Rail travel is one of the safest ways to get around in the modern age. The pioneer responsible for much of this safety record was the visionary inventor and industrialist George Westinghouse (1846-1914).
Before he invented his revolutionary air brake, slowing and stopping a train was an exercise fraught with risk. Each separate car of the train needed its own brakeman to manually operate brakes on its own set of wheels. Accidents caused by uncoordinated braking were frequent and Westinghouse realized that the poor safety of trains was holding up the whole industrialization of the United States.
He spent several years working on a replacement for brakemen's manual labor. Various models failed until, in 1868, he found a solution. He placed an air compressor inside the train driver's cabin and connected long air hoses to it. These hoses traveled the length of the train and were attached to brakes on each train carriage. This meant the driver could operate all the brakes on his own simply by allowing compressed air to pressurize the hoses that, in turn, provided the energy to activate the brake shoes. He obtained a patent for his air brakes in 1869 when he was just twenty-two years old, going on to found the Westinghouse Air Brake Company—the first of sixty Westinghouse companies.
The air brakes quickly became industry standard, and the vastly improved safety of trains meant they could travel much faster than before. By 1905 Westinghouse air brakes had been installed on more than two million train carriages as well as some 89,000 locomotive engines around the world.
