Westinghouse Electric was founded by George Westinghouse. Though the company was established in 1886, it didn’t reach Cleveland until 1894. Westinghouse would come to have many notable engineers working for his company including William Stanley, Nikola Tesla, Vladimir Zworykin, Oliver B. Shallenberger, Benjamin Garver Lamme and his sister Bertha Lamme. The Westinghouse company rivaled General Electric, founded by George’s arch-rival, Thomas Edison.

Westinghouse pioneered long-distance power transmission and high-voltage alternating-current transmission, unveiling the technology for lighting in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

Many years and many creations later, the Cleveland Westinghouse facilities began closing their doors during the post-World War II period. The corporation expanded its sales and service activities, operation branches of sales and engineering, elevator, and repair divisions, as well as sales offices. By the mid-1970s most all Cleveland manufacturing locations had been closed, and anything remaining was continued through the Rockside Road location into the 1980s.

During the 1980s, the Reagan-era defense build-up brought Westinghouse lucrative government contracts as remaining factories geared toward the production of torpedoes. By 1993 this was brought to a halt, when defense cuts began affecting the company, and they were forced to lay off 150 workers from the Cleveland division. In 1994 the Eaton Corp. bought Westinghouse for $1.6 billion, and began converting the research and development facilities, as well as the manufacturing plant, into commercially oriented enterprises.

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