The General Electric Company, or GE (NYSE: GE), is a multinational American technology and services conglomerate incorporated in the State of New York. In 2009, Forbes ranked GE as the world's largest company. The company has 323,000 employees around the world.
Formation
By 1890, Thomas Edison had brought together several of his business interests under one corporation to form Edison General Electric. At about the same time, Thomson-Houston Company, under the leadership of Charles A. Coffin, gained access to a number of key patents through the acquisition of a number of competitors. Subsequently, General Electric was formed by the 1892 merger of Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston Company
Public company
In 1896, General Electric was one of the original 12 companies listed on the newly-formed Dow Jones Industrial Average and still remains after 113 years, the only one remaining on the Dow (though it has not continuously been in the DOW index).
In 1911 the National Electric Lamp Association (NELA) was absorbed into General Electric's existing lighting business. GE then established its lighting division headquarters at Nela Park in East Cleveland, Ohio. Nela Park is still the headquarters for GE's lighting business.
RCA
The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was founded by GE in 1919 to further international radio. RCA would quickly grow into an industrial giant of its own.
Power generation
GE's long history of working with turbines in the power generation field gave them the engineering know-how to move into the new field of aircraft turbosuperchargers. Led by Sanford Moss, GE introduced the first superchargers during WWI, and continued to develop them during the Interwar period. They became indispensable in the years immediately prior to WWII, and GE was the world leader in exhaust-driven supercharging when the war started. This experience, in turn, made GE a natural selection to develop the Whittle W.1 jet engine that was demonstrated in the US in 1941. Although their early work with Whittle's designs was later handed to Allison Engine Company, GE Aviation emerged as one of the world's largest engine manufacturers second only to the well founded, and older, British company; Rolls-Royce plc, who led the way in innovative, reliable, and efficient high performance heavy duty jet engine design and manufacture.
Computing
GE was one of the eight major computer companies through all of the 1960s — with IBM, the largest, called "Snow White" followed by the "Seven Dwarfs": Burroughs, NCR, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, RCA, UNIVAC and GE. GE had an extensive line of general purpose and special purpose computers. Among them were the GE 200, GE 400, and GE 600 series general purpose computers, the GE 4010, GE 4020, and GE 4060 real time process control computers, and the Datanet 30 message switching computer. A Datanet 600 computer was designed, but never sold. It has been said that GE got into computer manufacturing because in the 1950s they were the largest user of computers outside of the United States federal government. In 1970 GE sold its computer division to Honeywell. This group, including Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data Corporation and Honeywell, were usually, within the industry itself, referred to as the "BUNCH", not as the "Seven Dwarfs".
