For two days last month, veteran actor Larry John Meyers stood under hot lights in a studio at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center on Second Avenue.

Wearing a walrus handlebar mustache and thick sideburns and attired in a formal blue pinstripe suit with a vest and gold pocket watch, Mr. Meyers assumed the forceful personality of George Westinghouse to answer nearly 200 questions about the engineer's life and inventions.

"I successfully used air to apply the brakes on a train," he says, looking into the camera and watching a TelePrompTer.

In between questions, makeup artist Jeannee Josefczyk dabbed the sweat from his brow.

This virtual interview with one of Pittsburgh's greatest industrial pioneers will be part of a larger long-term exhibit about important innovators that opens Nov. 8 at the Senator John Heinz History Center.

Visitors will be able to interview Westinghouse in a replica of his Wilmerding office, which was in a building called the Castle. The inventor will appear on a screen that is 8 feet wide and 5 feet high and it will look as if he is standing or pacing behind his desk. The year of this interview is 1905, but the entire top of the entrepreneur's desk will be a touch screen where visitors can ask questions by pressing the telephone, letters, patents, slide rule, coffee cup or photo album that are spread out before him.

In a recent telephone interview, Mr. Meyers talked about the challenges of becoming a kind of historic answering machine.

"There's a certain formality to this language. I think it's true that 100 years ago, when he was doing his work, people were probably a little bit more formal when they spoke," Mr. Meyers said.

In his responses, the actor emphasized the first syllable of "electricity."

"It's a relatively new word. It's a new thing at this time. That pronunciation makes the word special. It sets it off. Now we don't even say the 'e' -- 'Lectricity.' "

He also emphasized the phrases "direct current" and "alternating current," mentioning the competing technologies in the battle science called "The War of the Electrical Currents."

"I was careful not to slur past those ideas because it's what people were talking about in that era, which kind of electricity to use."

Similar virtual interviews have been done of Albert Einstein, which is available online. Benjamin Franklin's ghost can be questioned at the PECO Energy Liberty Center in Philadelphia.

Both interviews were created at CMU's Entertainment Technology Center.