How GE brought good things to life and helped build modern America

• The company's origins trace back to inventors like Thomas Edison and the "war of the currents" in the late 1800s.
• GE's breakthroughs transformed daily life with products like electric appliances, medical imaging, and jet engines.
• After a century of industrial dominance, the company shifted focus to finance before facing decline and splitting into three separate firms.

This story is part of the Iconic Brands series, a USA TODAY network project showcasing the companies and brands that helped shape the nation's identity, economy and culture. The series celebrates American ingenuity with a deeply reported examination of how brands intersect with history, community and everyday life in celebration of the nation's 250th anniversary. Find more athttps://crabstation.site/usa250/iconic-brands

Beneath a Schenectady, New York, science museum and planetarium, a place often electric with the energy of schoolchildren on field trips, lies a vast and quiet basement attic housing relics of American invention and innovation that lit up and fueled modern America.

Here amid over-stuffed shelves and crowded floor space is a very early version of the radio, one used in the 1910s to broadcast sound between General Electric plants in  Eastern New York and the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts.

There is an original toaster from the first decade of the 20^th century, hardly recognizable as something you would use to singe your bread.

Try not to trip over an antique streetlamp, the type that paved the way for brightly illuminated city streets.

Look down and see two small generators designed by Thomas Edison himself and each capable of powering an 1880s factory. Or maybe a still-working phonograph of Edison’s invention distracts you, until a wall of portraits of 1920s electrical manufacturing workers pulls your gaze in a new direction.

The common thread through all of this gee-whiz ancient tech and remnants of days long gone by is General Electric, a company that did as much as any other to transform the United States into an industrial and economic powerhouse whose standard of living for well over a century would be the envy of the world.

It pioneered the Electric House, and even the Electric Breakfast. Its innovations made the chore of housework, well, much less of a chore.

It transformed and lit up and powered entire cities and made possible gigantic factories employing millions coast to coast. It didn’t invent every new-fangled product (say, television), yet it reliably contributed breakthroughs elevating not only broadcasting but hydropower and aviation and medical imaging, to name just a few elements of 21^st century life we might take for granted.

As quaint or outdated as many of the artifacts in the basement of the Museum of Innovation & Science in Schenectady might seem today, they helped create lifestyles and convenience from which we still benefit.

“It's the story of the second Industrial Revolution with the development and impact of the electrical industry on the home, on manufacturing,” said Chris Hunter, president of the museum and a long-time archivist there.

“A lot of times with GE, there may not necessarily be the original scientific discovery, but it's the effort to make it useful and easily available to people.”

Here at America’s semiquincentennial, the original General Electric no longer exists as a sole company. Instead, its name and its innovations live on in three separate companies and at locations such as the GE Appliance Park in Louisville, owned by yet another company. It is well worth tracing, however, GE’s rich and sometimes complicated history and legacy, which reflect our nation’s progress and path and challenges in myriad ways.

“For more than 130 years, we invented the future of industry and pioneered technologies that spurred world-transforming changes and improved billions of lives,” the still-extant GE.com website states.

At the heart of the story is the spirit of invention and innovation and collaboration and competitiveness birthed out of the dawn of the electric age, some 150 years ago. It was a time worthy of an “Oppenheimer”-style movie treatment, featuring some of the biggest names in scientific and industrial history engaged in a “war of the currents”: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse and Steinmetz, to name a few.

“Invention is something that's new, not obvious and potentially useful. Innovation is something that's actually used,” said George Wise, a longtime former GE communications specialist in the Schenectady area who has written history articles and books about the company’s complex and storied history.

He conjures the spirit of improvisational comedy to describe General Electric’s origins and its commitment to innovation during what he considers “The General Electric Century” from 1886, when Edison Machine Works began operating in Schenectady, until 1986, when massive layoffs hit the upstate New York operation under famed CEO “Neutron Jack” Welch.

“When an idea is raised, “they don't say ‘yes, but,’ they say ‘yes, and,’” the 84-year-old said of improvisational troupes in an interview at the Schenectady County Historical Society where he volunteers.

