With this article we continue a series of pioneers and projectors to learn from. You are all encouraged to write about great projectors out of your context so we may learn from them and improve our way of performing projects. “Projector” is a term introduced by Daniel Defoe in “An Essay upon Projects” (1697). It refers to people that “project” into the future and thus make them real. A true projector is “he who, having by fair and plain principles of sense, honesty, and ingenuity brought any contrivance to a suitable perfection, makes out what he pretends to, picks nobody’s pocket, puts his project in execution, and contents himself with the real produce as the profit of his invention.” History is full of those people, let´s make use of their stories by explaining the narrative behind.

George Westinghouse was an American entrepreneur and engineer based in Pittsburgh, who invented the railway air brake and was a pioneer of the electrical industry, gaining his first patent at the age of 19. He saw the potential in alternating current as an electricity distribution system in the early 1880s and put all his resources into developing and marketing it, directly competing with Edison, who focused on direct current distribution systems. But he became famous with the railway air brakes, because before that invention the ability to stop a train in an emergency did not exist. It is said, that Westinghouse had the idea while waiting on a train, being delayed because two freight trains had collided on the tracks ahead. He thought of using steam or electricity as power sources for braking, but finally he focused on compressed air power.

At the age of 23 he built a prototype of his invention started to improve it systematically and it was first used on a train for an emergency stop of a train in 1868. The air brake worked by piping compressed air from the locomotive´s steam-driven air compressor through a rather complicated piping system to the brake shoes of each train car. In 1869, the was brake was patented and Westinghouse founded the Westinghouse Air Brake Company, which is still existing nowadays with the shortened name WABCO. Later he founded several other companies, always building on his inventions, e.g. The Westinghouse Electric Company. He developed a system of automatic signals, powered by compressor air, an automatic telephone exchange system (which was never used for communication) and an alternating current motor, which was awarded in 1912 with the Edison Gold Medal. When he died at the age of 68, he owned about 40 companies employing more than 50.000 workers. In 1989, Westinghouse was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Westinghouse was talented at machinery and business from his youth. He enrolled at Union College, but soon lost his interest and dropped out, having more interest in practical work. He created a rotary steam engine at the age of 19 and devised the Westinghouse Farm Engine, horse-drawn, vertical-boilered and horizontal-cylinder engines which looked like a coffee pot on wheels. Two years later he invented a “car replacer”, a device to guide derailed railroad cars back onto the tracks, and a reversible frog, a device used with a railroad switch to guide trains onto one of two tracks.

In essence, George Westinghouse revolutionized the transportation industry with his invention of the railway air brake. His alternating current electricity made the production and transmission of electricity over vast areas possible and the system used to electrify the country and the world. He was beloved by the workforce that stretched from East Pittsburgh around the world. The working population held Westinghouse in high esteem because he believed an employer could make huge profits while treating his employees in a humane fashion. He cared for the living conditions of his employees, as well as their educational and cultural growth as well as for their families. Already in the year 1869, WABCO became the first employer to implement a nine-hour day, 55-hour work weeks, and half-holidays on Saturdays. The Westinghouse Company built houses on a tract of land that it had purchased and then sold homes to its workers at a very inexpensive price.

More information is available here:

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/George_Westinghouse; https://interestingengineering.com/george-westinghouse-the-man-who-electrified-the-united-states; http://www.westinghousememorial.org/history.htm