March 1914: George Westinghouse

One of the peculiarities of obituaries in archive editions of The Engineer is that they often don’t cover what you might expect them to. We remember George Westinghouse as the father of alternating current, and for his ‘war of the currents’ with Thomas Edison, who was a proponent of direct current, believing it safer. It’s a colourful story, taking in as it does the deliberate electrocution of an unfortunate elephant called Topsy (by Edison). The Engineer’s lengthy obituary of Westinghouse doesn’t mention rivalry with Edison once; indeed it hardly mentions AC at all.

In fact, the bulk of the obituary is dedicated to one of Westinghouse’s earlier inventions: the railway air brake. Westinghouse began to think about this when he was about 20, after he was delayed for two hours between his home in Schenectady, New York and the Bessemmer Steel plant in Troy, New York, by the collision of two freight trains. ‘The loss of time and inconvenience arising from this accident suggested that if the drivers of the two trains had had some way of applying brakes to all the wheels the accident might never had happened’ the obituary says (continues below).