“And that's the way this whole electrification worked. Edison had an idea, and it was a good idea. And yet they had some faults. And instead of saying ‘yes, but,’ people said ‘yes, and, we can do it even better with this alternating current thing. ‘ And somebody else said, ‘yes, and we can do it even better.’”

“So it was an improvisational thing, and it wasn't all scientists and engineers. Customers were very important; workers, foremen. It was this improvisational effort of people saying ‘yes, and.’”

“And General Electric was one of the major players.”

Of the incandescent light bulb and the advent of utilities

“On September 4, 1882, the electrical age began.“

--The New York Historical, 2014

America’s first century saw remarkable progress as new modes of power and transportation came into being, laying the groundwork for large cities, westward expansion and industrialization.

Think Robert Fulton’s steam engine. Think the Erie Canal. Think the locomotive.

Inventors and innovators in the United States and overseas tinkered and experimented and built off of each other’s findings. So it was with what well may have been the most vital transformation of all,  the electrification of homes, businesses and entire communities.

Amid countless individuals and companies and research organizations fueling this quest was Thomas Edison, an Ohio native born in 1847. Edison built on earlier work to make in 1879 a crucial breakthrough. In his laboratory in New Jersey, “The Wizard of Menlo Park” tested and developed  and patented a glass bulb from which light could be emitted for a lengthy amount of time thanks to a heated carbon filament.

“He turned a bunch of components that had already been invented but were only potentially useful into an indoor electric lighting system that could be, and soon actually would be, used,” Wise wrote.

Yet if Edison had stopped there, he might not be the household name he remains today, and General Electric might not have come into being. The next and crucial step would be conceiving of and setting up power-generating utilities to light buildings and make machines and factories run.

If we could take a time machine back to Sept. 4, 1882, in Lower Manhattan, we would be present for a bit of true history: It was then the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York (known today as Con Edison) turned on an electric-generating station supplying power initially for 400 lights to several dozen structures within a few-block radius.

“This installation was the forerunner of all central electric generating stations,” states the Engineering and Technology History Wiki.

Creation of a legendary company amid tumult

Plenty of drama enveloped the run-up to the creation of General Electric in 1892. Edison championed electricity delivered via direct electrical current, which flows in only one direction. Nicola Tesla and George Westinghouse and others saw alternating current, in which the current switches directions many times per minute and allows voltage levels to be adjusted, as a better way to transmit electricity and create what we now today call the power grid.

“Edison, not wanting to lose the royalties he was earning from his direct current patents, began a campaign to discredit alternating current,” an account of “The War of the Currents” at energy.gov states. “He spread misinformation saying that alternating current was more dangerous, even going so far as to publicly electrocute stray animals using alternating current to prove his point.”

Alternating current ultimately won the better of the argument in that era, including at the newly formed General Electric in the 1890s.

In 1886, Edison Machine Works opened in Schenectady, but Edison remained in New Jersey operating a new research laboratory in West Orange. Increasingly, the innovator was more distant from operation of companies he’d helped build or inspire. When Edison General Electric formed in 1889, the company bore his name even though his role was limited mainly to serving on the board of directors and as a consultant.

GE formed from a merger of Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston Co. in 1892. Accounts state the step was fostered by banker J.P. Morgan and led to Thomson-Houston executives being placed in charge of the newly formed company.

Edison, who vocalized a desire for low prices serving more people, saw General Electric pursue a different course.

“Was he its founder, or one of its most vocal critics?” Wise wrote of Edison and the new GE. “The answer was both, but each at a different time. In 1878 he was the founder of the first of the companies that in 1892 would become GE. By that year 1892, however, he had become the man who did not want to see GE happen.”

Decades of GE innovation changed lives, society

General Electric powered forward in the 1890s and early 1900s, in part thanks to the genius of consulting engineer, Charles Steinmetz. His inventions included an efficient alternating generator and a three-phase electrical circuit, according to the Lemelson MIT website devoted to support of modern-day inventors.

 In the early 1900s, GE’s William Coolidge helped make the breakthrough of using ductile tungsten as the filament in incandescent light bulbs. He had a hand in developing products ranging from radar systems to electric blankets, the Lemelson MIT website biography of Coolidge states.  

