Do we like them?

Do we like George Westinghouse?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful turned up in his own words or acts, and the honours are real, but the record we could verify is thin.

George Westinghouse was born in Central Bridge, New York, in October 1846 and died in March 1914. As a teenager he served in the Civil War, first in the cavalry and then as an engineer on a Navy gunboat, and was discharged in 1865.

The air brake was his first big win, patented in 1869 and still the thing that lets trains stop. He went on to found or run dozens of companies, with around 400 patents by one count, and by the end his enterprises employed about 50,000 people. The Walk of Fame puts it at 360 patents and 60 companies, mostly around Pittsburgh.

The story everyone tells is the War of the Currents. Edison backed direct current, and his side ran a campaign to scare people off alternating current, including public electrocutions of stray dogs and a circus elephant, according to Scientific American. Westinghouse, for his part, reportedly refused to sell New York State his AC dynamos for use in executions. That is the dodgy-rival story, and he is on the better side of it.

On the harm check, nothing turned up. No nasty words, no campaigning against any group, and no company worth worrying about in the sources we read. The mud in this saga was thrown at him by Edison's camp, so it does not count against him here.

He also backed Nikola Tesla. In 1888 Westinghouse bought Tesla's AC patents for $60,000 plus stock options, and Tesla then helped perfect the AC system. He won the contract to light the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, and after his companies were hit in the 1907 financial panic he lost control of the electric company within about four years.

The honours are real. He was reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery in 1915 for his Civil War service, inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989, and former employees paid for a memorial in Pittsburgh's Schenley Park in 1930. Reports of generous pay, pensions and no strikes under his watch float around, but we could not pin them to a dated, solid source, so treat them as lore.