Episode Details

In 1911 George Westinghouse received the Edison Medal, named for the rival he defeated in the war of the currents. This episode explores the college dropout with 360 patents and 61 companies who quietly engineered the infrastructure of the modern world, always with safety as his primary design constraint.

We follow his Civil War service, the fail-safe compressed air brake, Union Switch and Signal, the natural gas blowout on his Pittsburgh estate, alternating current and the transformer, Edison's fear campaign and the electric chair, the 1890 financial crisis, the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Niagara Falls, and his pioneering treatment of workers at Wilmerding.

• How inverting the air brake logic made trains fail safe
• How he capped a natural gas geyser in his own backyard
• Why alternating current beat direct current over long distances
• How underbidding for the 1893 World's Fair proved AC's viability
• His five-and-a-half-day work week and respect for engineers' patents