First World Series

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1986

In the 1880s a fierce rivalry raged over how to deliver electric power, and George Westinghouse bet on alternating current. Founding his company in Pittsburgh in 1886, he built the motors, generators, and transformers that let electricity travel over long distances rather than only a few blocks. That gamble on AC would light cities and power factories far from any generating plant.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2019

Lois Weber was born on this Pittsburgh site and grew up to become the first American woman to direct films—and one of the most prolific and daring directors of the silent era. Between 1908 and 1934 she wrote, directed, and acted in more than two hundred pictures, tackling controversial subjects like drug addiction, abortion, and poverty that most filmmakers avoided. She also helped pioneer cinematic techniques, including the split screen.

Pittsburgh, PA

In the early 1850s, years before Edwin Drake's famous 1859 oil well, a Pittsburgh druggist named Samuel M. Kier was already turning a nuisance into an industry. Crude oil kept fouling the salt wells his family worked at Tarentum, so Kier tinkered with distilling it — and around 1854, on this site, he set up a small five-barrel still to refine that crude into clean-burning 'carbon oil' for lamps. It was, in effect, America's first commercial petroleum refinery, lighting homes before anyone imagined an oil boom.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1996

John A. Roebling was a German-born engineer whose faith in twisted wire cable transformed how Americans crossed their rivers. Here in Pittsburgh in 1846 he built one of the first wire-rope suspension bridges to carry a road over the Monongahela, proving a design he would refine across the country. His genius culminated in the Brooklyn Bridge, whose plans he drew before his death in 1869 left its completion to his son Washington.