Great Documentaries's video: Westinghouse - Chapter 18 - Lights at the Fair

(COPE) Hundreds of thousands of people came at night just to see the lighting. And what they do is they go back and they talk about it. (NARRATOR) The World's Fair was a massive undertaking, but Westinghouse had the courage of his conviction that his men could do it. He closed the contract before even consulting them. Edison was well-known for challenging people on patent infringement, and even though Westinghouse had won the World's Fair contract, they were dangerously close to a patent dispute and a massive lawsuit. The Westinghouse alternating-current system was going to power the lights of the fair, but the light bulbs that were going to be used were too similar to a patent owned by Edison. The one-piece incandescent light bulb. Some six months before the opening, with all of the Westinghouse work already installed, the patent on the Edison incandescent lamp was sustained, and Westinghouse was not permitted to use the light bulbs that he had planned to use. George Westinghouse had a clever way around this problem, though. Years earlier, he had purchased rights to the Sawyer-Man lamp patent and chose to use those lamps instead and thus originated the famous two- piece Westinghouse stopper lamp. So-called because a piece of ground glass held an iron filament fitted into the bulb like a cork. (REIS) Good business sense said he'd better have a backup, and that turned out to be the two-piece, all-glass Westinghouse stopper lamp that was upheld in court as an independent patent. Perhaps wasn't as good an incandescent lamp as the Edison lamp at the time, but it was good enough to successfully illuminate the great Chicago World's Fair in 1893. (NARRATOR) Westinghouse rushed through extensive new production facilities to finish the bulbs the moment the fair was scheduled to open. (REIS) The Westinghouse Company, at that time, manufactured 250,000 two-piece, all-glass Westinghouse stopper lamps. It was estimated, at the time, that that was 25% of all the incandescent lamps made up to that point in time anywhere in the world. (NARRATOR) It was a quick and dirty job, and the opening of the fair on May 1, 1893, was not delayed an hour. In his tradition of surrounding himself with smart people, Westinghouse was well-served by his patent lawyers and engineers. The World's Fair lamps did not last long and had to be changed often, but fair visitors never knew this at the time. All they saw was the beautiful lighting and the name "Westinghouse." The fair was a huge success, attracting nearly 28 million visitors in its 6-month run. And the Westinghouse exhibits had prime real estate. Just off the Court of Honor sat the massive Electricity Building, which was one of the most popular attractions. The Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company occupied a huge chunk of floor space right alongside their rival, General Electric. In Machinery Hall, the Westinghouse Electric Company showed off their complete polyphase system. The generating plant for the World's Fair lighting was the largest alternating-current central station then in existence. To further amaze visitors, the complex switchboard used to control all of the machines required only one operator. George Westinghouse attended the fair that summer but left all the planning and construction of the exhibits to his managers. Mr. E.E. Keller, the Westinghouse manager of the World's Fair contract, said, "Like most of his helpers, I felt ready to march through fire for him and was amply repaid. Such was the man Westinghouse." In the end, they even turned a profit of $16,000, not including advertising. (SUTHERLAND) I'd like to have been there. That would have been a great experience to have walked through that place, but I understand no one person could see the entire fair during the summer, that there was so much to see.