WILMERDING, PA.—Controversy is nothing new in the field of
electrical power transmission and distribution. You might say
that the North American power transmission system was born of
one-upmanship and misrepresentation. As the politicians and
pundits argue over who's to blame for the recent blackout and
where to find a solution, it might be instructive to look back
at the controversy that started it all: the Battle of the
Currents.
Before there were blackouts affecting vast sections of
North America, before there was deregulation, even before
there were utility monopolies, there was the question of
whether the North American power system should run on
alternating or direct current.
It wasn't inevitable that the choice should go one way or
the other. It only looks that way in retrospect. The matter
had to be settled in the free market, and the combatants
pitted against each other were none other than two giants in
the history of electrical power, Thomas Edison and George
Westinghouse.
Recently EA visited the George Westinghouse Museum
in Wilmerding, Pa., on the edge of Pittsburgh, where the
museum's executive director, Ed Reis, presented some
background on the Battle of the Currents and illuminated some
frequently overlooked aspects of Westinghouse's personality.
If Reis bears a faint resemblance to Westinghouse, it's no
coincidence. He portrays the Gilded Age electrical
industrialist in presentations before classes and civic
groups. He may work harder than anyone at keeping alive the
memory of George Westinghouse and presenting him as a kinder,
gentler industrial tycoon.
Because Westinghouse shunned the limelight and sought only
the betterment of mankind (in Reis's view), his influence to
this day is underappreciated. And yet his achievements
surround us every day. The Westinghouse power station at
Niagara Falls power station, for instance, was nothing less
than "the model used to electrify the world," says Reis.
Westinghouse had already established himself as a
successful inventor and businessman before turning his
attention to the electrification of a continent. By the age of
30, he had achieved things few dream of achieving in a
lifetime. His first patent, for a rotating steam engine, came
at the age of 19, after a successful career as a Union
Naval engineering officer in the Civil War. His first company,
the Westinghouse Air Brake Co., was founded in 1869, when
Westinghouse was only 22. Although the Westinghouse Electric
Co. would be his greatest and longest-lasting legacy, the air
brake business proved far more profitable to Westinghouse
personally over the course of his life.
During the 1880's, as his air brakes gained wider
acceptance among U.S. rail companies, Westinghouse turned his
attention to finding and exploiting natural gas. It's a
little-known chapter in the life of a man whose surname has
become synonymous with electrical power. Discovery of a
deposit of natural gas under Westinghouse's estate led to a
plan to supply natural gas to the booming metropolis of
Pittsburgh. The cheap, reliable power attracted iron and steel
magnates to the city—among them another icon of Gilded Age
industrialism, Andrew Carnegie.
So it was a George Westinghouse already established as a
successful inventor and entrepreneur who witnessed, in 1880, a
demonstration of electric lighting at Thomas Edison's
laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J.
Edison's lights were powered by direct current. This was
fine for a tinkerer, but Westinghouse—who had become
accustomed to thinking on the scale of transcontinental
railroads-saw that long-distance transmission of direct
current would be problematical, to say the least. Power
stations to boost the voltage in the d-c system would be
required every mile or so, which would work fine in Manhattan
but not so well on the Great Plains.
Edison may have had a genius for self-promotion,
but Westinghouse had two weapons
of his own: the secondary transformer, U.S. rights to which he
had bought in 1885 from the inventors Lucien Gaulard and John
Dixon Gibbs; and the polyphase induction motor, invented by
expatriate Serbian visionary Nikola Tesla and sold outright by
him to Westinghouse. (Tesla was a notoriously poor business
man and negotiator.)
"Westinghouse was the only person who could pull
off alternating current against Edison," contends Reis. Edison
dismissed Westinghouse's challenge with the suggestion that
Westinghouse '"stick to the air brake business,' or words to
that effect," Reis adds. As for envisioning an a-c
distribution system powering polyphase induction motors,
"Tesla had a piece of it," Reis acknowledges, but "George put
all the pieces together."
The Gaulard & Gibbs transformer, with stamped
copper plates, proved difficult and expensive to manufacture,
so Westinghouse introduced the process of winding copper wire
around the transformer's core by machine—another Westinghouse
innovation that's with us to this day. With Westinghouse's
financial backing, electricity was provided to the town of
Great Barrington, Mass., with twelve transformers stepping
3,000 volts down to 500 to illuminate 400 incandescent lamps.
Soon other communities were installing the a-c system, and by
1886 the Westinghouse Electric Co. was employing 3,000 people.
Edison fought back with propaganda. He placed
billboard and newspaper advertisements warning of the dangers
of alternating current. An engineer on his payroll, using
alternating current, staged public electrocutions of dogs
rounded up from the neighborhood. Edison and Westinghouse
sparred in print. Westinghouse's cause was set back when Frank
Pope, an electrician and
patent attorney who advocated alternating current, was
electrocuted while working on the Great Barrington generators.
Edison supported the use of alternating current
for the newly invented electric chair. Advocates of the chair
said it killed more humanely than other methods—a claim
that any witness to the first horribly botched execution could
plainly see was wrong. The true purpose of the electric chair
was to a demonstrate the lethality of alternating current. So
successful was this phase of the campaign that a victim
executed by electric chair was said by some to have been
westinghoused. This relic of the Battle of the Currents is
still the favored means of execution in at least nine U.S.
states.
Over time, in spite of the propaganda campaign,
the Westinghouse a-c system gained the upper hand in the
marketplace. By 1890, sales for the Westinghouse Electric Co.
totaled more than $4 million per year.
The beginning of the end for d-c distribution
came when Westinghouse won the bid to power 180,000
incandescent lamps at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in
Chicago. Edison tried to block this play by suing Westinghouse
for infringing on Edison lamp patents; Westinghouse responded
by redesigning his lamps. The show went on, and the
illumination of Chicago's Midway was a public sensation. The
nation embraced alternating current, and widespread
distribution of direct current was never again seriously
considered.
It wasn't until years later, in 1908, that Edison
was able to say to George Stanley, the son of William Stanley,
an engineer who had worked on Westinghouse's transformer:
"Tell your father I was wrong."
The success of alternating current did not secure
Westinghouse's future with Westinghouse Electric, however.
Bankers headed by J.P. Morgan took control of Edison's and
other electric companies in 1888 to build a "trust," which in
those days was a polite word for "monopoly." Westinghouse was
the only major electric company to resist the bankers and
remain independent. This angered the bankers, who retaliated
by refusing to lend Westinghouse money and calling him on
loans outstanding.
Their "trust," now known as General Electric,
became three times as large as the Westinghouse Electric Co.
George Westinghouse ran into financial trouble during a
recession at the turn of the century and eventually, in 1908,
lost control of Westinghouse Electric to the bankers.
For the rest of his life, according to Reis,
anytime Westinghouse's private Pullman car passed the
Westinghouse Electric Co., George Westinghouse would turn
away, unable to look at the company bearing his name that had
changed the face of industry.
Although Westinghouse left behind technologies
that we use every day, Ed Reis believes that his legacy may go
more deeply than that. "He was there to benefit mankind," Reis
says, "and electricity enabled him to do that."