Bigger yet was the hand he had in emerging X-ray technology.

“Coolidge has been immortalized for his invention of a vacuum tube for generating X-rays (often still called the "Coolidge tube"),” the Lemelson MIT biography states. “This patent granted in 1913, made the use of X-rays for medical diagnosis safe and convenient.”

Modern households, modern media and GE products

As General Electric and the country prospered in turn of the century America, GE towns like Schenectady prospered also. A planned development of upscale homes there became known as the GE Realty Plot, becoming a place of residence for municipal leaders and local General Electric executives and  scientists and engineers.

In the very early 1900s, the house in that neighborhood located at 1155 Avon Road became known as the Electric House. It was home to the family of Harry Hillman, an executive in GE’s electric heating department, according to an account on Union College’s website.

“It featured two circuits, one for lights and another for heating and cooking,” the account states. “At the time, houses only featured one circuit used exclusively for lighting.”

In that same decade, some of GE’s electricity-powered consumer products  were marketed collectively as creating the Electric Breakfast. Ads from the era of President Theodore Roosevelt and President William Taft highlight electric percolators and serving dishes and egg boilers and toasters as symbols of a sophisticated morning meal.

To be sure, the new conveniences of life created by General  Electric weren’t necessarily for everyone. In 1910, barely 1-in-7 U.S. households had electricity at all. So Electric Houses and Electric Breakfasts initially brought more comforts to the already comfortable, although more widespread electrification in the 1910s and later ultimately brought gadgets like toasters to nearly every household.

So it was with very early television. GE manufactured a mechanical television in 1928, when a broadcast was made to the four homes in Schenectady that had such televisions.

“In May 1928, they have the first TV newscast ever. And then they start a regular schedule of programing in August 1928,” museum president Hunter said. “They do the first TV remote in recognition of New York Gov. Al Smith receiving the Democratic nomination for president.”

The GE mechanical televisions had a tiny screen atop a wooden cabinet. Inside was a spinning disc whose holes correlated to just a few lines of pixels. Hardly high-definition television.

“At the time to build a high-resolution picture, you would have needed a disc the size of a five-story house,” Hunter said. While the technology worked, it wasn’t ready for the twin objectives of mass appeal and mass production.

More than a decade later, at the New York World Fair in 1939, both GE and competitor RCA introduced new television systems to the public. World War II would delay the advent of mass-produced televisions.

A bit of irony: GE in the 1980s would purchase longtime rival RCA, leading to it becoming owner of the NBC television network.

Another: The company marketed itself in the 1950s through its sponsorship of the “General Electric Theater” variety show. Its host? Ronald Reagan, who would go on to make his own news as U.S. president in the 1980s.

Nationwide, GE technological breakthroughs helped power the 20^th century forward.

GE engineer Samuel Moss at the firm’s Lynn, Massachusetts, plant developed just after World War I the turbo super-charger, instrumental in making high-altitude flights possible. The U.S. military relied heavily on the GE technology during World War II, the GE Aviation website states.

The GE J47 jet engine developed after the war became a standard as commercial jet flight began to transform both business and leisure travel in the United States and globally.

In health care, GE did not invent the pacemaker nor the CT scanner nor the MRI machine. Nonetheless, its innovations and production capacity made it a major player in these areas of medical technology.

On the lighter side, GE had a hand in popular 1950s toy Silly Putty, whose synthetic rubber had been invented during World War II in a General Electric laboratory.

Changing daily life through GE innovation

GE had its share of slogans. Were they on point?

“Live better electrically,” as a prewar GE slogan put it? Yes, if you consider the drudgery and difficulties of managing a non-electric household for most of human history.

Is it true that “Progress is our most important product,” as company marketers said in the postwar era? One can point now to GE’s 20^th century polluting of the Hudson River with PCB chemical contamination or to the tens of millions the company paid out in price-fixing claims during the 1960s. Yet most anyone who purchased GE’s groundbreaking “Mobile Maid Automatic Dishwasher” in 1954 must have marveled at the innovation.

