It took the energy out of the industrial lion and resulted in a personal depression, which led to his death in1914. His natural gas distribution system did more than Carnegie's capital to make Pittsburgh the Steel City. He was a pioneer in pension plans and in planned communities for workers. While Edison electrified New York City, the nation turned in favor of the AC current system of Westinghouse. His innovations allowed Westinghouse to take the lead in electrical distribution. Westinghouse developed the corporate model of invention and research. He was not only an inventor in his own right, but the orchestra leader of a symphony of ideas. Westinghouse became a manager of innovation. One of the most successful industrialists in America, George Westinghouse was a wizard who took a much different approach than Thomas Edison. His biography intersects with those of many great personalities of the Gilded Age, such as J.P Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, the Mellon Family, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Nikola Tesla. George Westinghouse's story is rich in drama and in breadth, a story of power, city building, and applying the Golden Rule in business. Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Exhibit Building, New York World's Fair, 1939 - Linen Postcard
When Edison set out to persuade the state of New York to use Westinghouse’s current to execute condemned criminals, Westinghouse fought back in court, attempting to stop the first electrocution and keep AC from becoming the “executioner’s current.” In this meticulously researched account of the ensuing legal battle and the horribly botched first execution, Moran raises disturbing questions not only about electrocution, but about about our society’s tendency to rely on new technologies to answer moral questions. The two men quickly became locked in a fierce rivalry, made all the more complicated by a novel new application for their product: the electric chair. Six years later, George Westinghouse lit up Buffalo with his less expensive alternating current (AC). In 1882, Thomas Edison ushered in the “age of electricity” when he illuminated Manhattan’s Pearl Street with his direct current (DC) system. In this amazing story of high stakes competition between two titans, Richard Moran shows how the electric chair developed not out of the desire to be more humane but through an effort by one nineteenth-century electric company to discredit the other.
0 kommentar(er)
