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Updated: June 22, 2025
It is recorded that at the conclusion of the trial, each patentee left the refreshment tent satisfied that his own brake was the best; but Time is the great arbiter, and his decision has been in favour of two the Automatic Vacuum and the Westinghouse, and these are the brakes the companies have adopted.
The air-brake is probably one of the most valuable inventions ever applied to the railroad industry, and yet George Westinghouse, its inventor, found it impossible even to give it away to railroad presidents until he had learned how to sell it.
Before 1876 the Gatling gun, dynamite, and the barbed-wire fence were introduced; the compressed-air rock drill, the typewriter, the Westinghouse air brake, the Janney car coupler, the cable-car system, the self-binding reaper and harvester, the cash carrier for stores, water gas, and the tin-can-making machine were invented, and Brush gave the world the first successful electric light.
The feed-water is heated by a portion of the exhaust steam and the exhaust from the Westinghouse brake, and the boiler is consequently fed by pumps, is kept cleaner, and makes steam better. The reversing gear is automatic and exceedingly ingenious, the compressed air from the Westinghouse brake reservoir being employed to do the heavy work.
The stone-drills are in the same annex; also the Smith and the Hardy brakes, the former of which is the European rival of the Westinghouse, acting upon the vacuum principle, and already in possession of so many of the lines in Europe that it proves a serious competitor.
In cars our ideas have fruited better, and Pullman and Westinghouse have gained a firm foothold in England, with whose endorsement their way is open across the Channel. In the arts we are credited with seventy-five pictures, against a hundred and twenty-three from England and six hundred and fifty-two from France. Here France was at home, and felt it.
By the reception that the public gave to his telephone, he learned to sympathize with Howe, whose first sewing-machine was smashed by a Boston mob; with McCormick, whose first reaper was called "a cross between an Astley chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a flying-machine"; with Morse, whom ten Congresses regarded as a nuisance; with Cyrus Field, whose Atlantic Cable was denounced as "a mad freak of stubborn ignorance"; and with Westinghouse, who was called a fool for proposing "to stop a railroad train with wind."
Likewise, when George Westinghouse, inventor of the airbrake, having finally persuaded the directors of the Pennsylvania Railroad, after many futile attempts in other directions, to grant him an opportunity to try out his invention, and, trying it out on a string of cars near Harrisburg ably demonstrated its practicability as a device for stopping trains and preventing accidents, he also as had Watt before him set the civilized world forward into an era full of promise and discovery as yet but barely entered upon, even with the remarkable progress already made in industry alone in the matter of regard for the safety of human life Westinghouse's own particular blazed trail through the forest of human ignorance this same airbrake.
In the year 1890 he severed his connection with the Westinghouse Company, since which time he has devoted himself entirely to the study of alternating currents of high frequencies and very high potentials, with which study he is at present engaged. No comment is necessary on his interesting achievements in this field; the famous London lecture published in this volume is a proof in itself.
Sit down for a few minutes, Mr. Blakeley. Now, Miss Gardner, Westinghouse Electric." The nurse resumed her reading in a monotonous voice. She read literally and without understanding, using initials and abbreviations as they came. But the shrewd old man followed her easily. Once, however, he stopped her. "D-o is ditto," he said gently, "not do."
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