The Age of Ingenuity.

This article focuses on the impact of the prestige of engineers on their inventiveness in the past. In 1888, George Westinghouse was investigating a motor for his alternating current electrical system. He had developed ac power two years earlier, and it offered a transmission advantage over the direct current system of Thomas Edison: The introduction of a transformer, to step voltages up or down, permitted efficient power transmission over longer distances. Edison's system still had the upper hand, however, because of the dc motor. Direct current not only could light up the dark, it could also do work, like driving streetcars and factory machinery. If the 1860s and 1870s encompassed the Great Railway Age in America, the decades following could be called the Age of Ingenuity. This period in American industrialization produced a flurry of inventions in machine tools, factory equipment, rubber and steel products, and communications devices.If engineers were not inventing new products, they were busy improving upon the systems and processes introduced earlier in England, France, and Germany.