George Westinghouse

George Westinghouse Jr. was an American inventor, engineer and industrialist based in Pittsburgh who transformed several major industries over his career. In 1869 he invented the railway air brake, a compressed-air system that let a single engineer stop every car of a train simultaneously and eliminated the dangerous earlier practice of brakemen manually setting each car's brakes by hand, a safety innovation that became standard on railways worldwide. He later championed alternating current for electrical power distribution at a time when the industry favored Thomas Edison's direct current systems, founding Westinghouse Electric Corporation in 1886 to develop AC technology; his company won the contract to illuminate the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition with AC power and in 1895 built the world's first large-scale AC power plant at Niagara Falls, establishing AC as the dominant standard for electrical distribution. He also pioneered safe systems for producing and transmitting natural gas, held 360 patents and founded 61 companies over his lifetime, and received the Edison Medal in 1911.