Westinghouse Electric Corporation

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.

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. 1994

Henry J. Heinz began in 1869 with a humble product — bottled horseradish sold from a Pittsburgh garden — and built it into one of the world's great food empires within two decades. In an era of adulterated and mislabeled food, Heinz staked his brand on purity, selling his condiments in clear glass so buyers could see exactly what they were getting. He paired shrewd, theatrical advertising with unusually generous treatment of his workers, reshaping both how Americans ate and how businesses sold to them.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2011

In 1869 a young inventor named George Westinghouse solved one of railroading's deadliest problems: how to stop a long train quickly and safely. His compressed-air brake let an engineer halt every car at once instead of relying on brakemen scrambling car to car. From this building his company grew into an industrial giant, and the technology he pioneered still slows trains around the world today.