September 4, 2019 • 44 mins
In its first few decades, General Electric would grow into an enormous company with incredible influence in the United States. In this episode, we see how that played out leading up to and through World War II.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works in iHeart Radio and I Love all
Things tech. And in our last episode, I was talking
about General Electric and I was really focusing on the
(00:27):
origin of the company and its first two decades of
its existence. And over the next few episodes, we're going
to start picking up the pace a bit and exploring
the full history of the company and why. In recent months,
that is, as of August twenty nineteen, some analysts have
expressed concern for the integrity of the company. This is
(00:48):
not a new development. Actually, GE has had some struggles
over the last decade or so, but we haven't gotten
there yet. We're still pretty early on in its history,
and there's a lot I could talk about, including advances
in some of the basic technology that GE was built
off of. For example, in nineteen thirteen, of physicists and
(01:11):
chemist named Irving Langmuir proved that by filling lightbulbs with
an inert gas like are gone, it would not only
extend the useful life of the tungsten filaments inside the
light bulb. That's the part that actually lights up in
a light bulb, but it would also prevent the inside
of the light bulb from turning black as it got
(01:32):
an internal coding of what's essentially soot from the tungsten.
Langmuir would make numerous contributions to science and would ultimately
receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in nineteen thirty two,
though that wasn't for light bulbs anyway. Another thing that
happened in nineteen thirteen was that Charles Coffin, who had
(01:53):
been president of the company, would become General Electrics first
chairman of the board of directors. Edwin Wilbur Rice, who
had studied under Allahu Thompson at Central High School in
Philadelphia and who had worked for General Electric since the
very beginning of the company, became the new president of
ge Rice had more than a hundred patents to his
(02:15):
name and had a strong hand in guiding how General
Electrics manufacturing facilities operated. He was one of the founders
for Gees Research Laboratory. Not a bad pick for president
of the company, someone who could direct the operational aspects.
Under Rice, General Electric continued to expand its business, and
(02:37):
it acquired other companies as well as experiencing growth on
its own. In nineteen eighteen, for example, GE acquired the
Pacific Electric Heating Company and the Hues Electric Heating Company,
so GE then formed a new division within the company
itself called Edison Electric Appliance Company. Around that same time,
(02:59):
GE also acquired the Trumbull Electric Company, which created and
supplied parts related to the electric utility industry such as switchboards.
So really still investing in that world, and to be fair,
electricity and infrastructure was still very slowly rolling out across
the United States, and g E had a very large
(03:20):
hand in that. In nineteen nineteen, General Electric became one
of the founding companies to create the Radio Corporation of
America or r c A. And I covered this in
the episodes I did about our CIA. So the super
short version of this is that leading up to World
War One, the United States military pretty much commondered the
(03:44):
radio communications industry in the US. Now, at that time,
radio stations weren't broadcasting entertainment and news and sound over
to radios. There were no consumer radios. This was really
all about sending wireless telegrams, so most transmissions were just
limited to Morse code. Now. There were a few early
(04:07):
radio broadcast pioneers around this time as well, but it
was very limited. Now. The problem was, at least from
the US military perspective, that many of these communications stations,
these radio transmitters were actually owned and operated by companies
that were from outside the United States, and the First
(04:27):
World War was driving home how important it was to
have a secure communications network within your own borders. So
the US military, namely the the U. S. Navy, ultimately
rested control of those transmission stations away from foreign companies
and then used them for wartime communications for official military communications.
(04:50):
But once the war was over, the government needed to
figure out what to do with all these transmission stations,
so rather than operate them as government owned entities, the
government reached out to several companies US companies including General
Electric and also Westinghouse, A, T and T, and the
United Fruit Company. Yeah, I'll have to do an episode
(05:12):
about the United Fruit Company at some point. It's a
pretty interesting and controversial story. Anyway. It was this group
that would form our c A, with each group partner
in the group holding a certain percentage of the ownership
of our CI, a General Electric held the majority steak.
(05:32):
Didn't hold a fifty percent steak. It was more like
but it held more interest in our cier than any
other party did. In I saw, we saw something pretty
darn cool. Well I didn't, I wasn't born yet, but
the world in general saw something pretty cool. In E
built a supercharger for an airplane. So there was an
(05:55):
engineer named Sanford Moss who came up with this idea.
He had this hypothesis us that fuel would burn better
in a chamber with compressed air. It would actually produce
more energy, would be a greater energy output with compressed
air inside the chamber. And it turned out that this
hypothesis was correct, and so using that knowledge, he designed
(06:19):
what was called a supercharger to produce a lot more
power in an engine. Now, a plane with one of
those superchargers would set an altitude record at the time,
and it reached a new altitude of forty eight hundred
feet or about twelve thousand fours Obviously we've left that
way behind now, but at the time that was a
(06:40):
significant achievement. In N two G S own radio station
in Schenectady, New York, with the identity of w g
Y would go on the air, the station had a
fifteen hundred what transmitter Now today that station is owned
by the company I work for, my Heart Media. Fun
(07:01):
little fact, though. It has also changed a bit since
nineteen twenty two. For example, the transmitter today is at
fifty thousand watts, so that's a big change, and the
wattage pretty much determines how far the transmissions can go.
Gets a little more complicated than that, but that's a
general rule of thumb. Also, in nineteen twenty two, Rice
(07:25):
would step down as president of the company and a
guy named Gerard Swope became the new president of GE
and pushed the company to produce more consumer appliances. So
this is really the era where g E started to
seriously get into the consumer appliance manufacturing business, stuff like
refrigerators and electric stoves. So while GE had made a
(07:48):
few consumer products over the previous twenty years, it hadn't
really seriously dealt into that market. And then in the
nineteen twenties that all changed. GE branded appliances became more
and more common. So who was this Swope fellow, Well,
unlike Rice, he wasn't at General Electric at the very
start of the company, and technically Rice was actually in
(08:11):
the precursor company. He had worked for the Thompson Houston
Electric Company that preceded General Electric. But Swope wasn't like that. Nope,
Swope was a newcomer. He originally joined g E in
eight three, one whole year after the company was founded.
Johnny come lately, Okay, I'm being a bit cheeky. Swope
(08:33):
had joined the company as a helper while he was
still in school. It's sort of like a gopher, someone
who did whatever it was that needed doing at any
given time. His starting salary back then was an entire
dollar a day of princely sum. Presumably he was making
a bit more than that by the time he took
on the role of company president in nineteen twenty two.
(08:56):
And I don't mean to suggest his employment and GE
was un oaken from eighteen nine to nineteen twenty two.
That was not the case. He left GE, he was
attending m I T. He graduated from m I T
with a degree in electrical engineering, and then he took
on a job for Western Electric, which is a company
that's even older than GE. Swope had also served on
(09:18):
the United States War Department General Staff. During World War One,
he aided in the procurement and supply operations for the army.
Charles Coffin brought Swope back over to the fold at
g E in nineteen nineteen. Now as the president of GE,
Swope would do more than just pushed the company into
manufacturing more consumer appliances. He was also concerned about employee benefits.
(09:44):
Under his leadership, General Electric began to implement employee benefit
programs such as voluntary unemployment insurance, profit sharing programs, and
a cost of living wage adjustment program. Swope would serve
as the president of the company life in fact, and
his first run that would stretch from nineteen twenty two
(10:05):
to nineteen forty, meaning that Swope also led the company
as the entire world went through the Great Depression, a
challenging time for everybody. And just to stick with this
for a second, I should explain who Swope's successor was
and why Swope would return to serve as president a
second time, because generally when you hear that someone left
(10:26):
as president and then had to come back as president,
it sounds like something really wrong happened in the interim.
That's not exactly the case. So in nineteen forty, Gerard
Swope retired and Charles E. Wilson, who had first started
working for GE UH specifically a g E subsidiary, when
he was twelve years old, and had been with a
(10:48):
company pretty much ever since. He actually completed his education
by taking night courses. Wilson was promoted to president in
nineteen forty and he led the company for about two
and a half years, but then a different president called
on him. That president was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who wanted
Wilson to join the War Production Board as vice chairman.
