Timeline of company evolution

• 1889 - renames itself the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company
• 1890s
  • 1891 - build world's first commercial AC system (Ames Hydroelectric Generating Plant)
  • 1893 - supplies electric lights and power for Chicago World Fair
  • 1895 - installs hydropower AC generators at Niagara Falls which supplied power to Buffalo, NY
  • 1899 - founds British Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company
• 1900s
  • 1901 - acquires Bryant Electric Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, which continues operation as a subsidiary
  • 1909 - ousts George Westinghouse as chairman during bankruptcy reorganization
• 1910s
  • 1914 - acquires Copeman Electric Stove Company in Flint, Michigan from Lloyd Groff Copeman, moves it to Mansfield, Ohio and enters the home appliance market (sold in 1974 to White Consolidated Industries)
  • 1915 - New England Westinghouse Company opens for business. First product: Mosin-Nagant rifles for the Czar's army.
  • 1916 - share of British Westinghouse purchased by a British holding company, which becomes Metropolitan-Vickers
• 1920s - enters the broadcasting industry, with stations like KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and WBZ (AM) in Massachusetts
• 1930s - enters the nuclear age with an industrial atom smasher.
  • 1934 - opens its Home of Tomorrow in Mansfield, Ohio, to demonstrate Westinghouse home appliances
  • 1935 - completes longest continuous electric steel annealing furnace in the world at Ford Motor Company, Dearborn, Michigan
• 1930s - funds invention of the magnetohydrodynamic generator
• 1940s - enters aviation with airborne radar (defense electronics sold 1996), jet engine propulsion, and ground based airport lighting.
  • 1941 - after years of resistance to the unionization efforts of its employees and to the National Labor Relations Act, signs a national labor agreement with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America after a US Supreme Court decision that upheld the Act.
  • 1945 - renames itself the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, and makes first automatic elevator.
• 1950s - enters consumer finance with Westinghouse Credit Corporation
• 1960s - acquires ThermoKing, begins automated mass transit (sold 1988); adopts "You Can Be Sure If It's Westinghouse" as advertising slogan for home appliances
• 1970s - sells well-known home appliance division to White Consolidated Industries which becomes White-Westinghouse
• 1979 - sells off all Oil Refineries and closes other civic projects in Iran after the Iranian Revolution.
• 1980s - acquires cable television operator TelePrompter (sold 1985) and robot maker Unimation; sells street light division to Cooper Lighting, elevator/escalator division to Schindler Group, and lamp division to Philips.
  • 1988 - closes the East Pittsburgh plant, which had once been the primary Westinghouse manufacturing facility.
  • 1989 - sells watthour meter division at Raleigh, North Carolina to Asea Brown Boveri Group.
• 1990s
  • 1994 - sells electric power distribution and control business unit to Eaton Corporation for $1 billion
  • 1995 - buys CBS for US$5.4 billion.
  • 1996 - buys Infinity Broadcasting
  • 1996 - sells Westinghouse Electronic Systems defense business to Northrop Grumman for $3 billion, becoming Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems.
  • 1997 - sells most non-broadcast operations; renames itself CBS Corporation
  • 1998 - sells remaining manufacturing asset, its nuclear energy business, to BNFL which sold it to Toshiba in 2006 which still operates it as Westinghouse Electric Company today.
  • 1998 - CBS Corporation creates a new subsidiary called Westinghouse Electric Corporation to manage the Westinghouse brand.
  • 1999 - sells itself to Viacom, Inc.
• 2000s
  • 2005 - Viacom renamed itself CBS Corporation

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