When They Were Boys
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: © Wide World Photos George Westinghouse ? The Boy Who Developed His Mechanical Ideas t-A YOUTH named Westinghouse, still in / his teens, was traveling in a rail- road train one afternoon when the train came to a stop beside an open field. After a few minutes of waiting, young Westinghouse left the coach to see what had happened. He discovered that there was a wreck ahead, and as the conductor told him that the train would be delayed for some time, he decided that he would investigate the wreck. Two freight trains had collided, and both were nearly demolished. The engineer of each train had seen that a collision was inevitable and, slowing down the engines as much as possible, had jumped. "I saw the train coming toward me and set the hand brakes, but there was not time to stop the cars," said one of the eng
...ineers. "The wreck would not have happened if the engineers could have controlled the cars from their engine cabs," another trainman remarked. Young Westinghouse was greatly interested. "What do you mean by controlling the cars?" he asked. The engineer explained that when he wanted to stop a train he had to signal with the engine whistle for brakes to be applied by hand to the cars. There were no brakes on the cars that could be worked from the engine to bring the train to a sudden stop. The young man listened intently. When the line was clear again and he could continue his journey, he sat thinkingabout brakes for railroad trains, automatic brakes that could be controlled from the cab of the engine. In the weeks that followed, young West-- inghouse did much thinking about brakes, but none of his ideas were practical. He tried a mechanical automatic brake, which he rejected. Then, realizing that he needed a great deal of power to put on h...
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