(11:10):
The United States had entered World War Two in December
of nineteen forty one, and there was a pressing need
to devote manufacturing capabilities towards producing equipment and weapons for
American soldiers. Wilson responded to the request and he left
General Electric. So Gerard Swope came out of retirement and
once again led the company until nineteen forty five and
(11:32):
World War Two's end. At that point, Wilson returned to
GE and resumed his role as president of the company
for another five years. Now, the reason I decided to
follow that particular trail and kind of move away from
the timeline for a second was again to illustrate how
important General electrics business had become. It was integral to
(11:54):
the modernization of the United States, and gees manufacturing facilities
were formidable both for their industrial businesses and consumer appliance businesses.
No wonder the President looked to GE for help in
manufacturing and acquisitions for wartime production. Okay, so let's get
back to the timeline and learn what GE was doing
during all those years. One note I saw pop up
(12:17):
on several sites was that in nineteen twenty four GE
opted to exit the utilities business because of antitrust concerns
from the U. S. Government. But despite my searching, I
couldn't find any other information on that, and I just
saw essentially the same timeline popping up on multiple websites,
(12:38):
So that suggested to me that they were all pulling
from a single common source. Now this does not mean
that the information is wrong. It might be right, and
I just wasn't able to find corroborating evidence of it.
But because I couldn't find any confirmation outside that list,
I got a little leery of it. So I'm including
(12:59):
this whole story in this podcast simply to point out
that it can be important to look for those corroborating
sources that really indicate that you're looking at true information
and you're not just looking at somebody's list that is
unsupported and other people have just copied that exact, exact
same list and put it up on their own websites.
(13:21):
That does happen. It happens a lot, so you'll actually
find a lot of plagiarism out there on the Internet.
You'll be looking at a source for information, You'll be
reading up on a paragraph and you think, all right,
that's interesting, Let's see if I can find any more
data about this, and you'll do a search and a
different website will pop up. You start reading that and
you think, well, this sounds really familiar, and if you
(13:42):
put them side by side, you realize this is exact
exactly the same language and there's no indication that, uh,
that it was done on the up and up. Now,
occasionally someone will write a piece and it will all
be agreed upon that that piece will be distributed it
to different outlets, but a lot of times people are
(14:03):
just taking whatever they think is cool or interesting or
we'll drive traffic, and they'll just put it up on
their site without asking that's not cool. Anyway, back to GE,
there were a couple of big important events that definitely
happened in nineteen four. Um. Whether GE got the utilities
business because of antitrust issues I can't speak to because
(14:23):
I couldn't find anything about it. But stuff that got
started or happened in nine there were some important things.
One of those was a lawsuit that would go all
the way up to the Supreme Court. Now, let me explain.
In the United States, GE held the patents for pretty
much all the basic components for the light bulb. That is,
they had a patent on the tungsten filament in the
(14:45):
gas filled bulb and all this other stuff. Westinghouse had
entered into a licensing agreement with GE so that Westinghouse
could produce and more importantly, sell light bulbs. In return,
GE said that Westinghouse would have to set its prices
for light bulbs according to GES direction, and that it
would have to follow certain quotas. In other words, G
(15:08):
was using its power to say, you can sell light
bulbs based on our designs, but they have to be
at this price, and you can't make more than x
number of them because that would eat into our own profits,
and Gee said, we can change our our price at
any time for any reason. And that's really the issue
that went to court. Now, what the courts would ultimately
(15:29):
find and the Supreme Court decision would come down in
nine six, is that typically if you license out a patent,
if you've invented something and you've got the patent for
your invention and someone asks to license your invention, typically
you cannot dictate a price for a product made from
your patented invention. However, in this case, GE had not
(15:53):
just licensed out the right to manufacture light bulbs, and
it also licensed out the right to sell light bulbs,
and that meant GE could determine other things like the
selling price of the light bulb. At least, this is
what the court found. And this is one of the
more controversial business related decisions made by the Supreme Court.
It's been challenged several times and upheld a few times,
(16:16):
sometimes with just a split court decision like split right
down the middle. It means that you could potentially patent
and invention and then not only licensed it out to
other entities, but you can dictate at what price those
entities could sell your invention. So you could in theory,
produce your own products and sell them for a lower
cost than your competitors could because of your demands, and
(16:37):
thus you are undercutting them while you're simultaneously licensing your
invention to them. It's pretty cut throat stuff. Now, there
are limitations on this. The Supreme Court essentially said patent
holders can only do this if they themselves are also
manufacturing the product. So you couldn't just come up with
a cool invention, get it patented, and then just sit
(16:58):
on that patent and wait for people to life it's
your ideas, and then tell them how much they have
to sell the product for. That's off limits. You have
to actually be actively using that patent yourself, So pat
controls would not be able to do this. But again
it shows how GEES business would end up shaping the
world around it. I've got a lot more to say
about General Electric, but before I get to that, let's
(17:19):
take a quick break. Earlier I alluded to the fact
that a couple of big things happened in and they
both had to do with lightbulbs. And that's ironic because
this next big thing was really shady. Executives from g
(17:42):
E attended a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. That meeting was
also attended by representatives of companies like Phillips and the
company de Lump and as Rum. All of these are
light bulb manufacturers, or were at the time. They signed
a document that was titled Convention for the Development and
Progress of the International Incandescent Electric Lamp Industry. But the
(18:06):
agreement has a more sinister nickname, the Phoebus Cartel. Now,
Phoebus is another name for Apollo, the god of the Sun,
so that's fun. But what this group was doing was
working out a global agreement about the manufacture and sale
and design of light bulbs, and that agreement divided up
(18:27):
the world into regions assigned to the various members of
the Cartel. Each member would have its own region to
lord over, and it would have a quota that it
was supposed to stay below in order to meet manufacturing
needs and to meet the needs of all the members
at the cartel. But more than that, the group actually
determined that the useful life of a light bulb should
(18:50):
be one thousand hours. They were collectively agreeing to limit
a lightbulb's lifespan, and this is called plan obsolescence, and
it's a pretty shifty way to ensure continued success. Essentially,
it's when a company builds a product that is only
supposed to last a certain amount of time, and it
(19:12):
comes along with the expectation that the customer who buys
your product is going to go out and buy a
new version of the thing that just broke. So these
companies could make better light bulbs. In fact, they had
already done that. The average lightbulb lifespan in was already
twenty five hundred hours, so two point five times as long.
(19:36):
Now they were going to work to reduce that lifespan
in order to drum up more business. Light bulbs burn
out faster, people have to go back and buy more
light bulbs. It was making their own business by making
the products worse in a way, and because it would
be an agreement across multiple companies around the globe, there'd
be nowhere else to go. Insert maniacal laugh here. Interestingly,
(20:02):
though GE was crucial to forming this cartel, it was
part of the meeting that created it. GE itself was
not a member of the cartel. It did, however, own
interests in nearly all of the companies that were members
of the cartel, and it did have one subsidiary, a
British subsidiary called International General Electric that was part of
(20:25):
the cartel, but the overall company was not. Companies in
the cartel had to send light bulbs to a testing
facility in Switzerland to make certain they were manufacturing bulbs
with the right lifespan. And like I said, they were
given those strict quotas. If you sold more than your
quota allowed, you would get fined. You would also get
fined if the light bulbs you made didn't last long enough,
(20:48):
or worse, lasted too long. This really did happen, and
the plan was for the agreement to last until nineteen
fifty five, so it was a thirty year agreement. The
only reason that didn't actually happen was because of a
little thing called World War two. But yeah, that's a
heck of a thing to learn about. And g E
engineers really did work on ways to decrease the useful
(21:11):
life of light bulbs for various products, including flashlights. They
were saying, well, you know, flashlight flash bulbs, they last
three hole changes of batteries, right now, let's reduce that.
And I got it down so that the light bulbs
would only last two whole sets of batteries and then
eventually got to a point where the light bulbs lifespan
(21:32):
was about the same length as the useful lifespan of
a set of batteries. That's the way progress works, I
guess anyway. Uh, it's a it's a heck of a
thing to read about, and it it does kind of stink.
