George Westinghouse Accomplishments

George Westinghouse Jr., who was a prolific inventor, engineer, and industrialist, had the aspiration to turn dreams into enterprises. He was an ambitious teenager that had a mind filled with ideas, which he used to seize every opportunity to improve the efficiency of technology. There are a lot of notable achievements that George Westinghouse was responsible for, including but not limited to the introduction, development, and improvement of alternating current for light and power more than any other man that was known. Foreseeing the potential of alternating current he founded Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company along with 59 other companies; he is also accounted for over 100 patents for his work. In the process he helped improve

was born in Central Bridge, New York on October 6, 1846. George Jr. was the eighth of ten children born to an American toolmaker and his wife, George Westinghouse Sr. and Emmeline Vedder. In 1856, the Westinghouse family moved to Schenectady, New York, where George Sr. established the firm of G. Westinghouse & Company for the manufacturing and production of small steam engines and agricultural machinery. During the American Civil War, George Jr. served in the Union Army and Navy from 1863-1866, then briefly attended Union College for about 3 months. In 1865, at the age of 19 years old he dropped out after filling a patent for his first invention, a rotary steam engine that was fairly successful. In that same year he was making substantial advancements in various railroad technologies while working at his father’s machine shop he also invented a device for placing derailed freight cars back onto their track. He had a continuance in railroad which led Westinghouse to his first major invention. With the tribulations and limitations of observing stopping of trains and manually-operated brakes, he developed a method of using brakes actuated by compressed air. Finally, he had turned this idea into the Westinghouse Air Brake Company, which was founded in 1869. There were additional features added to the design, the air brake became widely acknowledged, and the Railroad Safety Appliance Act of 1893 made air brakes compulsory on all of the American trains.

When purchasing patents to combine with his own inventions, he also developed a complete electrical and compressed-air signal system. These ideas evolved into the Union Switch and signal Company, which were founded 1881 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There was a well that was drilled in the yard of Westinghouse’s home which had led to several dozen inventions for the control and distribution of natural gas. Most of his ideas were the basis for founding a company to distribute gas in Pittsburgh area and the knowledge he gained from this work had pointed him in a good direction of a better distribution system for electric current. He also invented a reduction valve that permitted high-pressure gas from well to be delivered at low pressure at the point of use. He reasoned that a similar device could work with electricity and found in a so-called secondary generator developed in England. William Stanely, a skilled associate, he turned the unfinished secondary generator into a transformer that proved to be the solution to widespread distribution of electric power. With his firm faith in the alternating-current system led to the founding of the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company in 1886, he soon purchased the related patents of Nikola Tesla for $60,000 in cash and stock in the Westinghouse