George Westinghouse Tells of His Battle with Edison Over DC and AC Current, Telsa's Energy

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My name is George Westinghouse, and if you’ve ever turned on a light, hopped on a train, or walked through a modern city powered by electricity, then you've lived in the world I helped build. I wasn’t a flashy man, and I didn’t always seek the spotlight, but I believed in ideas—especially the ones that could make life better, safer, and more efficient for everyone. Let me tell you how I became known as “The Industrial Strategist.”

I was born in 1846 in Central Bridge, New York, to a family of inventors and craftsmen. From the time I could hold a tool, I was taking things apart to see how they worked—and usually putting them back together a little better. I served briefly in the Civil War, but when I came home, my mind was full of mechanical ideas. I filed my first patent at just 19 years old for a rotary steam engine. But my first major breakthrough came with trains. Back then, stopping a train was a dangerous and slow process, involving brakemen running along the tops of cars to turn wheels by hand. I invented the air brake—a system that allowed engineers to stop all the cars at once from the locomotive. It saved lives and revolutionized the railroad industry.

But my true impact came in the world of electricity. You see, during the 1880s, everyone was talking about Thomas Edison and his new electric lights. Edison was pushing Direct Current—or DC—as the future of power. But DC couldn’t travel very far. You had to build a power plant every mile or so. That’s where I came in. I met a brilliant inventor named Nikola Tesla, who had created a system based on Alternating Current—AC. AC could travel long distances with little loss, which meant we could build large power plants and send electricity to homes and businesses many miles away. I saw the potential and bought the rights to Tesla’s patents.

Now, I won’t lie to you—the fight between Edison and me over AC vs. DC got ugly. Edison launched public campaigns to scare people away from AC. He even supported the use of AC in the first electric chair just to show how dangerous it was. But I stood by the science. I believed that Tesla’s AC system was better—not just for business, but for the future of energy. When we lit up the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago using AC, the world saw the truth. Not long after, we built a power plant at Niagara Falls that brought electricity to Buffalo, New York. That was when AC officially won.

But I didn’t stop there. I started over 60 companies in my lifetime—working on everything from electric railways to natural gas systems. I believed in treating my workers fairly and always aimed to use technology to improve lives. I wasn’t just focused on machines. I cared deeply about the people who built and benefited from them.

I passed away in 1914, just before the world plunged into war. But I had already seen the impact of what we’d built: a connected, electrified, and rapidly changing world. People today remember Edison’s name, and Tesla’s fame has grown over the years, but I like to think of myself as the one who brought the pieces together. I took great ideas and turned them into real systems that worked for everyone.

So if you ever feel like the quiet kid with the practical ideas, remember this—sometimes the one who gets things done changes the world more than the one who grabs the headlines. That was me. That was George Westinghouse.

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