George Westinghouse

Before inventor George Westinghouse's air brake was patented on April 13, 1869, there was no way to stop a railway train easily, quickly and reliably in a case of emergency. When his train was delayed due to an accident, he started thinking about a solution. The concept of operating the brakes of the train with compressed air came to Westinghouse when he heard about mining engineers in Europe. They used compressed air for drills, although the pressure pipes there were longer than those of a railway train. In 1868, a test train whose five carriages were equipped with the new Westinghouse air brakes mastered a real emergency brake with flying colors. The following year, the 23-year-old founded the “Westinghouse Air Brake Company” (WABCO).

George Westinghouse was born on October 6, 1846, in a small village in the state of New York. Already strongly interested in technology as a teenager, he would become one of the most productive U.S. inventors a few years later. Among his numerous inventions were automatic signal controls for trains or a telephone exchange, which made manual connection superfluous. Fascinated by all things related to alternating current, Westinghouse, who was considered fair, level-headed and inspiring, founded the “Westinghouse Electric Company” in 1886. Here he pioneered - with support of Nikola Tesla - the use of alternating current, which later became the standard for global electric grid technology. At the time of his death on March 12, 1914, George Westinghouse owned about 40 companies in the United States and Europe, employing a total of 50,000 people.

In 1901, the air brake found its way into electrically powered trains, and one year later, the Westinghouse magnetic brake found its way into trams. In 1908, he presented the electro-pneumatic brake for subways. In 1999, WABCO's rail business was absorbed into the U.S. rail technology company “Wabtec Corporation”.

The development of a pneumatic brake for trucks and heavy vehicles in 1921 marked WABCO's entry into the rapidly growing automotive industry. WABCO established itself as a specialist in commercial vehicle safety, for example as the leading developer of the ABS for trucks (1981), the electronic braking system EBS (1996) or the autonomous emergency braking system OnGuard (2003). In 2020, ZF acquired WABCO and integrated the company into the ZF Group as today's “Commercial Vehicle Solutions” division.