Electricity." Electrical World, January–February 2000, p. 41.

Usselman, Steven W. "From Novelty to Utility: George Westinghouse and the Business of Innovation during the Age of Edison." Business History Review, Summer 1992, p. 251.

Web Sites

"About George Westinghouse." Library of Congress.http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/papr/west/westgorg.html (accessed on February 18, 2003).

George Westinghouse Virtual Museum.http://www.georgewestinghouse.com/museum.html (accessed on February 18, 2003).

Kurtus, Ron. "Alternating Current Electricity (AC)." School for Champions.http://www.school-for-champions.com/science/ac.htm (accessed on February 18, 2003).

"Nikola Tesla." Freedom of Information Act, Federal Bureau of Information.http://foia.fbi.gov/tesla.htm (accessed on February 18, 2003).

"Tesla: Master of Lightning." Public Broadcasting Service.http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ (accessed on February 18, 2003).

Wicks, Frank. "How George Westinghouse Changed the World." Mechanical Engineering Magazine.http://www.memagazine.org/backissues/october96/features/westingh/westingh.html (accessed on February 18, 2003).