… THEY ALL MADE MISTAKES

eorge Westinghouse has as spotless a reputation as any luminary in American history. He invented the air brake that dramatically increased the safety and efficiency of train traffic, successfully championed alternating current, and built the first safe, highvoltage distribution system. The Westinghouse geared turbine engine improved marine shipping, and he was granted patents that safely advanced natural-gas-well drilling, metering, and distribution.

But even Westinghouse didn’t always get it right. Natural gas was so plentiful in the Point Breeze section of Pittsburgh where he made his home that he put down a natural gas well in his yard. There was just one problem: Very few people (one might argue no one) really understood how to do this safely. The gas pressure was so great that in the middle of the night it blew the head off the well and blasted the primitive drill rig to smithereens. For the next several days, a hurricane of natural gas escaped through the hole until it was brought under control by a valve that Westinghouse himself invented. That near disaster didn’t prevent Westinghouse from running his own experiment on gas illumination by erecting an 18-metre-tall pipe on his property and lighting the gas plume. Contemporary accounts describe a king-size gas torch with a 30-metre-tall flame.

Think of the kind of notoriety an act like that would bring about today.

Now I don’t mean to too closely associate the erratic and flamboyant Musk with Westinghouse. Westinghouse’s many biographers portray him as quiet and essentially selfless. His longest employees were pallbearers at his funeral. Yet if a church mouse like Westinghouse can sometimes get it wrong, Musk – with all his ideas and technology and passion and appetite for risk – deserves more than a few do-overs.

– Roy Berendsohn