George Westinghouse

From 1885 George Westinghouse bought European transformer patents and had his engineers turn them into a working alternating-current lighting system, put into commercial service in Buffalo in November 1886; in July 1888 he acquired the rights to Nikola Tesla's alternating-current motor patents. His company built the alternating-current plant for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and won the 1893 contract for the generators of the Niagara Falls power station, which began supplying Buffalo in November 1896.

In 1869, aged 22, Westinghouse patented a railway brake worked by compressed air and founded the Westinghouse Air Brake Company. His automatic brake of the 1870s and the quick-action triple valve he patented in 1887-88, after the Burlington trials, made it practical to brake long freight trains, and the brake came into general use on American railroads.

In April 1892, General Electric-group companies bid $13.98 to $18.51 per light to illuminate the Chicago world's fair. Westinghouse's company won the contract with a bid of $5.25, which some of his friends called a reckless dive in the dark and which lost money directly. Because Edison's patent on the all-glass lamp bulb barred it from making ordinary lamps, Westinghouse and his engineers produced a two-piece 'stopper' lamp and he set up a glass factory, making about 250,000 lamps for the fair's opening on 1 May 1893, though the lamps held vacuum poorly and had to be renewed often.

Changing the lamp design and setting up a dedicated factory within months of meeting the patent barrier is consistent with resourcefulness under a hard outside constraint. His biographers present the low bid itself as a deliberate bet on publicity, so the episode is not evidence of cost control. Resourcefulness

Around 1900 Westinghouse drew up a patent specification for apparatus that would draw heat from the atmosphere and give more power than it consumed. Lord Kelvin cabled back that atmospheric heat cannot be used to generate power and later called the idea a chimera; in November 1901 Professor Dewar of the Royal Institution judged that the specification explicitly claimed perpetual motion, and about three years later his engineer MacAlpine reached the same verdict on the power claim. Westinghouse answered that Kelvin's paper did not meet the case and treated the work as a pastime; his biographer Henry Prout records references to it in his letters as late as 1913.

The episode is consistent with the independence from authority his biographer describes, who writes that he 'accepted nothing on a great name'. Here that independence ran against established thermodynamics, so it also illustrates the cost of the trait. Independent Thinking

On 23 October 1907, a day after the Knickerbocker Trust failure set off a financial panic, the directors of Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company asked a federal court to appoint receivers; the company's debt was about $43 million. Westinghouse worked out the merchandise creditors' plan, under which creditors took stock in settlement, and the company came out of receivership in 1908 after about fourteen months. The reorganised board mostly represented banks and creditors, he stayed on as president with reduced powers, and in 1911 he ended his official relations with the company. He died in March 1914.

Prout ties the 1907 failure to the risks of his practice of financing the companies through personal appeals and his own holdings rather than a bankers' syndicate, and records his earlier refusal to accept bankers' control. That is consistent with the strong need for autonomy scored on his profile, though the facts above do not by themselves show that it explains the outcome. Need for Autonomy