General Electric P7 Oven Size

[Lucrecio Houle]

GeneralElectric Company (GE) was an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, incorporated in the state of New York and headquartered in Boston. The company had several divisions, including aerospace, energy, healthcare, and finance.[7][8][9][10]

In 1880, Gerald Waldo Hart formed the American Electric Company of New Britain, Connecticut, which merged a few years later with Thomson-Houston Electric Company, led by Charles Coffin. In 1887, Hart left to become superintendent of the Edison Electric Company.[23] General Electric was formed through the 1892 merger of Edison General Electric Company and Thomson-Houston Electric Company with the support of Drexel, Morgan & Co.[22] The original plants of both companies continue to operate under the GE banner to this day.[24]

The General Electric business was incorporated in New York, with the Schenectady plant used as headquarters for many years thereafter. Around the same time, General Electric's Canadian counterpart, Canadian General Electric, was formed.[25]

In 1893, General Electric bought the business of Rudolf Eickemeyer in Yonkers, New York, along with all of its patents and designs. Eickemeyer's firm had developed transformers for use in the transmission of electrical power.[26]

In 1896, General Electric was one of the original 12 companies listed on the newly formed Dow Jones Industrial Average,[27] where it remained a part of the index for 122 years, though not continuously.[28]

In 1911, General Electric absorbed the National Electric Lamp Association (NELA) into its lighting business. GE established its lighting division headquarters at Nela Park in East Cleveland, Ohio. The lighting division has since remained in the same location.[29]

Owen D. Young, through GE, founded the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in 1919 after purchasing the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America. He aimed to expand international radio communications. GE used RCA as its retail arm for radio sales.[30] In 1926, RCA co-founded the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), which built two radio broadcasting networks. In 1930, General Electric was charged with antitrust violations and was ordered to divest itself of RCA.[31]

In 1927, Ernst Alexanderson of GE made the first demonstration of television broadcast reception at his General Electric Realty Plot home at 1132 Adams Road in Schenectady, New York.[32][33] On January 13, 1928, he made what was said to be the first broadcast to the public in the United States[32] on GE's W2XAD: the pictures were picked up on 1.5 square inches (9.7 square centimeters) screens in the homes of four GE executives. The sound was broadcast on GE's WGY (AM).[citation needed]

Experimental television station W2XAD evolved into the station WRGB, which, along with WGY and WGFM (now WRVE), was owned and operated by General Electric until 1983.[34] In 1965, the company expanded into cable with the launch of a franchise, which was awarded to a non-exclusive franchise in Schenectady through subsidiary General Electric Cablevision Corporation.[35] On February 15, 1965, General Electric expanded its holdings in order to acquire more television stations to meet the maximum limit of the FCC, and more cable holdings through subsidiaries General Electric Broadcasting Company and General Electric Cablevision Corporation.[36]

The company also owned television stations such as KOA-TV (now KCNC-TV) in Denver[37] and WSIX-TV (later WNGE-TV, now WKRN) in Nashville,[38] but like WRGB, General Electric sold off most of its broadcasting holdings, but held on to the Denver television station[39] until in 1986, when General Electric bought out RCA and made it into an owned-and-operated station by NBC. It even stayed on until 1995 when it was transferred to a joint venture between CBS and Group W in a swap deal, alongside KUTV in Salt Lake City for longtime CBS O&O in Philadelphia, WCAU-TV.[40]

Led by Sanford Alexander Moss, GE moved into the new field of aircraft turbo superchargers. This technology also led to the development of industrial gas turbine engines used for power production.[41] GE introduced the first set of superchargers during World War I and continued to develop them during the interwar period. Superchargers became indispensable in the years immediately before World War II. GE supplied 300,000 turbo superchargers for use in fighter and bomber engines. This work led the U.S. Army Air Corps to select GE to develop the nation's first jet engine during the war.[42] This experience, in turn, made GE a natural selection to develop the Whittle W.1 jet engine that was demonstrated in the United States in 1941.[43] GE was ranked ninth among United States corporations in the value of wartime production contracts.[44] However, their early work with Whittle's designs was later handed to Allison Engine Company. GE Aviation then emerged as one of the world's largest engine manufacturers, bypassing the British company Rolls-Royce plc.

