General Electric

• 1. The Meatball On The Roof

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  General Electric's logo is a blue circle with four curved white lines that suggest the blades of a fan, wrapped around cursive letters spelling GE. Arthur L. Rich designed it in 1899, and it was trademarked in 1900. Inside the company, people call it the Monogram, though some just call it the meatball. That small emblem rode on light bulbs, refrigerators, jet engines, and television networks for well over a century. It even glowed on the roof of 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, a building that later became the Comcast Building. General Electric was founded in 1892 and incorporated in the state of New York. By its final year of operation, it was headquartered in Boston. In 2024, the conglomerate that once held that name ceased to exist as a single company. How does a firm with two Nobel laureates and 122 years on the Dow Jones Industrial Average end up split into three pieces? What turned the most valuable company in the world into the worst performer on the index? The answers live in laboratories, courtrooms, riverbeds, and boardrooms.

• 2. Edison's Merged Empire

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  In 1889, Thomas Edison held interests in a tangle of separate firms. Edison Lamp Company made lamps in East Newark, New Jersey. Edison Machine Works built dynamos and large electric motors in Schenectady, New York. Bergmann & Company produced lighting fixtures and sockets, while Edison Electric Light Company held the patents and the money, backed by J. P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt family. Henry Villard, a long-time Edison supporter, proposed pulling all of these interests into one body. Samuel Insull, who served as Villard's secretary and later financier, supported the idea. Drexel, Morgan & Co., founded by J. P. Morgan and Anthony J. Drexel, financed Edison's research and merged several of his companies into Edison General Electric Company, incorporated in New York on the 24th of April 1889. Not every Edison venture joined. The Edison Illuminating Company, which would later become Consolidated Edison, stayed outside the merger. Gerald Waldo Hart had formed the American Electric Company of New Britain, Connecticut, in 1880. It later merged with Thomson-Houston Electric Company, led by Charles Coffin. The 1892 union of Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston, again backed by Drexel, Morgan & Co., created General Electric. The original plants of both companies still operate under the GE banner. The Schenectady plant served as headquarters for many years, and a Canadian counterpart, Canadian General Electric, formed around the same time.

• 3. The Wizards Of Schenectady

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  Charles Steinmetz joined General Electric in 1893 when GE acquired a smaller New York company. A genius in both mathematics and electronics, he earned over 200 patents and pushed the company forward. His name survives in Steinmetz's equation, Steinmetz solids, Steinmetz curves, the Steinmetz equivalent circuit, and the IEEE Charles Proteus Steinmetz Award. Two GE employees would go on to win the Nobel Prize, Irving Langmuir in 1932 and Ivar Giaever in 1973. Ernst Alexanderson carried that inventive streak into a new medium. In 1927, at his General Electric Realty Plot home at 1132 Adams Road in Schenectady, he made the first demonstration of television broadcast reception. On the 13th of January 1928, he made what was said to be the first broadcast to the public in the United States on GE's W2XAD. The pictures appeared on screens of just 1.5 square inches, about 9.7 square centimeters, in the homes of four GE executives, with sound carried on GE's WGY. That experimental station W2XAD grew into WRGB. The fictional city of Ilium in several of Kurt Vonnegut's works, including Cat's Cradle and Player Piano, appears loosely based on Schenectady. Vonnegut wrote for GE in the early 1950s, and his short story Deer in the Works is set at the Ilium Works.

• 4. Wings And Turbines

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  Sanford Alexander Moss led GE into aircraft turbosuperchargers, a field that also produced industrial gas turbine engines for power generation. GE introduced its first superchargers during World War I and kept developing them between the wars, until they became indispensable just before World War II. The company supplied 300,000 turbosuperchargers for fighter and bomber engines. That track record led the U.S. Army Air Corps to pick GE to develop the nation's first jet engine, and GE went on to demonstrate the Whittle W.1 jet engine in the United States in 1941. GE ranked ninth among United States corporations in the value of wartime production contracts. Its early work on Whittle's designs was later handed to Allison Engine Company. GE Aviation eventually became one of the world's largest engine manufacturers, passing the British firm Rolls-Royce plc. The power side of this work carried its own troubles. In 2018, GE Power drew attention when a model 7HA gas turbine in Texas was shut down for two months after a turbine blade broke. The 7HA shared blade technology with GE's newest and most efficient model, the 9HA. GE responded with new protective coatings and heat treatment methods. Chubu Electric of Japan and Electricite de France also had units affected. GE acquired the wind power assets of Enron during its bankruptcy in 2002. Enron Wind was the only surviving U.S. manufacturer of large wind turbines at the time, and GE doubled the division's annual sales to $1.2 billion in 2003.