“We bring good things to life,” GE stated as its slogan by the late 1970s, ironically on the eve of a new era for the company that moved it away from manufacturing and toward huge profit growth in finance.

By then, historian Wise’s “General Electric Century” was running out of steam. Amid greater foreign competition and a changing society, GE’s manufacturing base faced challenges.

In 1986, the 100^th anniversary of the arrival in Schenectady of Edison Machine Works, GE cut some 3,000 jobs, a huge blow to the city and its blue-collar workforce.

Yet GE itself was thriving in new ways. Under the leadership of CEO Jack Welch, a regular on business magazine covers and in the business section of bookstores, General  Electric went all in becoming a lender through its GE Capital arm. The company, like many others, became more Wall Street, less Main Street.

It worked well on the stock exchange and for the bottom line, perhaps not so well in burghs where GE laborers had worked their craft for many decades.

GE ended the 20^th century on a high, with annual revenues around $130 billion and with success in a range of endeavors ranging from lending and media to appliances and health care.

The company’s fortunes turned in the wrong direction within years, however.  The Great Recession of 2008 cracked holes in the financial services portion of the business. GE found itself getting mostly out of the appliances business, ending production of light bulbs even. And GE was removed from the Dow Jones average in 2018.

“GE's corporate integration of its home appliances, jet engines, health care technology, power generation and financial services at times proved to be unwieldy,” USA TODAY wrote in a 2018 article.

Authors Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann in their book “Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric” wrote that GE had fallen victim to concepts of “success theater” and “chasing earnings” that might have satisfied Wall Street for a time.

That had the effect of “allowing small problems to become big problems before they were detected,” the authors wrote. The book and other critiques cite issues including how the disparate parts of the conglomerate weren't necessarily fitting well together; how some acquisitions including of French energy company Alstom did not yield the expected successes; how 21st century corporate finance laws helped unearth underlying weaknesses in the balance sheets; and how company leaders proved not to master the types of innovation shown by technology companies that were refashioning how we communicate in the era of the internet and social media.

After the original GE became three separate firms – GE Aviation, GE Health Care and GE Vernova (energy and power systems), social media lit up with scorn and sadness.

User Crescent504 wrote this on Reddit: “My grandfather apprenticed at GE. They educated him in computers and he built their mainframes in the 1960s. Worked in the Defense Electronics division. Spent most his life at the company. My uncle followed in his footsteps and worked at GE. Everything they built has been obliterated. That company used to be a place you worked for life and were proud of the work you did.”

Business consultant Eric P. Miller wrote this on LinkedIn two years ago: “It's clear that the company that so many of us have revered for so long is now simply another bookmark in US corporate history.”

Out on Schenectady’s Erie Boulevard with Edison and Steinmetz

Building 37 at GE’s Schenectady complex still stands amid what historian Wise calls “a beautifully manicured ruin.” The structure is adorned with a massive “General Electric” sign and logo. It features 1,399 lights, each changed by hand from white to red or green at Christmastime most years.

Leading up to the complex and Building 27 is Erie Boulevard, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. There, near a Sunoco gasoline station and some vacant parking lots is a sculpture of Edison with Steinmetz, labeled on a plaque as “Two founding fathers of electricity.”

No signs point you here to this recognition of American and local innovation, and one recent day the only people present to look at them were two journalists on assignment.

Earlier that same day, Wise had spoken of all that General Electric meant to the country’s progress.

“If you look at it, people came here from Poland and they came here from Italy, and they got a job as a laborer. And their son finished high school…and then they might have gotten into the apprentice program, or they got a machinist job or something, and their children went to college.

“That's my feeling about GE in Schenectady. Its greatest contribution was it offered this path of upward mobility. And that was a wonderful thing.”

How the list was chosen

The Iconic Brands 50 identifies American companies that most profoundly shaped the nation’s identity, economy and culture. Selection emphasized historical significance, industry-building innovation, measurable economic influence and lasting cultural impact. Brands were chosen for transforming daily life or becoming enduring symbols of American values. Long-term relevance and sustained national influence carried greater weight than short-term financial performance or recent popularity.