by Jill Jonnes
From the start, George Westinghouse had machines in his blood, spending his formative years in Schenectady, New York, a small village overlooking that rich commercial waterway the Erie Canal. There young Westinghouse worked amid the pounding screech and whine of the family machine shop, which successfully manufactured threshing machines of his father’s own design. When the War Between the States broke out, George, a mere stripling of fifteen, immediately ran off to serve, as had two older brothers. His father pulled him home. Two years later, as the fighting and dying dragged bloodily on, George, seventeen, was allowed to enlist, serving first with the cavalry and then with the navy. When the Civil War came to its weary end, George Westinghouse briefly attended Union College before returning gratefully to the family machine shop. That fall, at age nineteen, he patented his first invention, a rotary engine. Years later Westinghouse would say, “My early greatest capital was the experience and skill acquired from the opportunity given me, when I was young, to work with all kinds of machinery, coupled later with the lessons in that discipline to which a soldier is required to submit.”6
So, in the beginning of 1885, as George Westinghouse, industrialist-entrepreneur of Pittsburgh, marshaled his inventive faculties and his bright young electrical lieutenants, he was very much a man to contend with, the founder of four successful companies in the United States and overseas. Unlike Edison, who preferred to use only his own patented work, Westinghouse already had long and reasonably happy experience with purchasing other inventors’ better ideas and improving them in his own shops. Of course, Westinghouse in 1885 was nowhere near as famous as the flamboyant Edison. By this time, Edison was a completely lionized and beloved figure, generally a favorite with reporters, the disheveled genius who minced no words, lived off apple pie, and embodied everything big and bold and can-do about a self-confident young nation. To the press, Westinghouse was just another successful Pittsburgh inventor and manufacturer, and worse yet, one who usually refused requests for interviews and stories. “If my face becomes too familiar to the public, every bore or crazy schemer will insist on buttonholing me,” he explained.7 Even when he did grant an interview, Westinghouse rarely made for good copy. He was pretty dull stuff.
In private, however, he was intensely compelling, forthright, blunt, often charismatic. Wrote one biographer of Westinghouse, “With his soft voice, his kind eyes, and his gentle smile, he could charm a bird out of a tree. It is related that in a knotty negotiation it was suggested to the late Jacob H. Schiff, then the head of a great banking house, that he should meet Westinghouse. ‘No,’ said the astute old Jew, ‘I do not wish to see Mr. Westinghouse; he would persuade me.’”8 This was Westinghouse’s charming side. He could also be blunt to the point of offense. But Westinghouse’s public persona was reserved and serious. While he had a solid reputation for making novel technologies work in the real world, his major inventions—railroad air brakes and automated signaling systems—however much they had improved the safety and productivity of the nation’s most important industry, lacked the glamour and glitz of Edison’s riveting discoveries, the talking phonograph and the incandescent light. The mesmerizing French actress Sarah Bernhardt had never begged to meet “le grand Westinghouse.”
Like Edison, Westinghouse was much liked and admired by his workers. One young Westinghouse apprentice would always remember the following telling episode at Westinghouse Electric Company’s Garrison Alley Works:
“One day several of us were back of the ‘Iron clad’ building at the side of Duquesne Way, which was an unpaved quagmire. A young foreigner was wheeling copper ingots unloaded from a freight car on the other side of Duquesne Way. An iron slab served as a run-way for the wheel barrow. The wheel slipped off one side into the soft mud. Our crowd enjoyed the predicament and jeeringly gave advice to the helpless lad.
“Mr. Westinghouse appeared, in his long-tailed coat and high hat. He removed his gloves, took hold of the wheel and lifted it onto the slab. He said nothing. It made a lasting impression on me.”9 Here was a boss whose first impulse was to help, to set things right, and at the same time to drive home a powerful but unspoken lesson. They were all working together, from top to bottom.
