E. H. Heinrichs: Profile of a Founding Practitioner

Abstract

A German immigrant who worked in journalism in Pittsburgh at the height of the Gilded Age played an important, yet largely undocumented, role in the early history of public relations. While E. H. Heinrichs has been cited in a few histories of public relations and in a number of college textbooks, this article is the first to profile at length the acknowledged founding practitioner of corporate public relations. Heinrichs, the first person to be hired by a corporation to coordinate its communications, played a role in “the battle of the currents,” the propaganda war waged between Heinrichs's ultimately successful client, George Westinghouse, who proposed alternating current (AC), and Thomas Alva Edison, who supported direct current (DC), to determine the method by which the world would receive electricity.