But I get it from a sales perspective. I mean,
if Willie Wonka had actually made an everlasting gob stopper,
(21:54):
he'd only have to sell one to each kid, and
then he would have innovated himself out of business. He
would never sell anymore. Why would he. Everyone already has
one and it never gets smaller. That that's that's inventing
yourself out of business. But still, there's something particularly sinister
about a company or group of companies that agree to
(22:16):
build into their products the intent for those products to
stop working after a certain amount of time, forcing people
to go and buy a new one. It's not super cool.
On a less conspiratorial note, in nineteen seven, g E
was one of a few companies to demonstrate a live
TV broadcast. Now earlier in n T and T had
(22:38):
to demonstrated a long distance broadcast of its own. GEES
claim is that their demonstration was the first to broadcast
to a television in an actual home, as opposed to
a demonstration theater or a showroom. The broadcast came from
GES radio station w g Y, and the TV was
in a home located in Schenectady, New York, and GEES headquarters.
(23:01):
The television was not an electric electronic television that had
just recently been pioneered by Philo Farnsworth that same year.
This was actually a mechanical television, meaning there were actual
moving parts inside the television. But I've talked about that
in several earlier episodes of Tech Stuff, so I'm just
gonna move along here. In nineteen twenty eight, the Radio
(23:25):
Corporation of America, in which I remember g E owned
a large steak, created the NBC Networks. Now technically they
were two networks of affiliates, so you had two NBC networks.
There was NBC Red and NBC Blue, so you could
say ge had partial ownership of NBC at this time,
(23:45):
though that wouldn't last for very long for the time being.
That's because in nineteen thirty the US government began to
investigate GE Westinghouse and r c A for monopolistic practices.
The antitrust investor stigation was followed by formal charges and
a long period of negotiation, and ultimately the parties agreed
(24:07):
to our CIA becoming its own incorporated company and the
various partners, including GE, would divest themselves of their shares
in our CIA. In addition, GE and Westinghouse had to
agree to stay out of the radio broadcast business for
two and a half years in order to give our
CIA a chance to stand on its own. And boy
how they did it ever, But that's covered in other
(24:30):
episodes I did not too long ago. We'll get back
to both NBC and our CI a later on in
this series. For now, let's talk about plastic. Plastic was
something that had been around for a while. Synthetic plastic
was a relatively new idea. There are natural plastics, but
those are limited because it's hard to get to them
(24:52):
and you have to do some processing. It's not very efficient.
So synthetic plastics was something that people really wanted to
be able to to develop because plastic is incredibly useful stuff,
but you have to have a more efficient way to
make it. That had been experimented with as early as
the mid nineteenth century, but the first fully synthetic plastic
(25:14):
was developed in nineteen o seven. It was called bake
Light by the way, and companies since then had been
working to try and find cheaper, more efficient ways to
produce synthetic plastic because it could be put to so
many applications. GE was one of those companies, and throughout
the nineteen thirties and into the nineteen forties, g E
engineers worked on lots of different experiments to develop synthetic plastic.
(25:39):
It was around this time that James Wright, an engineer
for GE, who was trying to make synthetic rubber, ended
up developing Silly putty. So you may remember that from
a recent Tech Stuff episode. Corning would end up beating
GE to the punch as far as the development of
silicone goes. The two companies were in fierce competition to
(26:00):
try and develop it first, and Corning came out ahead,
but GE was able to create a more efficient manufacturing
process and ended up being extremely successful in the market
as a result, So Corning developed it and GE figured
out how to make it more efficiently. G E introduced
the first electric household food waste disposer called the disposal.
(26:24):
This is a garbage disposal which mounts beneath the drain
on a sink, and the idea is that there's a
spinning disk or impeller plate under the drain which has
some protrusions on it, and turning on the disposal activates
an electric motor that then spins the plate rapidly, and
the spinning pulverizes the food or whatever else is down
(26:46):
the disposal and turns it into a slurry that can
get washed down the holes on the outer edge of
the disposal and then down into the pipe system of
your house. And it also would create an effective means
of creeping out audiences in horror movies, because we all
know what happens when a character is at a garbage disposal.
Something important, usually a ring, is gonna fall down there,
(27:09):
and then they're gonna put their hand down the drain,
even as we all screamed, don't put your hand down there. Anyway,
The disposal went on sale in nineteen thirty five. I
should also mentioned that ge did not invent the garbage disposal.
That honor goes to John Ham's. Not John Hamm who's
(27:30):
a great actor but John Hams. He invented the device
in nineteen seven and filed a patent for it, though
as far as I can tell, he wasn't able to
go to market with a device until after GE had
already introduced the disposal. Also in nineti GE provided the
lamps for the first Major League Baseball night game, which
(27:51):
took place in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Cincinnati Reds played the
Philadelphia Phillies and they won two to one. Night games
actually were really important. They helped transform the sport at baseball.
It meant that folks who worked during the day could
still have the opportunity to watch a game live in
the evening, and it boosted crowd attendance and gave a
(28:13):
healthy dose of umph to the sport. And of course
other sports would follow suit. Throughout the nineteen thirties, the
company continued to work on multiple industries. G E introduced
more consumer products for the average joe, and the company
also worked on high tech components for airplane and car
engines for a more let's say, elite clientele. Howard Hughes
(28:36):
himself used a g E supercharger in nineteen thirty seven
to set a transcontinental air record he flew across the
United States in seven hours, twenty eight minutes, and twenty
five seconds. In nineteen thirty eight, the labs at GE
managed to reinvent the company wheel, by which I mean
the light bulb. The invention was a fluorescent lamp, which
(28:58):
works a different way from condescent lamps. And incandescent lamp
creates light by using electricity to heat up a filament
until it gives off light when it incandesses, and that's
the basic premise behind all incandescent lights, but a fluorescent
lamp is different. The idea for fluorescent lamps was actually
(29:20):
a few decades old, but the challenge was to create
one that was practical from both a use case scenario,
as in, this is giving off enough light for me
to do stuff, and also from a manufacturing standpoint. Dozens
of people worked on solving these problems, and a lot
of people made various contributions, so there's not one single
(29:41):
person I can point to as being the inventor of
the fluorescent lamp, which is a bit of a relief
since it means I don't have to explain that so
and so invented this and then walk it back and say, okay, well,
actually it's way more complicated than that. I'll explain how
fluorescent lamps work when we come back from this short Okay,
(30:08):
so fluorescent lamps. There's actually a few different types of
fluorescent lamps, but I'm going to focus on hot cathode
lamps because that was sort of the earliest ones that
were able to be manufactured for the mass market. And
typically the lamp is a long glass tube, and inside
of this long glass tube there is a coating of
(30:31):
fluorescent powder on the inside surface of the tube, and
also inside the tube is low pressure are gone gas,
and there's also a little bit of liquid mercury in there. Um.
This is why handling fluorescent lamps is a bit dangerous. Well,
that's one of the reasons. Another is that their tubes
(30:51):
made of glass, so breaking one not only releases a
small amount of toxic chemical to the environment and also
can cut you up pretty badly. Now, a hot cathode
fluorescent lamp has two electrodes on either end of the tube,
so you have one on one end one on the
other end. Both of these electrodes are cathodes, meaning they
(31:12):
both contribute electrons into the tube. Though they do this
one at a time. It's another example of thermionic emission,
like with the vacuum tube where you heat up a
filament and it starts to give off electrons. A pulse
of voltage creates an arc between the cathodes, starting from
one cathode and traveling to the other, and alternating current
(31:35):
makes the arc go one way, then it goes the
opposite way many times a second. A C works better
for fluorescent lamps than DC direct current because it means
one electrode will act as a cathode and then the
other electrode will act as the cathode, and they'll switch
back and forth, and that creates a more even lighting
(31:55):
within the lamp. If there was one side that was
just always the cathode, that side would be much brighter
than the other side. That's what you would get with
direct current. So that's why fluorescent lamps work best with
a C electricity rather than d C. Now, getting the
arc started can be a bit of a challenge, especially
(32:16):
with those early bulbs. That requires a spike of high voltage,
and you can think of voltage kind of like pressure.