• 5. Radio Sets And Sitcoms

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  Owen D. Young, then GE's general counsel and vice president, founded the Radio Corporation of America in 1919. He had purchased the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America while working with senior naval officers, aiming to expand international radio communications. GE used RCA as its retail arm for radio sales. In 1926, RCA co-founded the National Broadcasting Company, which built two radio networks. The arrangement did not last. In 1930, General Electric was charged with antitrust violations and ordered to divest itself of RCA. GE returned to broadcasting decades later in dramatic fashion. In December 1985, it reacquired RCA, primarily to gain the NBC television network, for $6.28 billion. That deal surpassed the Capital Cities/ABC merger from earlier that year as the largest non-oil company merger in world business history. GE owned NBC from 1986 until 2013. In 2004, GE bought 80% of Vivendi Universal Entertainment, parent of Universal Pictures, and merged it with NBC to form NBCUniversal. The unwinding came in stages. On the 3rd of December 2009, NBCUniversal became a joint venture with Comcast, which took a controlling interest while GE retained 49%. On the 19th of March 2013, Comcast bought GE's remaining shares for $16.7 billion. GE's broadcasting reach once stretched across stations like KCNC-TV in Denver and radio outlets such as KGO in San Francisco. The NBC sitcom 30 Rock parodied GE from 2006 to 2013, and former CEO Jack Welch even cameoed as himself in the season four episode Future Husband.

• 6. The Mainframes That Got Away

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  In the 1960s, GE stood among the eight major computer companies alongside IBM, Burroughs, NCR, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, RCA, and UNIVAC. Its lineup included the GE 200, GE 400, and GE 600 series general-purpose machines, plus the GE/PAC 4000 real-time process control computers and the DATANET-30 and Datanet 355 message switching systems. GE became the first business in the world to own a computer, hosting one at its Appliance Park plant, the first non-governmental site to do so. Homer Oldfield became General Manager of GE's Computer Department in 1956. He helped build the Bank of America ERMA system, the first computerized system designed to read magnetized numbers on checks. Ralph J. Cordiner fired Oldfield in 1958 for overstepping his bounds, because Cordiner did not see potential in the computer business. From 1964 to 1969, GE joined with MIT, and briefly Bell Laboratories, to develop the Multics operating system on the GE 645 mainframe. The project ran long and was not a major commercial success, yet it demonstrated single-level storage, dynamic linking, a hierarchical file system, and ring-oriented security. Active development of Multics continued until 1985. GE's own GECOS operating system, started in 1962 and later renamed GCOS, is still in use today in some versions. In 1970, GE sold its computer division to Honeywell and exited manufacturing. Years later the rivalry returned. In 2000, GE made a counter-offer to buy Honeywell that Honeywell approved, but on the 3rd of July 2001, the European Union prohibited the proposed acquisition, citing dominant positions and insufficient remedies.

• 7. Rivers Of PCBs

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  Based on data from 2000, researchers at the Political Economy Research Institute listed GE as the fourth-largest corporate producer of air pollution in the United States, releasing more than 4.4 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the air each year. Only the United States Government, Honeywell, and Chevron Corporation were responsible for producing more Superfund toxic waste sites. GE contaminated the Hudson River with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, between 1947 and 1977. In 1983, the EPA declared a 200-mile stretch, from Hudson Falls to New York City, a Superfund site, considered one of the largest in the nation. That same year, New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams sued GE over more than 100,000 tons of chemicals dumped from its plant in Waterford, New York. From around 1932 until 1977, GE also polluted the Housatonic River with PCB discharges from its Pittsfield, Massachusetts plant. The highest concentrations sit in Woods Pond in Lenox, Massachusetts, measured up to 110 mg/kg in the sediment. About 11,000 pounds of PCBs are estimated to remain behind the Woods Pond dam. In 1999, GE agreed to a $250 million settlement over the Housatonic and other sites. Some consumers boycotted GE light bulbs and refrigerators during the 1980s and 1990s to protest the company's role in nuclear weapons production. The reactors involved in the 2011 Fukushima I crisis in Japan were GE designs, with concerns over their safety raised as early as 1972.

• 8. Collapse And Split

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  On the 15th of August 2019, financial fraud investigator Harry Markopolos, known for uncovering Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme, accused General Electric of being a bigger fraud than Enron, alleging $38 billion in accounting fraud. GE denied wrongdoing. He pointed to under-reserved long-term care liabilities and a current ratio of only 0.67, warning the company might file for bankruptcy in a recession. On the 6th of October 2020, GE reported it had received a Wells notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission about possible securities law violations. The decline showed in the numbers. GE had been a dividend aristocrat that never cut its dividend for 119 years, until a 50% reduction in 2017 from 24 cents to 12 cents per share, followed by a further cut in 2018 to 1 cent. In August 2000, the company had a market capitalization of $601 billion and was the most valuable company in the world. On the 26th of June 2018, the stock was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average and replaced with Walgreens Boots Alliance, after falling more than 55 percent year on year. It had been the only company left from the original 1896 index. Leadership turned over fast. Jeff Immelt, CEO from 2001, began selling off divisions after the Great Recession. John Flannery, his 2017 replacement, divested locomotives and lighting to focus on aviation. In 2018, H. Lawrence Culp Jr. took over. On the 9th of November 2021, Culp announced GE would split into three public companies by 2024. GE HealthCare spun off on the 4th of January 2023, and GE Vernova followed on the 2nd of April 2024. GE Aerospace took the General Electric name and ticker, and the company's legal name is still General Electric Company.