George Westinghouse, like Edison, thought money was important only as a form of “stored energy” to use as he wished in his work and expand his businesses. He was interested not in being rich, but in helping the world. He strove incessantly to deliver better, more reliable products. But he had another goal also. “My ambition is to give as many persons as possible an opportunity to earn money by their own efforts,” he once explained, “and this has been the reason why I have tried to build up corporations which are large employers of labor, and to pay living wages, larger even than other manufacturers pay, or than the open labor market necessitates.”10 After his first trip to England, he instituted a half-day off on Saturdays, beginning in June 1871, the first local firm to do so. Westinghouse companies would be pioneers in worker safety, disability benefits, and pensions.
George Westinghouse had his great electrical epiphany in the spring of 1885 while reading the English journal Engineering. For Westinghouse, his coup de foudre was reading the description of an alternating current system on display in London at the Inventions Exhibition. This AC system used something entirely novel—a “secondary generator” (soon to be known as a transformer)—to step down higher AC voltages to those low enough to run individual incandescent lights. While others saw it as having limited application, Westinghouse immediately realized that here was something potentially revolutionary, a new way to economically transfer electricity not just to individual light bulbs, but over long distances. Right now, a DC central station had to be located in the middle of its service area. What if you could dispense with coal and steam and run electrical generators with hydropower at faraway waterfalls, then use high-voltage AC to send that electricity a great distance? This transformer ought to be able then to step down the high-voltage AC safely before it entered the factory or office building or house.
It so happened that one of Westinghouse’s young employees, Guido Pantaleoni, was in Italy because his physician father had just died. Westinghouse cabled him to locate the inventors of the “secondary generator,” Lucien Gaulard and John Gibbs, to see what he thought about their work. If it was all that Westinghouse hoped, they should secure options on the patents. Pantaleoni did not have to travel far, it turned out, for Gaulard was in Turin, where he was demonstrating the ability of their AC system to transmit electricity long distances from a waterfall-powered dynamo and then step it down for each individual light. In fact, Gaulard and Gibbs had been developing and exhibiting their AC system for a couple of years, but not until that spring of 1885 did it catch Westinghouse’s eager attention.
Over in Europe, Pantaleoni, a junior engineer, felt very uneasy rendering judgment for his formidable boss about the commercial feasibility of what he saw: “a fifty-mile circuit that lighted the exhibition buildings, the Turin railway station, and stations at Veneria Reale and at Lanzo, a small village in the Savoy Alps.”11 So the young man sought the advice of the far more seasoned German electrical firm of Siemens and Halske. Years later Pantaleoni would relate, “Werner von Siemens, whom I had known, assured me there was nothing whatsoever in alternating current, that it was pure humbug.”12 But knowing how excited Westinghouse was, Pantaleoni sought other advice from a Budapest firm, the Ganz Company, which strongly advised the young man to pursue the Gaulard-Gibbs system, for they themselves were busy improving upon it (some might say infringing upon their patent). Westinghouse bought an option on the American patent rights and arranged for delivery of one of the duo’s transformers, along with a Siemens generator designed to run arc lights on alternating current.
In the United States, as sultry spring turned to summer, the whole nation was riveted by the courageous and highly public dying of revered Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant. Stricken with a fatal throat cancer, the once mighty warrior was confined to his sickbed at th
e family’s East 66th Street brownstone in New York. There he labored determinedly through June and then July’s suffocating heat to complete his memoir. A man of probity himself, Grant had served two inglorious terms as a president whose administration had been marred by corruption. Then the ex-president found himself unwittingly enmeshed in a mortifying $14 million Wall Street banking swindle, only to be bailed out by the kindness of the nation’s richest man, William H. Vanderbilt. Grant hoped his memoir would sell enough to erase his humiliating debts. His dignity during his slow and painful decline, and the ex-president’s determination to salvage his honor, to assert the importance of simple honesty, had restored the general to the nation’s deepest affections. As the July heat pressed in, the Grant family sought out the cool mountain air near upstate Saratoga, where the ever frailer soldier, wrapped in shawls, painstakingly revised his page proofs with the help of his editor and publisher, Samuel Clemens. On July 23, within days of finishing, Grant died peacefully. In New York City, the morning air reverberated with a solemn clangor of hundreds of church bells, punctuated by the newsboys yelling: “Extra! Extra!” Black-bordered editions featured page after page sanctifying the humble beginnings and heroic deeds of the great general of the Grand Army of the Republic, the man who had saved the Union. Within hours, the city’s thousands of American flags were at half-mast and buildings draped in deepest black. Like Edison and Westinghouse, Grant was a small-town boy who had risen to great deeds from very ordinary circumstances.