So in a hydraulic system and a water based system
like pipes, it's the more pressure you put behind the water,
forcing water through the pipe system faster. With a fluorescent lamp,
the higher voltage forces a current to flow from the
(32:39):
cathote across to the other electrode, but the gas inside
the tube actually resists this, and the colder the gas is,
the more it resists the current. So it might take
a few false starts to get that that arc actually going,
And there are a couple of different ways of doing that,
including like preheating the gas. These are all things that
(33:00):
would be built into the lamps themselves. It's not something
that you would have to do in addition to that,
But that whole discussion deserves its own podcast. So the
arc will vaporize the mercury that's inside the tube, turning
that liquid mercury into a gas, and as the arc
passes through this vaporized mercury, it gives off ultra violet light.
(33:25):
But hey, I hear you say, ultra violet light is
outside the visible spectrum for we puny humans. Ha ha ha,
puny humans. I say that is true, And that's where
the fluorescent powder coating the inside of the tube comes
into play. Stuff like phosphor will give off light or fluoresce,
or if you really want to make it easy to understand,
(33:47):
you could just say glow when exposed to certain types
of energy, such as ultra violet light. So the light
given off by the vaporized mercury is invisible to we
puny humans, but the light given off by the fluorescing
phosphor isn't. And that's how fluorescent lamps generate light. G
E engineers figured out how to make the fluorescent light
(34:10):
bulb in a way that was efficient and suitable for
actual applications as opposed to interesting lab experiments. And the
fluorescent lamp had some distinct advantages and a few disadvantages
compared to incandescent lamps. For one, it was more energy efficient.
It required less energy to generate an equivalent amount of light.
(34:30):
So we measure the amount of light given off by
stuff in units called lumens, and we measure electricity, And
what's the typical incandescent lightbulb produces sixteen lumens per what
of electricity? A fluorescent lightbulb might produce between fifty two
one hundred lumens per what. So, in other words, you
(34:51):
don't have to use nearly as much electricity to get
an equivalent amount of light out of a fluorescent lamp.
That's oversimplifying, but it gets the point across, which means
you save money in the long run by using these
fluorescent bulbs instead of incandescent ones. Fluorescent bulbs also last longer,
usually ten to twenty times longer than incandescent bulbs. Granted,
(35:15):
I also just talked about how companies were actively working
to limit the useful life of light bulbs, so part
of the fluorescent bulb advantage was really because companies were
purposefully planning out the obsolescence of the incandescent bulbs, so yikes.
Fluorescent lamps also generate less heat than incandescent lamps do,
(35:35):
so that was another area where they were superior, and
they diffuse light very well, but they also had disadvantages.
One was the environmental hazard I talked about. There's stuff
in fluorescent bulbs, namely the mercury that you don't want
getting out into the general environment. They are also more
expensive than incandescent bulbs, and they can't, without special adjustments,
(35:59):
be used with any sort of dimmer switch. They also
flicker slightly, usually too fast for most of us to
pick up, but it can drive some people a little bonkers,
like if it's slowing down a bit, Because as bulbs
get closer to the end of their lives, they can
flicker more noticeably. It can cause discomfort for people who
(36:20):
have epilepsy can it can trigger epileptic episodes. So there
are some other dangers with this stuff. And maybe you
end up being affected psychologically by the way these lights
give off light. You could end up like Joe and
Joe versus the volcano, and you might believe that you've
got a brain cloud. But seriously, there are folks who
(36:43):
just swear by the fact that fluorescent lights generate a
light that is unpleasant to them, and they much prefer
the warmer light from an incandescent bulb. In ninety nine,
a remarkable woman named Katherine Burr joined the ge Research Laboratory.
She was the first woman to be part of the
g E Research leavel, and she developed a non reflective glass.
(37:07):
It was nicknamed Invisible glass. The glass would become the
basis for all sorts of applications, such as for camera
lenses and for telescopes, you know, stuff where you want
to minimize or eliminate reflection as much as you possibly can.
So hats off to you, miss Burr. That was pretty incredible.
In ninety g E began to relay TV broadcasts from
(37:30):
New York City to its television station w r g B,
which was in Schenectady, New York, and this would set
the path for the development of television networks TV stations
that would end up carrying the broadcast of neighboring stations,
and this would follow the path that was pioneered by
radio networks like NBC. Now, by this time, much of
(37:53):
the world was already involved in World War Two, and
as it became more apparent that the US would likely
become of it as well, the government and particularly the
military began to seek out innovation from American companies to
augment the military capabilities of the United States. GE would
work on many of those projects, including the design and
(38:14):
production of the first jet engine in the United States,
called the I A. Now I should stress that this
was not the first jet engine in the world. Other
countries had already produced jet engines, but it would be
the first one designed and produced in the United States.
It was largely based off the design of a British
(38:37):
jet engine called the Power Jets W DOT two B
The I A was essentially a prototype jet engine, the
result of about a year of r and D and production.
It would lead to a production model called the General
Electric J thirty one. This would become the first mass
manufactured jet engine in the United States, and it would
(38:58):
be used in aircraft like the Ryan F R Fireball
and the Bell P fifty nine era comment. The US
officially joined the jet age in nineteen forty three. General
Electric also introduced an early form of autopilot, a system
designed to keep an aircraft on a specific course. I've
done a few episodes mentioning how these systems work. I
(39:22):
might need to do an update on that, but in
nineteen forty three it was a pretty rudimentary system designed
to hold a steady course and make minor adjustments. Also
in nineteen forty three, General Electric formed another division within
the company called g E Capital, which is a financial
services company within General Electric. It was sort of evolved
(39:44):
from an earlier division called the General Electric Contracts Corporation.
That one formed in nineteen thirty two as a way
to help customers purchase GE products through various finance plans.
Because that was around the time of the Great Depression,
so people who wanted appliances couldn't really afford to buy
them outright, so ge formed this as a way to
(40:07):
help customers pay for stuff and still be able to
sell consumer goods to people. Ge Capital pretty much picked
up where the Contracts company had left off, but it
would become a truly enormous company in its own right
later on, when I get to more recent years, we'll
talk about how it was one of the major bits
(40:27):
of the company spun off when ge encountered major financial difficulties,
but just as a sneak peak. At its height, this
company by itself, the the g E Capital Company had
assets exceeding six hundred thirty seven billion dollars, So yeah,
big business in general. Electric demonstrated the first commercial use
(40:52):
of radar, a technology that had been developed in Europe
and which was of considerable importance in wartime. G E
used radar to show how it could help vehicles, even
non military ones, navigate through darkness, and in nineteen forty six,
the company would design and produce the world's most popular
jet engine. It was called the J forty seven, capable
(41:14):
of providing up to five thousand pounds of thrust per engine.
The company and others licensed to produce the J forty
seven would build more than thirty thousand of the things
over the following decades, and this engine was used in
lots of different aircraft, including the Boeing B forty seven
strato Jet, the Martin x B fifty one, the Conveyor
(41:35):
B thirty six peacemaker, and the Republic XF ninety one
thunder Scepter, in addition to many others. And if I
ever get fired from tech stuff, I want to get
a job naming jets, because that seems like it's a
pretty cool gig. In nineteen forty nine, the U. S.
Courts ruled on a case that had been working its
(41:56):
way through the system for the better part of a decade,
and it all had to do patents about light bulbs
and lamps. The argument was essentially that through the control
of patents, GE was restricting competition and practicing monopolistic company policies,
which was a big no no and in violation of
the Sherman Antitrust Act. The court decision stated that g
(42:19):
E had made numerous undeniable contributions to the advancements of
technology in general and the light bulb in particular, but
it had also used its leverage to quote insulate itself
from competition end quote. The finding cited numerous smaller companies
that had been in the lamp manufacturing business but had
(42:40):
either gone out of business or were entirely beholden to
General Electric as licensees of the company's patents, and the
ruling essentially stated that all those patents on lamp and
lamp parts should be quote dedicated to the public end quote,
and so General Electric was compelled to lease its patents
(43:01):
on those particular technologies. Um the company certainly had performed
in ways that gave it all the advantages, which again,
from the perspective of a company, seems like a no brainer.
You want to give yourself every chance of success. But
from an external perspective that it looked like GE was
(43:22):
a big bully, and so that was how this decision
came down. In our next episode, we'll look at how
General Electric played a big part in the space race,
and we'll try and skip over a whole bunch of
other stuff, because obviously this is going at a pretty
slow pace, and for a company that's more than a
hundred thirty years old, it's gonna take us a while.
