General Electric

General Electric (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in New York, and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut.[2] As of 2015, the company operates through the following segments: Appliances, Power and Water, Oil and Gas, Energy Management, Aviation, Healthcare, Transportation and Capitalwhich cater to the needs of Home Appliances, Financial services, Medical devices, Life Sciences, Pharmaceutical, Automotive, Software Development and Engineering industries. In 2011, GE ranked among the Fortune 500 as the 6th-largest firm in the U.S. by gross revenue,[5] and the 14th most profitable. As of 2012 the company was listed the fourth-largest in the world among the Forbes Global 2000, further metrics being taken into account. The Nobel Prize has twice been awarded to employees of General Electric: Irving Langmuir in 1932 and Ivar Giaever in 1973.
On January 13, 2016, it was announced that GE will be moving its corporate headquarters to the South Boston Waterfront neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. Some of the workers will arrive in the summer of 2016, and the full move will be completed by 2018.
== History ==
During 1889, Thomas Edison had business interests in many electricity-related companies: Edison Lamp Company, a lamp manufacturer in East Newark, New Jersey; Edison Machine Works, a manufacturer of dynamos and large electric motors in Schenectady, New York; Bergmann & Company, a manufacturer of electric lighting fixtures, sockets, and other electric lighting devices; and Edison Electric Light Company, the patent-holding company and the financial arm backed by J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt family for Edison's lighting experiments. In 1889, Drexel, Morgan & Co., a company founded by J.P. Morgan and Anthony J. Drexel, financed Edison's research and helped merge those companies under one corporation to form Edison General Electric Company which was incorporated in New York on April 24, 1889. The new company also acquired Sprague Electric Railway & Motor Company in the same year.
At about the same time, Charles Coffin, leading the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, acquired a number of competitors and gained access to their key patents. General Electric was formed through the 1892 merger of Edison General Electric Company of Schenectady, New York, and Thomson-Houston Electric Company of Lynn, Massachusetts, with the support of Drexel, Morgan & Co. Both plants continue to operate under the GE banner to this day. The company 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.
=== Public company ===
In 1896, General Electric was one of the original 12 companies listed on the newly formed Dow Jones Industrial Average. After 120 years, it is the only one of the original companies still listed on the Dow index, although it has not been on the index continuously.
=== RCA ===
Owen D. Young, through GE, founded the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in 1919 to further international radio. GE used RCA as its retail arm for radio sales from 1919, when GE began production, until separation in 1930. RCA quickly grew into an industrial giant in its own right.
=== Television ===
In 1927, Ernst Alexanderson of GE made the first demonstration of his television broadcasts at his General Electric Realty Plot home at 1132 Adams Rd, Schenectady, NY. On January 13, 1928, he made what was said to be the first broadcast to the public in the United States on GE's W2XAD: the pictures were picked up on 1.5 square inch (9.7 square centimeter) screens in the homes of four GE executives. The sound was broadcast on GE's WGY (AM).
Experimental television station W2XAD evolved into station WRGB which—along with WGY and WGFM (now WRVE)—was owned and operated by General Electric until 1983.
=== Power generation ===
GE's 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 Alexander Moss, GE introduced the first superchargers during World War I, and continued to develop them during the Interwar period. Superchargers became indispensable in the years immediately prior to World War II, 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 United States in 1941. GE ranked ninth among United States corporations in the value of wartime production contracts. 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, bypassing the British company, Rolls-Royce plc.
In 2002, GE acquired the windpower assets of Enron during its bankruptcy proceedings. 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. t acquired ScanWindin 2009.
=== Computing ===
With IBM (the largest), Burroughs, NCR, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, RCA and UNIVAC, GE was one of the eight major computer companies of the 1960s.
GE had a 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, 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.
In 1962, GE started developing its GECOS (later renamed GCOS) operating system, originally for batch processing, but later extended to timesharing and transaction processing. Versions of GCOS are 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 store, dynamic linking, hierarchical file system, and ring-oriented security. Active development of Multics continued until 1985.
It has been said that GE got into computer manufacturing because in the 1950s they were the largest user of computers outside the United States federal government, 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. However, in 1970, GE sold its computer division to Honeywell, exiting the computer manufacturing industry, though it retained its timesharing operations for some years afterwards. GE was a major provider of computer timesharing services, through General Electric Information Services (GEIS, now GXS), offering online computing services that included GEnie.
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.
Category:Companies