Читать книгу Intellectual Property Law for Engineers, Scientists, and Entrepreneurs - Howard B. Rockman - Страница 70

INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS
George Westinghouse
STEAM‐POWER BRAKE DEVICES AND ALTERNATING CURRENT

George Westinghouse is considered by some as one of the most productive inventors of his era, who helped perpetuate the Industrial Revolution through his ambition to resolve technical, commercial, and social obstacles. For example, in 1871, his employees were given a half‐day off on Saturday, the initial step toward the five‐day work week. He created an employee pension fund in 1908, and his workers were given paid vacations in 1913. The first radio station in the world was Westinghouse KDKA in Pittsburgh.

George Westinghouse was born in Central Bridge, New York, on October 6, 1846. He worked in his father’s farm machinery shop in Schenectady, New York, until the age of 15, when he joined the Union Army as a cavalry scout, and then the Union Navy as a naval engineer where he served throughout the Civil War. He briefly attended Union College, and, upon returning to his father’s shop in 1865, he developed and patented a rotary steam engine, a device for replacing derailed freight cars, and a railroad frog.

In 1866, after the war was over, Westinghouse, while working for his father, was a passenger in a train that stopped suddenly to avoid colliding with a wrecked train ahead. He got out, looked over the site, talked to the trainmen, and determined that there must be a better way to brake a heavy train. At that time, the railroads were heavily prone to accidents because each railroad car had its own brakes that were applied separately and manually by brakemen, leaping from car to car upon a signal from the engineer. The danger inherent in this system is obvious.

Meanwhile, in 1867, Westinghouse married Margaret Erskine Walker and moved to Pittsburgh, where he had met others who shared his interest in inventing and manufacturing products for the railroad industry. Westinghouse continued to seek a solution to the train braking problem. He first considered using a chain to couple all of the train’s brake controls, but this did not work. His next idea of using the steam generated by the locomotive to operate steam brakes on each car became impractical when the steam condensed to water and froze in cold weather before reaching the brake systems.

He then learned that engineers drilling dynamite holes in an Alpine tunnel had used a steam engine to produce compressed air that was piped 3000 feet into the tunnel to run the air drills. He applied this technology to an air brake system for trains, and obtained a patent for his air brake on April 13, 1869.

Westinghouse wanted to install a test air brake system on a full‐sized steam‐driven train and approached Cornelius Vanderbilt, president of New York Central Railroad, with a request to “borrow” a locomotive and several cars. When Westinghouse told Vanderbilt that he wanted to stop a train with just air, Vanderbilt had Westinghouse removed from his office.

In 1869, however, Westinghouse convinced Panhandle Railroad to provide him with a locomotive and four cars, on which he installed his air brake system. A test was arranged over the Pittsburgh–Steubenville stretch of Panhandle’s right of way. Panhandle officials and Westinghouse boarded the train, and it started out. At the first and second stations, the train stopped as promised. Before reaching the third station, the engineer saw a horse and carriage stuck at a crossing. The brakes were applied by the engineer hard and fast. The train came to a screeching halt, with most passengers being hurled to the floor. This convinced the Panhandle officials, and Westinghouse, that the engineer‐operated air brake was a vast improvement over the prior manual braking system.

As Westinghouse Air Brake Company, which was organized in July 1869, began to receive orders, Westinghouse built his first factory in Pittsburgh. His brake system gave railroad passengers greater confidence in the safety of their ride, and provided increased efficiency to the owners of the railroads. The Railroad Safety Appliance Act of 1893 made air brakes required equipment on all U.S. trains. The use of air brakes also took hold in Europe, and is today the industry standard.

Business expanded, and Westinghouse bought land east of the city where he erected a larger plant, and in 1890 built a town around the plant. The town was named “Wilmerding,” the name of the family from whom he had bought the land. Unlike other U.S. factory towns of the late nineteenth century, the stores were privately operated, and not by Westinghouse Company. Workers were not bound by a scrip system, and houses were either rented from the company or could be purchased at a modest cost. In addition to the benefits mentioned in the first paragraph of this essay, Westinghouse Company also provided pensions covering the wives and orphans of retirees, sickness and accident benefits, student training courses in the company’s shop, employee incentive plans, and the basic principles of collective bargaining.

In 1879, Westinghouse invented a pneumatic interlocking railroad signal system to control the increased speed and flexibility that railroads gained by the invention of the air brake. In 1881, he organized the Union Switch and Signal Company to develop and sell his railroad safety and traffic control inventions.

In the mid‐1880s, Westinghouse became interested in electricity and, in particular, the disadvantages of the DC power systems fostered by Thomas Edison. He pursued AC power–generating technology, bought the U.S. rights to Gaulard and Gibbs’ AC distribution system in 1885, and hired William Stanley to improve on the Gaulard–Gibbs “transformer.” In 1886, Westinghouse organized the Westinghouse Electric Company to advance the introduction and use of AC power systems in direct competition with Edison’s DC power systems, as described in more detail in the essay titled “Current Events” following Chapter 36, supra. In 1887–1888, Westinghouse also acquired rights under Nikola Tesla’s AC polyphase system patents, and hired Tesla to work for Westinghouse Electric and develop the AC motor with the rotating magnetic field that Tesla had conceived and had been working on. In 1892, Westinghouse, using Tesla’s AC polyphase system, was awarded the contract to light the “White City,” the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Westinghouse’s company also installed the electrical generators to turn the kinetic energy of Niagara Falls into hydroelectric energy. Commercial service of these huge generators began in the fall of 1896. Due to financial problems, Westinghouse lost control of his electric company in 1907, but retained control of his other companies.

George Westinghouse was issued 361 patents in all, and died on March 12, 1914, in New York City. He and his wife are buried in Arlington National Cemetery. In my judgment, George Westinghouse appears to be a successful industrialist who was driven more by the desire that his efforts would benefit mankind than by the drive for money for money’s sake.