(43:42):
I finally take it in twenty year chunks. But in
the meantime, if you guys have suggestions for other topics
I should cover. Whether it's a company, a technology product,
maybe a trend in tech, or just a general concept
in tech and you want to know more about it,
send me an email the addresses tech Stuff at how
stuff works dot com. Pop on over to our website
(44:04):
that's text stuff podcast dot com. You'll find an archive
of all of our past episodes. There. You also find
links to where we are on social media, and you'll
find a link to our online store, where every purchase
you make goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it,
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff
(44:28):
is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works in iHeart Radio and I Love all
Things tech. And in our last episode, I was talking
about General Electric and I was really focusing on the
(00:27):
origin of the company and its first two decades of
its existence. And over the next few episodes, we're going
to start picking up the pace a bit and exploring
the full history of the company and why. In recent months,
that is, as of August twenty nineteen, some analysts have
expressed concern for the integrity of the company. This is
(00:48):
not a new development. Actually, GE has had some struggles
over the last decade or so, but we haven't gotten
there yet. We're still pretty early on in its history,
and there's a lot I could talk about, including advances
in some of the basic technology that GE was built
off of. For example, in nineteen thirteen, of physicists and
(01:11):
chemist named Irving Langmuir proved that by filling lightbulbs with
an inert gas like are gone, it would not only
extend the useful life of the tungsten filaments inside the
light bulb. That's the part that actually lights up in
a light bulb, but it would also prevent the inside
of the light bulb from turning black as it got
(01:32):
an internal coding of what's essentially soot from the tungsten.
Langmuir would make numerous contributions to science and would ultimately
receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in nineteen thirty two,
though that wasn't for light bulbs anyway. Another thing that
happened in nineteen thirteen was that Charles Coffin, who had
(01:53):
been president of the company, would become General Electrics first
chairman of the board of directors. Edwin Wilbur Rice, who
had studied under Allahu Thompson at Central High School in
Philadelphia and who had worked for General Electric since the
very beginning of the company, became the new president of
ge Rice had more than a hundred patents to his
(02:15):
name and had a strong hand in guiding how General
Electrics manufacturing facilities operated. He was one of the founders
for Gees Research Laboratory. Not a bad pick for president
of the company, someone who could direct the operational aspects.
Under Rice, General Electric continued to expand its business, and
(02:37):
it acquired other companies as well as experiencing growth on
its own. In nineteen eighteen, for example, GE acquired the
Pacific Electric Heating Company and the Hues Electric Heating Company,
so GE then formed a new division within the company
itself called Edison Electric Appliance Company. Around that same time,
(02:59):
GE also acquired the Trumbull Electric Company, which created and
supplied parts related to the electric utility industry such as switchboards.
So really still investing in that world, and to be fair,
electricity and infrastructure was still very slowly rolling out across
the United States, and g E had a very large
(03:20):
hand in that. In nineteen nineteen, General Electric became one
of the founding companies to create the Radio Corporation of
America or r c A. And I covered this in
the episodes I did about our CIA. So the super
short version of this is that leading up to World
War One, the United States military pretty much commondered the
(03:44):
radio communications industry in the US. Now, at that time,
radio stations weren't broadcasting entertainment and news and sound over
to radios. There were no consumer radios. This was really
all about sending wireless telegrams, so most transmissions were just
limited to Morse code. Now. There were a few early
(04:07):
radio broadcast pioneers around this time as well, but it
was very limited. Now. The problem was, at least from
the US military perspective, that many of these communications stations,
these radio transmitters were actually owned and operated by companies
that were from outside the United States, and the First
(04:27):
World War was driving home how important it was to
have a secure communications network within your own borders. So
the US military, namely the the U. S. Navy, ultimately
rested control of those transmission stations away from foreign companies
and then used them for wartime communications for official military communications.
(04:50):
But once the war was over, the government needed to
figure out what to do with all these transmission stations,
so rather than operate them as government owned entities, the
government reached out to several companies US companies including General
Electric and also Westinghouse, A, T and T, and the
United Fruit Company. Yeah, I'll have to do an episode
(05:12):
about the United Fruit Company at some point. It's a
pretty interesting and controversial story. Anyway. It was this group
that would form our c A, with each group partner
in the group holding a certain percentage of the ownership
of our CI, a General Electric held the majority steak.
(05:32):
Didn't hold a fifty percent steak. It was more like
but it held more interest in our cier than any
other party did. In I saw, we saw something pretty
darn cool. Well I didn't, I wasn't born yet, but
the world in general saw something pretty cool. In E
built a supercharger for an airplane. So there was an
(05:55):
engineer named Sanford Moss who came up with this idea.
He had this hypothesis us that fuel would burn better
in a chamber with compressed air. It would actually produce
more energy, would be a greater energy output with compressed
air inside the chamber. And it turned out that this
hypothesis was correct, and so using that knowledge, he designed
(06:19):
what was called a supercharger to produce a lot more
power in an engine. Now, a plane with one of
those superchargers would set an altitude record at the time,
and it reached a new altitude of forty eight hundred
feet or about twelve thousand fours Obviously we've left that
way behind now, but at the time that was a
(06:40):
significant achievement. In N two G S own radio station
in Schenectady, New York, with the identity of w g
Y would go on the air, the station had a
fifteen hundred what transmitter Now today that station is owned
by the company I work for, my Heart Media. Fun
(07:01):
little fact, though. It has also changed a bit since
nineteen twenty two. For example, the transmitter today is at
fifty thousand watts, so that's a big change, and the
wattage pretty much determines how far the transmissions can go.
Gets a little more complicated than that, but that's a
general rule of thumb. Also, in nineteen twenty two, Rice
(07:25):
would step down as president of the company and a
guy named Gerard Swope became the new president of GE
and pushed the company to produce more consumer appliances. So
this is really the era where g E started to
seriously get into the consumer appliance manufacturing business, stuff like
refrigerators and electric stoves. So while GE had made a
(07:48):
few consumer products over the previous twenty years, it hadn't
really seriously dealt into that market. And then in the
nineteen twenties that all changed. GE branded appliances became more
and more common. So who was this Swope fellow, Well,
unlike Rice, he wasn't at General Electric at the very
start of the company, and technically Rice was actually in
(08:11):
the precursor company. He had worked for the Thompson Houston
Electric Company that preceded General Electric. But Swope wasn't like that. Nope,
Swope was a newcomer. He originally joined g E in
eight three, one whole year after the company was founded.
Johnny come lately, Okay, I'm being a bit cheeky. Swope
(08:33):
had joined the company as a helper while he was
still in school. It's sort of like a gopher, someone
who did whatever it was that needed doing at any
given time. His starting salary back then was an entire
dollar a day of princely sum. Presumably he was making
a bit more than that by the time he took
on the role of company president in nineteen twenty two.
(08:56):
And I don't mean to suggest his employment and GE
was un oaken from eighteen nine to nineteen twenty two.
That was not the case. He left GE, he was
attending m I T. He graduated from m I T
with a degree in electrical engineering, and then he took
on a job for Western Electric, which is a company
that's even older than GE. Swope had also served on
(09:18):
the United States War Department General Staff. During World War One,
he aided in the procurement and supply operations for the army.
Charles Coffin brought Swope back over to the fold at
g E in nineteen nineteen. Now as the president of GE,
Swope would do more than just pushed the company into
manufacturing more consumer appliances. He was also concerned about employee benefits.
(09:44):
Under his leadership, General Electric began to implement employee benefit
programs such as voluntary unemployment insurance, profit sharing programs, and
a cost of living wage adjustment program. Swope would serve
as the president of the company life in fact, and
his first run that would stretch from nineteen twenty two
(10:05):
to nineteen forty, meaning that Swope also led the company
as the entire world went through the Great Depression, a
challenging time for everybody. And just to stick with this
for a second, I should explain who Swope's successor was
and why Swope would return to serve as president a
second time, because generally when you hear that someone left
(10:26):
as president and then had to come back as president,
it sounds like something really wrong happened in the interim.
That's not exactly the case. So in nineteen forty, Gerard
Swope retired and Charles E. Wilson, who had first started
working for GE UH specifically a g E subsidiary, when
he was twelve years old, and had been with a
(10:48):
company pretty much ever since. He actually completed his education
by taking night courses. Wilson was promoted to president in
nineteen forty and he led the company for about two
and a half years, but then a different president called
on him. That president was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who wanted
Wilson to join the War Production Board as vice chairman.
