A Life of George Westinghouse (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from A Life of George Westinghouse

Many officers and members of The American Society of Mechanical Engineers have thought that the Society ought to publish the lives of some of its great men. In 1912 it published a special edition of the Autobiography of John Fritz, Honorary Member and Past President. This life of George Westinghouse, Honorary Member and Past President, is the second in what may be a series of such biographies. The activities of George Westinghouse were many and varied, and many different activities went on simultane ously. He dealt in the same week, and often in the same day, with organization, financial and executive affairs, com mercial affairs, and the engineering details of half a dozen companies in two hemispheres. They were as far apart in kind as the air brake and natural gas, and as far apart in geography as San Francisco and St. Petersburg. That being so, it seemed that a chronological narrative would of necessity lead to some confusion, not to say fatigue, for the reader. It was decided to treat each topic by itself without regard to what might be going on at the same time in other fields, with a short preliminary chapter to which the reader might return to orient himself should he care, for instance, to know what other serious things were in hand at a critical moment in the history of the air brake. It was hoped that by this treatment a certain continuity of impression might be kept in each story told by itself.

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