Although George Westinghouse was, in the broadest sense, a public servant, my own acquaint ance with him was only social. As he left behind him no diaries, no files of personal correspondence, and scarcely any other sources of supply on which the biographer of a political or military celebrity depends for much interesting material, I have been obliged to rely, in the main, on the memories of the friends of Mr. Westinghouse, local tradition and gossip in neighborhoods where he had lived, the records of courts and minutes of public meetings, corporate reports and partnership account books, old volumes of newspapers and magazines, mis cellaneous scrapbooks, and the like. One day, let us hope, we may have from the pen of some well known expert in technology an adequate summary of what the whole world's industrial advancement owes to the work of the eminent inventor. The mission of the present volume is simply human. It will have been accomplished if it conveys to the young man of today a sense that his career will depend for success less on the splendor of its start than on the spirit in which he pursues it; far less on capital than on courage, on worry than on watch fulness, on pull than on persistence.