(11:10):
The United States had entered World War Two in December
of nineteen forty one, and there was a pressing need
to devote manufacturing capabilities towards producing equipment and weapons for
American soldiers. Wilson responded to the request and he left
General Electric. So Gerard Swope came out of retirement and
once again led the company until nineteen forty five and
(11:32):
World War Two's end. At that point, Wilson returned to
GE and resumed his role as president of the company
for another five years. Now, the reason I decided to
follow that particular trail and kind of move away from
the timeline for a second was again to illustrate how
important General electrics business had become. It was integral to
(11:54):
the modernization of the United States, and gees manufacturing facilities
were formidable both for their industrial businesses and consumer appliance businesses.
No wonder the President looked to GE for help in
manufacturing and acquisitions for wartime production. Okay, so let's get
back to the timeline and learn what GE was doing
during all those years. One note I saw pop up
(12:17):
on several sites was that in nineteen twenty four GE
opted to exit the utilities business because of antitrust concerns
from the U. S. Government. But despite my searching, I
couldn't find any other information on that, and I just
saw essentially the same timeline popping up on multiple websites,
(12:38):
So that suggested to me that they were all pulling
from a single common source. Now this does not mean
that the information is wrong. It might be right, and
I just wasn't able to find corroborating evidence of it.
But because I couldn't find any confirmation outside that list,
I got a little leery of it. So I'm including
(12:59):
this whole story in this podcast simply to point out
that it can be important to look for those corroborating
sources that really indicate that you're looking at true information
and you're not just looking at somebody's list that is
unsupported and other people have just copied that exact, exact
same list and put it up on their own websites.
(13:21):
That does happen. It happens a lot, so you'll actually
find a lot of plagiarism out there on the Internet.
You'll be looking at a source for information, You'll be
reading up on a paragraph and you think, all right,
that's interesting, Let's see if I can find any more
data about this, and you'll do a search and a
different website will pop up. You start reading that and
you think, well, this sounds really familiar, and if you
(13:42):
put them side by side, you realize this is exact
exactly the same language and there's no indication that, uh,
that it was done on the up and up. Now,
occasionally someone will write a piece and it will all
be agreed upon that that piece will be distributed it
to different outlets, but a lot of times people are
(14:03):
just taking whatever they think is cool or interesting or
we'll drive traffic, and they'll just put it up on
their site without asking that's not cool. Anyway, back to GE,
there were a couple of big important events that definitely
happened in nineteen four. Um. Whether GE got the utilities
business because of antitrust issues I can't speak to because
(14:23):
I couldn't find anything about it. But stuff that got
started or happened in nine there were some important things.
One of those was a lawsuit that would go all
the way up to the Supreme Court. Now, let me explain.
In the United States, GE held the patents for pretty
much all the basic components for the light bulb. That is,
they had a patent on the tungsten filament in the
(14:45):
gas filled bulb and all this other stuff. Westinghouse had
entered into a licensing agreement with GE so that Westinghouse
could produce and more importantly, sell light bulbs. In return,
GE said that Westinghouse would have to set its prices
for light bulbs according to GES direction, and that it
would have to follow certain quotas. In other words, G
(15:08):
was using its power to say, you can sell light
bulbs based on our designs, but they have to be
at this price, and you can't make more than x
number of them because that would eat into our own profits,
and Gee said, we can change our our price at
any time for any reason. And that's really the issue
that went to court. Now, what the courts would ultimately
(15:29):
find and the Supreme Court decision would come down in
nine six, is that typically if you license out a patent,
if you've invented something and you've got the patent for
your invention and someone asks to license your invention, typically
you cannot dictate a price for a product made from
your patented invention. However, in this case, GE had not
(15:53):
just licensed out the right to manufacture light bulbs, and
it also licensed out the right to sell light bulbs,
and that meant GE could determine other things like the
selling price of the light bulb. At least, this is
what the court found. And this is one of the
more controversial business related decisions made by the Supreme Court.
It's been challenged several times and upheld a few times,
(16:16):
sometimes with just a split court decision like split right
down the middle. It means that you could potentially patent
and invention and then not only licensed it out to
other entities, but you can dictate at what price those
entities could sell your invention. So you could in theory,
produce your own products and sell them for a lower
cost than your competitors could because of your demands, and
(16:37):
thus you are undercutting them while you're simultaneously licensing your
invention to them. It's pretty cut throat stuff. Now, there
are limitations on this. The Supreme Court essentially said patent
holders can only do this if they themselves are also
manufacturing the product. So you couldn't just come up with
a cool invention, get it patented, and then just sit
(16:58):
on that patent and wait for people to life it's
your ideas, and then tell them how much they have
to sell the product for. That's off limits. You have
to actually be actively using that patent yourself, So pat
controls would not be able to do this. But again
it shows how GEES business would end up shaping the
world around it. I've got a lot more to say
about General Electric, but before I get to that, let's
(17:19):
take a quick break. Earlier I alluded to the fact
that a couple of big things happened in and they
both had to do with lightbulbs. And that's ironic because
this next big thing was really shady. Executives from g
(17:42):
E attended a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. That meeting was
also attended by representatives of companies like Phillips and the
company de Lump and as Rum. All of these are
light bulb manufacturers, or were at the time. They signed
a document that was titled Convention for the Development and
Progress of the International Incandescent Electric Lamp Industry. But the
(18:06):
agreement has a more sinister nickname, the Phoebus Cartel. Now,
Phoebus is another name for Apollo, the god of the Sun,
so that's fun. But what this group was doing was
working out a global agreement about the manufacture and sale
and design of light bulbs, and that agreement divided up
(18:27):
the world into regions assigned to the various members of
the Cartel. Each member would have its own region to
lord over, and it would have a quota that it
was supposed to stay below in order to meet manufacturing
needs and to meet the needs of all the members
at the cartel. But more than that, the group actually
determined that the useful life of a light bulb should
(18:50):
be one thousand hours. They were collectively agreeing to limit
a lightbulb's lifespan, and this is called plan obsolescence, and
it's a pretty shifty way to ensure continued success. Essentially,
it's when a company builds a product that is only
supposed to last a certain amount of time, and it
(19:12):
comes along with the expectation that the customer who buys
your product is going to go out and buy a
new version of the thing that just broke. So these
companies could make better light bulbs. In fact, they had
already done that. The average lightbulb lifespan in was already
twenty five hundred hours, so two point five times as long.
(19:36):
Now they were going to work to reduce that lifespan
in order to drum up more business. Light bulbs burn
out faster, people have to go back and buy more
light bulbs. It was making their own business by making
the products worse in a way, and because it would
be an agreement across multiple companies around the globe, there'd
be nowhere else to go. Insert maniacal laugh here. Interestingly,
(20:02):
though GE was crucial to forming this cartel, it was
part of the meeting that created it. GE itself was
not a member of the cartel. It did, however, own
interests in nearly all of the companies that were members
of the cartel, and it did have one subsidiary, a
British subsidiary called International General Electric that was part of
(20:25):
the cartel, but the overall company was not. Companies in
the cartel had to send light bulbs to a testing
facility in Switzerland to make certain they were manufacturing bulbs
with the right lifespan. And like I said, they were
given those strict quotas. If you sold more than your
quota allowed, you would get fined. You would also get
fined if the light bulbs you made didn't last long enough,
(20:48):
or worse, lasted too long. This really did happen, and
the plan was for the agreement to last until nineteen
fifty five, so it was a thirty year agreement. The
only reason that didn't actually happen was because of a
little thing called World War two. But yeah, that's a
heck of a thing to learn about. And g E
engineers really did work on ways to decrease the useful
(21:11):
life of light bulbs for various products, including flashlights. They
were saying, well, you know, flashlight flash bulbs, they last
three hole changes of batteries, right now, let's reduce that.
And I got it down so that the light bulbs
would only last two whole sets of batteries and then
eventually got to a point where the light bulbs lifespan
(21:32):
was about the same length as the useful lifespan of
a set of batteries. That's the way progress works, I
guess anyway. Uh, it's a it's a heck of a
thing to read about, and it it does kind of stink.