Grant’s New York funeral was an epic panoply of public grief, such as would be forever remembered by all who were present. On the blue, warm dawn of August 8, like an incoming tide, a vast sea of one and a half million Americans of every rank and class flowed in, engulfing the six-mile funeral route from Manhattan’s City Hall all the way north to Riverside Park, where Grant would be buried. All were there to honor Grant and pay homage to the nation’s very survival. “By 9 o’clock every balcony, window, and door commanding a view of the line of march was teeming; the roofs and cornices swarmed,” reported The New York Times. “There was not an accessible point, however high and dangerous, but had its observer: men climbed the telegraph poles and clung to the wires; boys were high in the trees; carriages and wagons thronged the crossings where the police would allow them … the statues in the squares were black with climbers, and even the lamp post granted many a foothold.”13 At 10:00 A.M., as the air began to shimmer with heat, Major General Winfield Scott Hancock cantered forth on his magnificent black charger, followed by his staff. The funeral cortege set out on its slow and somber procession north. As far as the eye could see, behind General Hancock flowed a mighty river of military display: “massed regiments in their brilliant uniforms, their guns glistening in the sun, their colors draped, and their slow steps keeping time to the music of the many dirges for the dead.” Hour after hour, as the heat intensified, the columns of soldiers, sailors, and marines swept by in all their finest military precision. Then followed volunteers and militia from many states, even the old Confederacy, marching, marching in columns to band music or muffled drums. And, finally, came the remains of the great dead hero Ulysses S. Grant, his purple-draped catafalque solemn and humble atop a black wagon drawn by twenty-four horses, each majestically caparisoned with purple, each horse led by a young black man in broadcloth and silk hat.
All through the silent, respectful sea of mourners, men and boys swept off their hats, while women dabbed their eyes and tears trickled silently down. Next rumbled past an elegant multitude of fine carriages, ferrying President Grover Cleveland and a wide array of the nation’s political and diplomatic luminaries. The great state funeral had lasted four hours, but only at the very end came the most poignant of all the military sights: the aging, marching veterans of the Civil War—eighteen thousand strong—who had fought a full two decades ago, whether under Grant or Lee. On this day they were one. The crowds were shrouded in a respectful silence rare in that cacophonous city. Grant’s funeral served as yet another reminder that the old, rural, preindustrial America was passing. The North with its railroads and superior communications had prevailed. No longer were great landowners the most wealthy and powerful. Now it was the eastern financiers and industrialists who were ascendant, the men who ruled the nation. Grant’s classic memoir became a runaway bestseller, salvaging his honor and his widow’s finances.
So when Pantaleoni sailed back into Manhattan from the Continent, he returned to a nation just out of mourning. Not long behind him on another ocean steamer followed Reginald Belfield, an English employee of Gaulard-Gibbs who was bringing with him their “secondary transformers.” Wrote Belfield, “I arrived in America on the 22nd of November 1885, where I immediately saw Mr. George Westinghouse and Mr. Herman Westinghouse.”14 One can safely assume that once ensconced in Pittsburgh, Belfield found his first encounter with the gloomy industrial boomtown as astounding as did all other newcomers. Located in the far western hills of Pennsylvania, where the swift-flowing Allegheny and the Monongahela Rivers merged to form the broad and busy Ohio River, Pittsburgh had the advantage of being a pivotal river port. Pittsburgh also served as a major terminus for the powerful Pennsylvania Railroad (whose arrogance toward the locals had led the 1877 labor rioters to burn and loot the road’s depot, yards, and trains). Equally important, the surrounding hills and valleys contained some of the world’s richest coalfields, which cheaply fed the city’s hundreds of filthy, belching factories and mills. When English writer Anthony Trollope passed through hardworking Pittsburgh in 1862, he found it “the blackest place … I ever saw.” Six years later, about the same time that George Westinghouse relocated his works to Pittsburgh because all that coal made casting steel frogs cheap, author James Parton decried a city so ugly and grimy that “every street appears to end in a huge black cloud … [it was] smoke, smoke, smoke—everywhere smoke.” In short, it was “Hell with the lid taken off.”15