In 2002, GE acquired the wind power assets of Enron during its bankruptcy proceedings.[46] Enron Wind was the only surviving U.S. manufacturer of large wind turbines at the time, and GE increased engineering and supplies for the Wind Division and doubled the annual sales to $1.2 billion in 2003.[47] It acquired ScanWind in 2009.[48][49]

In 2018, GE Power garnered press attention when a model 7HA gas turbine in Texas was shut down for two months due to the break of a turbine blade.[50] This model uses similar blade technology to GE's newest and most efficient model, the 9HA. After the break, GE developed new protective coatings and heat treatment methods. Gas turbines represent a significant portion of GE Power's revenue, and also represent a significant portion of the power generation fleet of several utility companies in the United States. Chubu Electric of Japan and lectricit de France also had units that were impacted. Initially, GE did not realize the turbine blade issue of the 9FB unit would impact the new HA units.[51]

GE was one of the eight major computer companies of the 1960s along with IBM, Burroughs, NCR, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, RCA, and UNIVAC.[52] GE had a line of general purpose and special purpose computers, including the GE 200, GE 400, and GE 600 series general-purpose computers,[52] the GE/PAC 4000 series real-time process control computers, and the DATANET-30 and Datanet 355 message switching computers (DATANET-30 and 355 were also used as front end processors for GE mainframe computers). A Datanet 500 computer was designed but never sold.[53]

In 1956 Homer Oldfield had been promoted to General Manager of GE's Computer Department. He facilitated the invention and construction of the Bank of America ERMA system, the first computerized system designed to read magnetized numbers on checks. But he was fired from GE in 1958 by Ralph J. Cordiner for overstepping his bounds and successfully gaining the ERMA contract. Cordiner was strongly against GE entering the computer business because he did not see the potential in it.

In 1962, GE started developing its GECOS (later renamed GCOS) operating system, originally for batch processing, but later extended to time-sharing and transaction processing. Versions of GCOS are still in use today. From 1964 to 1969, GE and Bell Laboratories (which soon dropped out) joined with MIT to develop the Multics operating system on the GE 645 mainframe computer. The project took longer than expected and was not a major commercial success, but it demonstrated concepts such as single-level storage, dynamic linking, hierarchical file system, and ring-oriented security. Active development of Multics continued until 1985.

GE got into computer manufacturing because, in the 1950s, they were the largest user of computers outside the United States federal government,[52] aside from being the first business in the world to own a computer. Its major appliance manufacturing plant "Appliance Park" was the first non-governmental site to host one.[54] However, in 1970, GE sold its computer division to Honeywell, exiting the computer manufacturing industry,[52] though it retained its timesharing operations for some years afterward. GE was a major provider of computer time-sharing services through General Electric Information Services (GEIS, now GXS), offering online computing services that included GEnie.

In 2000, when United Technologies Corp. planned to buy Honeywell, GE made a counter-offer that was approved by Honeywell.[55] On July 3, 2001, the European Union issued a statement that "prohibit the proposed acquisition by General Electric Co. of Honeywell Inc.".[56] The reasons given were it "would create or strengthen dominant positions on several markets and that the remedies proposed by GE were insufficient to resolve the competition concerns resulting from the proposed acquisition of Honeywell".[56]

On June 27, 2014, GE partnered with collaborative design company Quirky to announce its connected LED bulb called Link. The Link bulb is designed to communicate with smartphones and tablets using a mobile app called Wink.[57]

In December 1985, GE reacquired the RCA Corporation, primarily to gain ownership of the NBC television network for $6.28 billion; this merger surpassed the Capital Cities/ABC merger that happened earlier that year as the largest non-oil merger in world business history.[58] The remainder of RCA was sold to various companies, including Bertelsmann which absorbed RCA Records and Thomson SA, which licensed the manufacture of RCA branded electronics, traced its roots to Thomson-Houston, one of the original components of GE.[citation needed] Also in 1986, Kidder, Peabody & Co., a U.S.-based securities firm, was sold to GE and following heavy losses was sold to PaineWebber in 1994.[59]

In 1997, Genpact was founded as a unit of General Electric in Gurgaon. The company was founded as GE Capital International Services (GECIS).[60][61] In the beginning, GECIS created processes for outsourcing back-office activities for GE Capital such as processing car loans and credit card transactions. It was an experimental concept at the time and the beginning of the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry.[62][63] GE sold 60% stake in Genpact to General Atlantic and Oak Hill Capital Partners in 2005 and hived off Genpact into an independent business. GE is still a major client to Genpact today for services in customer service, finance, information technology, and analytics.[64][65]

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