But I get it from a sales perspective. I mean,
if Willie Wonka had actually made an everlasting gob stopper,
(21:54):
he'd only have to sell one to each kid, and
then he would have innovated himself out of business. He
would never sell anymore. Why would he. Everyone already has
one and it never gets smaller. That that's that's inventing
yourself out of business. But still, there's something particularly sinister
about a company or group of companies that agree to
(22:16):
build into their products the intent for those products to
stop working after a certain amount of time, forcing people
to go and buy a new one. It's not super cool.
On a less conspiratorial note, in nineteen seven, g E
was one of a few companies to demonstrate a live
TV broadcast. Now earlier in n T and T had
(22:38):
to demonstrated a long distance broadcast of its own. GEES
claim is that their demonstration was the first to broadcast
to a television in an actual home, as opposed to
a demonstration theater or a showroom. The broadcast came from
GES radio station w g Y, and the TV was
in a home located in Schenectady, New York, and GEES headquarters.
(23:01):
The television was not an electric electronic television that had
just recently been pioneered by Philo Farnsworth that same year.
This was actually a mechanical television, meaning there were actual
moving parts inside the television. But I've talked about that
in several earlier episodes of Tech Stuff, so I'm just
gonna move along here. In nineteen twenty eight, the Radio
(23:25):
Corporation of America, in which I remember g E owned
a large steak, created the NBC Networks. Now technically they
were two networks of affiliates, so you had two NBC networks.
There was NBC Red and NBC Blue, so you could
say ge had partial ownership of NBC at this time,
(23:45):
though that wouldn't last for very long for the time being.
That's because in nineteen thirty the US government began to
investigate GE Westinghouse and r c A for monopolistic practices.
The antitrust investor stigation was followed by formal charges and
a long period of negotiation, and ultimately the parties agreed
(24:07):
to our CIA becoming its own incorporated company and the
various partners, including GE, would divest themselves of their shares
in our CIA. In addition, GE and Westinghouse had to
agree to stay out of the radio broadcast business for
two and a half years in order to give our
CIA a chance to stand on its own. And boy
how they did it ever, But that's covered in other
(24:30):
episodes I did not too long ago. We'll get back
to both NBC and our CI a later on in
this series. For now, let's talk about plastic. Plastic was
something that had been around for a while. Synthetic plastic
was a relatively new idea. There are natural plastics, but
those are limited because it's hard to get to them
(24:52):
and you have to do some processing. It's not very efficient.
So synthetic plastics was something that people really wanted to
be able to to develop because plastic is incredibly useful stuff,
but you have to have a more efficient way to
make it. That had been experimented with as early as
the mid nineteenth century, but the first fully synthetic plastic
(25:14):
was developed in nineteen o seven. It was called bake
Light by the way, and companies since then had been
working to try and find cheaper, more efficient ways to
produce synthetic plastic because it could be put to so
many applications. GE was one of those companies, and throughout
the nineteen thirties and into the nineteen forties, g E
engineers worked on lots of different experiments to develop synthetic plastic.
(25:39):
It was around this time that James Wright, an engineer
for GE, who was trying to make synthetic rubber, ended
up developing Silly putty. So you may remember that from
a recent Tech Stuff episode. Corning would end up beating
GE to the punch as far as the development of
silicone goes. The two companies were in fierce competition to
(26:00):
try and develop it first, and Corning came out ahead,
but GE was able to create a more efficient manufacturing
process and ended up being extremely successful in the market
as a result, So Corning developed it and GE figured
out how to make it more efficiently. G E introduced
the first electric household food waste disposer called the disposal.
(26:24):
This is a garbage disposal which mounts beneath the drain
on a sink, and the idea is that there's a
spinning disk or impeller plate under the drain which has
some protrusions on it, and turning on the disposal activates
an electric motor that then spins the plate rapidly, and
the spinning pulverizes the food or whatever else is down
(26:46):
the disposal and turns it into a slurry that can
get washed down the holes on the outer edge of
the disposal and then down into the pipe system of
your house. And it also would create an effective means
of creeping out audiences in horror movies, because we all
know what happens when a character is at a garbage disposal.
Something important, usually a ring, is gonna fall down there,
(27:09):
and then they're gonna put their hand down the drain,
even as we all screamed, don't put your hand down there. Anyway,
The disposal went on sale in nineteen thirty five. I
should also mentioned that ge did not invent the garbage disposal.
That honor goes to John Ham's. Not John Hamm who's
(27:30):
a great actor but John Hams. He invented the device
in nineteen seven and filed a patent for it, though
as far as I can tell, he wasn't able to
go to market with a device until after GE had
already introduced the disposal. Also in nineti GE provided the
lamps for the first Major League Baseball night game, which
(27:51):
took place in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Cincinnati Reds played the
Philadelphia Phillies and they won two to one. Night games
actually were really important. They helped transform the sport at baseball.
It meant that folks who worked during the day could
still have the opportunity to watch a game live in
the evening, and it boosted crowd attendance and gave a
(28:13):
healthy dose of umph to the sport. And of course
other sports would follow suit. Throughout the nineteen thirties, the
company continued to work on multiple industries. G E introduced
more consumer products for the average joe, and the company
also worked on high tech components for airplane and car
engines for a more let's say, elite clientele. Howard Hughes
(28:36):
himself used a g E supercharger in nineteen thirty seven
to set a transcontinental air record he flew across the
United States in seven hours, twenty eight minutes, and twenty
five seconds. In nineteen thirty eight, the labs at GE
managed to reinvent the company wheel, by which I mean
the light bulb. The invention was a fluorescent lamp, which
(28:58):
works a different way from condescent lamps. And incandescent lamp
creates light by using electricity to heat up a filament
until it gives off light when it incandesses, and that's
the basic premise behind all incandescent lights, but a fluorescent
lamp is different. The idea for fluorescent lamps was actually
(29:20):
a few decades old, but the challenge was to create
one that was practical from both a use case scenario,
as in, this is giving off enough light for me
to do stuff, and also from a manufacturing standpoint. Dozens
of people worked on solving these problems, and a lot
of people made various contributions, so there's not one single
(29:41):
person I can point to as being the inventor of
the fluorescent lamp, which is a bit of a relief
since it means I don't have to explain that so
and so invented this and then walk it back and say, okay, well,
actually it's way more complicated than that. I'll explain how
fluorescent lamps work when we come back from this short Okay,
(30:08):
so fluorescent lamps. There's actually a few different types of
fluorescent lamps, but I'm going to focus on hot cathode
lamps because that was sort of the earliest ones that
were able to be manufactured for the mass market. And
typically the lamp is a long glass tube, and inside
of this long glass tube there is a coating of
(30:31):
fluorescent powder on the inside surface of the tube, and
also inside the tube is low pressure are gone gas,
and there's also a little bit of liquid mercury in there. Um.
This is why handling fluorescent lamps is a bit dangerous. Well,
that's one of the reasons. Another is that their tubes
(30:51):
made of glass, so breaking one not only releases a
small amount of toxic chemical to the environment and also
can cut you up pretty badly. Now, a hot cathode
fluorescent lamp has two electrodes on either end of the tube,
so you have one on one end one on the
other end. Both of these electrodes are cathodes, meaning they
(31:12):
both contribute electrons into the tube. Though they do this
one at a time. It's another example of thermionic emission,
like with the vacuum tube where you heat up a
filament and it starts to give off electrons. A pulse
of voltage creates an arc between the cathodes, starting from
one cathode and traveling to the other, and alternating current
(31:35):
makes the arc go one way, then it goes the
opposite way many times a second. A C works better
for fluorescent lamps than DC direct current because it means
one electrode will act as a cathode and then the
other electrode will act as the cathode, and they'll switch
back and forth, and that creates a more even lighting
(31:55):
within the lamp. If there was one side that was
just always the cathode, that side would be much brighter
than the other side. That's what you would get with
direct current. So that's why fluorescent lamps work best with
a C electricity rather than d C. Now, getting the
arc started can be a bit of a challenge, especially
(32:16):
with those early bulbs. That requires a spike of high voltage,
and you can think of voltage kind of like pressure.