In 1882, a very proud Andrew Carnegie brought his idol, Darwinist Herbert Spencer, to view what the steelman cherished as Pittsburgh’s utopian might. Spencer’s verdict as his train steamed away from the stinky black haze: “Six months residence here would justify suicide.”16 An observer arriving in the same year as Reginald Belfield wrote, “Pittsburg [as it was spelled from 1890 to 1911] of to-day looks in the distance like a huge volcano, continually belching forth smoke and flames. By day a great pall rests over the city, obscuring the sun, and by night the glow and flash of the almost numberless iron-mills which fill the valley and cover the hill-sides, light the sky with a fiery glare. This great workshop of the modern Cyclops is one of the most important manufacturing centers of the country, and embodies our most valuable interests in iron and steel manufactures…. Though the suburbs of the city are beautiful and contain many charming residences, the aspect of the city itself is grimy and gloomy, in spite of the noble business blocks and open, spacious streets.”17
Those who could afford it, like the Westinghouses, lived amid the flowering hedgerows and dappled lawns of suburban Homewood, six miles east of downtown on the Pennsylvania Railroad line. And it was there that Belfield was taken on that first day in late November 1885 to live as a guest of the family. The white brick Westinghouse villa, George’s surprise birthday present to Marguerite in 1871, featured a square tower, a fashionable mansard roof, and twenty acres of surrounding gardens and lawns. It also had its own railway siding for Westinghouse’s private railcar. But when Belfield came that late fall, the summer flowers had long since fallen before the first frosts. The villa was misnamed Solitude, for the Westinghouses loved to entertain and always had company around. “Hospitality,” wrote one Westinghouse biographer of George, “was his greatest diversion and in this he was ably assisted by Mrs. Westinghouse. It was their normal life to have several guests in the house, and to have a dinner-party every night. The varied company included distinguished men of many lands.”18
A famously genial and charming host, Westinghouse would frequently call his wife during t
he day from the office to say he would be bringing two, four, or even ten home to dine. The usual guests were business associates and their wives, but those Pittsburgh locals often arrived to find a distinguished sprinkling of visiting scientists, railroad executives, and foreign notables who had happened to be in town touring the big Westinghouse works. Marguerite, reported the local Social Mirror, “lives in greater style, entertains more splendidly, and wears more gorgeous, varied, elegant toilets, has more and finer diamonds than any woman in Pittsburgh.”19 The table always glittered with beautiful Sèvres and Dresden china, crystal, and solid silver and gold silverware, but the food was very simple and healthful. Westinghouse always made his own salad dressing and heard and said nothing while concentrating completely on this private dining ritual. If the dinner discussion became technical, Isaac Watson, the black butler, would discreetly hand his employer a pencil and pad. When Westinghouse had made whatever notes and sketches he wished, Watson would retrieve it and put it on a table in the library. Westinghouse might repair later with a few others there or to his billiards room, where papers could be spread out on the green baize, diagrams studied, and plans drawn.
Reginald Belfield, when he stepped off onto the Pennsylvania Railroad stop a few hundred yards from Solitude, may have noticed a towering wooden structure back behind the lovely villa. It was, strangely enough, a large natural gas well. Westinghouse had become interested in natural gas the previous year and had sunk an initial well, but as Pantaleoni would later recount, it was disparaged by the president of the local gas company as nice enough but little. “If there was a thing that would cause Mr. W. to fight it was the thought that anything he was in was small and insignificant. Within a day or two a new rig was put in … with a terrific roar the tools were thrown out and smashed the hot house, as the most phenomenal well of Natural Gas was ‘in.’ For days you could not hear your own voice in the Homewood residence…. [Westinghouse] alone had a never disappearing smile on his beaming face, while the Fire Department was pumping water over the house to prevent it from catching fire from the burning gas. The Philadelphia Company (natural gas) was born.”20