Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, the Air Brake, and Electric Heating
Stuart K. Hayashi
The following is a section of the longer essay, “How Billionaires and Capitalism Save Billions of Lives — Including Yours.” That essay includes an index listing various case studies of a for-profit initiative saving lives. The blog post below is of at least one such case study. You can return to that index here.
Even when the technology is not made for an explicit lifesaving purpose, but is instead intended for uses that are more general, it could save lives. That happens with electricity generation. Suffering from the cold at night has threatened human lives since the Stone Age. Deaths from cold annually outnumber those from heat.
Prior to the advent of indoor electric heating, people had to heat their homes by burning firewood. In developing countries, where there are still millions of people who do not have access to electricity, such people still have to do it, sometimes with dung. Although there is romance to the image of relaxing before a warm fireplace, this practice carries its own hazards. The fumes can build up in the lungs and ultimately cause growths in them. This is “indoor air pollution,” and there are figures that illustrate the extent of the damage it does.
Worldwide, but mostly in the developing countries, this indoor air pollution proves lethal for large numbers of human beings. Among the higher estimates is 3.5 million per year. That is 200,000 more than the number of people annually killed by the outdoor air pollution that is more familiar to us. This also exceeds the annual death rates of both malaria and AIDS combined. Even the lowest estimates are around 1.6 million per year.
The total number of casualties from indoor air pollution is 260 million, which is almost twice as many as those from all of the twentieth century’s wars put together.
The scourge of indoor air pollution is evident even in rich countries where people have access to electricity but, for aesthetic reasons, opt for fireplaces anyway. Eight percent of Britons do this, and half of them are categorized as “affluent.” Such a small portion of the U.K. population still heating with fireplaces is enough to excrete three times more air pollution than do all the country’s automobile emissions. Wood-burning stoves in the U.K.’s urban areas account for almost 50 percent of Britons’ exposure to carcinogens in particles of air pollution.
Considering all of the perils of the heating methods that people must rely upon when they do not have electricity, this absence is identified properly as “energy poverty.” The flip side is that these dangers and deaths are eliminated when people do have proper access to electricity — especially, in this context, electric heating.
Eighty-seven percent of the global human population currently has access to electricity. And, according to Our World in Data, 4.1 percent of the global population dies from indoor air pollution. That means that out of the Earth’s 7.9 billion people, that is 6.873 billion with electric power. Were it the case that this 6.873 billion did not have electricity and therefore had to rely on fireplaces for heating, and 4.1 percent of them died from indoor air pollution, that would be 281.793 million killed.
This suggests that simply in having electric heating in their homes, at least 281 million people have been saved.
By creating the electricity generation industry, rivals Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse contributed to this lifesaving. And, prior to this, Westinghouse had already made his first fortune with a different lifesaving device.
As it was for his future adversary, invention had been a lifelong vocation for Westinghouse. A prodigy, at age fifteen he had already designed his own rotary engine. A few years later, he would come up with the idea for which he was most famous. Traveling via locomotive then was especially perilous. For a train to stop, a brakeman would have to ride on the roof of a car. This brakeman would have to apply the brake on each car separately and then move on to the next car until the brakes were applied on all of them. On account of this arduous sequence of tasks, the train would normally travel for an entire two miles between the application of the first brake and the time that the train finally ground to a halt. In one year, as many as 5,000 American brakemen were killed during this sequence.
As a young man, Westinghouse came to the rescue with his air brake system. The train’s wheels would be connected to a tube. When the brake was applied, it sent compressed air through the tube that acted on the wheels of all the cars simultaneously. The distance the train would continue to travel upon application of the brakes was now in hundreds of yards instead of thousands.
At age twenty-one, Westinghouse searched for investors. He went to railroad magnate “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt, Sr., who had made his own financially risky innovations throughout his life and who, by this time, had become the richest man in the country, if not the world. Upon hearing Westinghouse’s idea, Vanderbilt cackled, “Do you mean to tell me that you can stop a railroad train by wind?”
Westinghouse replied, “Well, yes. Inasmuch as air is wind, I suppose you are right.”
Vanderbilt had heard enough. He concluded, “I have no time to waste on fools.”
The young Westinghouse remained undaunted. He introduced his air brake to the market in 1872. Twenty-one years later, Congress passed the Railroad Safety Act (RSA), mandating that railroads have their trains make use of both Westinghouse’s air brake and another lifesaving innovation, the Jenny coupler. However, there was a grace period; the statute would not go into full effect until 1900. Many media, such as the TV program Modern Marvels, credit this legislation with railroads adopting these safety devices.
Yet long before the law went into effect, forward-thinking executives already knew that the hazards associated with locomotives made prospective passengers reluctant to ride and prospective employees skittish to apply to work for their railroads. By 1876 — over sixteen years prior to the Railroad Safety Act’s passage and over two decades prior to it going into effect fully — over 37 percent of railroad passenger cars in the United States already had Westinghouse’s air brake installed.
According to engineer Gary McCormick, this invention saved “hundreds of lives each year.” Sure enough, between the years 1890 and 1915, the fatality rate fell by more than 63 percent for railroad passengers and by more than 61 percent for employees. And that was the trend prior to the RSA going into full effect. Between 1890 and 1899, the fatality rate dropped by more than a third for passengers and by one-fourth for employees.
Having established himself as a successful salesman his air brake, Westinghouse turned his attention elsewhere. He took the millions he earned and invested them in other endeavors, such as competing against Thomas Edison in the market for electricity.
Edison’s ambition did not end with inventing and selling his practical incandescent lightbulb. People could only use it if their houses had electricity, something that no one possessed. For there to be demand for Edison’s lightbulbs, he had to make available the means to light it. For that reason, he set to work on providing a system for distributing low-voltage, high-current electricity — direct current.
It is misleading to say that Edison’s system made use of direct current (DC) whereas Westinghouse’s was all about alternating current (AC). Rather, Edison’s system made use of DC only, whereas Westinghouse’s made use of both DC and AC.
The issue with Edison’s system was that DC would only send electricity over relatively short distances — the length of a street. If all of today’s homes were lit only through DC, there would have to be a power plant on every city block.
Conversely, when alternating current is employed, the electricity can be transmitted over many miles, across entire U.S. states. A single power plant could transmit high-voltage, low-current electricity over mostly undeveloped terrain until reaching an urban center. Once the electricity reached the urban center, it would be sent to a transformer that would convert the electricity to DC — low voltage, high current.
Nikola Tesla invented the polyphase induction motor with which Westinghouse transmitted his high-voltage alternating current over miles. As, in his old age, Tesla frittered away his wealth on an unworkable scheme and continued to live expensively in the Hotel New Yorker, Westinghouse took care of him. Subsequent to George Westinghouse’s death in 1914, executives from his company continued to pay $125 monthly to cover Tesla’s room and board.
In 1938 — five years before his own death — Tesla described Westinghouse as
the only man on this globe who could take my alternating system under the circumstances then existing and win the battle against prejudice... He was a pioneer of imposing stature, one of the world’s true noblemen of whom America may well be proud and to whom humanity owes an immense debt of gratitude.
Dying in 1931, Thomas Edison had a net worth of $12 million. In 2020 U.S. dollars, that is $204 million, putting Edison a fifth on his way to being a billionaire.
Considering that at least 281 million lives have been saved by the proliferation of electricity throughout homes, these fortunes were well-earned. These are the billionaires maligned in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s diatribes.
And though Westinghouse and Edison were unusual in many respects, they were not unusual in being nineteenth-century entrepreneurs whose ventures had saved lives. The same applies to Gail Borden.