So in a hydraulic system and a water based system
like pipes, it's the more pressure you put behind the water,
forcing water through the pipe system faster. With a fluorescent lamp,
the higher voltage forces a current to flow from the
(32:39):
cathote across to the other electrode, but the gas inside
the tube actually resists this, and the colder the gas is,
the more it resists the current. So it might take
a few false starts to get that that arc actually going,
And there are a couple of different ways of doing that,
including like preheating the gas. These are all things that
(33:00):
would be built into the lamps themselves. It's not something
that you would have to do in addition to that,
But that whole discussion deserves its own podcast. So the
arc will vaporize the mercury that's inside the tube, turning
that liquid mercury into a gas, and as the arc
passes through this vaporized mercury, it gives off ultra violet light.
(33:25):
But hey, I hear you say, ultra violet light is
outside the visible spectrum for we puny humans. Ha ha ha,
puny humans. I say that is true, And that's where
the fluorescent powder coating the inside of the tube comes
into play. Stuff like phosphor will give off light or fluoresce,
or if you really want to make it easy to understand,
(33:47):
you could just say glow when exposed to certain types
of energy, such as ultra violet light. So the light
given off by the vaporized mercury is invisible to we
puny humans, but the light given off by the fluorescing
phosphor isn't. And that's how fluorescent lamps generate light. G
E engineers figured out how to make the fluorescent light
(34:10):
bulb in a way that was efficient and suitable for
actual applications as opposed to interesting lab experiments. And the
fluorescent lamp had some distinct advantages and a few disadvantages
compared to incandescent lamps. For one, it was more energy efficient.
It required less energy to generate an equivalent amount of light.
(34:30):
So we measure the amount of light given off by
stuff in units called lumens, and we measure electricity, And
what's the typical incandescent lightbulb produces sixteen lumens per what
of electricity? A fluorescent lightbulb might produce between fifty two
one hundred lumens per what. So, in other words, you
(34:51):
don't have to use nearly as much electricity to get
an equivalent amount of light out of a fluorescent lamp.
That's oversimplifying, but it gets the point across, which means
you save money in the long run by using these
fluorescent bulbs instead of incandescent ones. Fluorescent bulbs also last longer,
usually ten to twenty times longer than incandescent bulbs. Granted,
(35:15):
I also just talked about how companies were actively working
to limit the useful life of light bulbs, so part
of the fluorescent bulb advantage was really because companies were
purposefully planning out the obsolescence of the incandescent bulbs, so yikes.
Fluorescent lamps also generate less heat than incandescent lamps do,
(35:35):
so that was another area where they were superior, and
they diffuse light very well, but they also had disadvantages.
One was the environmental hazard I talked about. There's stuff
in fluorescent bulbs, namely the mercury that you don't want
getting out into the general environment. They are also more
expensive than incandescent bulbs, and they can't, without special adjustments,
(35:59):
be used with any sort of dimmer switch. They also
flicker slightly, usually too fast for most of us to
pick up, but it can drive some people a little bonkers,
like if it's slowing down a bit, Because as bulbs
get closer to the end of their lives, they can
flicker more noticeably. It can cause discomfort for people who
(36:20):
have epilepsy can it can trigger epileptic episodes. So there
are some other dangers with this stuff. And maybe you
end up being affected psychologically by the way these lights
give off light. You could end up like Joe and
Joe versus the volcano, and you might believe that you've
got a brain cloud. But seriously, there are folks who
(36:43):
just swear by the fact that fluorescent lights generate a
light that is unpleasant to them, and they much prefer
the warmer light from an incandescent bulb. In ninety nine,
a remarkable woman named Katherine Burr joined the ge Research Laboratory.
She was the first woman to be part of the
g E Research leavel, and she developed a non reflective glass.
(37:07):
It was nicknamed Invisible glass. The glass would become the
basis for all sorts of applications, such as for camera
lenses and for telescopes, you know, stuff where you want
to minimize or eliminate reflection as much as you possibly can.
So hats off to you, miss Burr. That was pretty incredible.
In ninety g E began to relay TV broadcasts from
(37:30):
New York City to its television station w r g B,
which was in Schenectady, New York, and this would set
the path for the development of television networks TV stations
that would end up carrying the broadcast of neighboring stations,
and this would follow the path that was pioneered by
radio networks like NBC. Now, by this time, much of
(37:53):
the world was already involved in World War Two, and
as it became more apparent that the US would likely
become of it as well, the government and particularly the
military began to seek out innovation from American companies to
augment the military capabilities of the United States. GE would
work on many of those projects, including the design and
(38:14):
production of the first jet engine in the United States,
called the I A. Now I should stress that this
was not the first jet engine in the world. Other
countries had already produced jet engines, but it would be
the first one designed and produced in the United States.
It was largely based off the design of a British
(38:37):
jet engine called the Power Jets W DOT two B
The I A was essentially a prototype jet engine, the
result of about a year of r and D and production.
It would lead to a production model called the General
Electric J thirty one. This would become the first mass
manufactured jet engine in the United States, and it would
(38:58):
be used in aircraft like the Ryan F R Fireball
and the Bell P fifty nine era comment. The US
officially joined the jet age in nineteen forty three. General
Electric also introduced an early form of autopilot, a system
designed to keep an aircraft on a specific course. I've
done a few episodes mentioning how these systems work. I
(39:22):
might need to do an update on that, but in
nineteen forty three it was a pretty rudimentary system designed
to hold a steady course and make minor adjustments. Also
in nineteen forty three, General Electric formed another division within
the company called g E Capital, which is a financial
services company within General Electric. It was sort of evolved
(39:44):
from an earlier division called the General Electric Contracts Corporation.
That one formed in nineteen thirty two as a way
to help customers purchase GE products through various finance plans.
Because that was around the time of the Great Depression,
so people who wanted appliances couldn't really afford to buy
them outright, so ge formed this as a way to
(40:07):
help customers pay for stuff and still be able to
sell consumer goods to people. Ge Capital pretty much picked
up where the Contracts company had left off, but it
would become a truly enormous company in its own right
later on, when I get to more recent years, we'll
talk about how it was one of the major bits
(40:27):
of the company spun off when ge encountered major financial difficulties,
but just as a sneak peak. At its height, this
company by itself, the the g E Capital Company had
assets exceeding six hundred thirty seven billion dollars, So yeah,
big business in general. Electric demonstrated the first commercial use
(40:52):
of radar, a technology that had been developed in Europe
and which was of considerable importance in wartime. G E
used radar to show how it could help vehicles, even
non military ones, navigate through darkness, and in nineteen forty six,
the company would design and produce the world's most popular
jet engine. It was called the J forty seven, capable
(41:14):
of providing up to five thousand pounds of thrust per engine.
The company and others licensed to produce the J forty
seven would build more than thirty thousand of the things
over the following decades, and this engine was used in
lots of different aircraft, including the Boeing B forty seven
strato Jet, the Martin x B fifty one, the Conveyor
(41:35):
B thirty six peacemaker, and the Republic XF ninety one
thunder Scepter, in addition to many others. And if I
ever get fired from tech stuff, I want to get
a job naming jets, because that seems like it's a
pretty cool gig. In nineteen forty nine, the U. S.
Courts ruled on a case that had been working its
(41:56):
way through the system for the better part of a decade,
and it all had to do patents about light bulbs
and lamps. The argument was essentially that through the control
of patents, GE was restricting competition and practicing monopolistic company policies,
which was a big no no and in violation of
the Sherman Antitrust Act. The court decision stated that g
(42:19):
E had made numerous undeniable contributions to the advancements of
technology in general and the light bulb in particular, but
it had also used its leverage to quote insulate itself
from competition end quote. The finding cited numerous smaller companies
that had been in the lamp manufacturing business but had
(42:40):
either gone out of business or were entirely beholden to
General Electric as licensees of the company's patents, and the
ruling essentially stated that all those patents on lamp and
lamp parts should be quote dedicated to the public end quote,
and so General Electric was compelled to lease its patents
(43:01):
on those particular technologies. Um the company certainly had performed
in ways that gave it all the advantages, which again,
from the perspective of a company, seems like a no brainer.
You want to give yourself every chance of success. But
from an external perspective that it looked like GE was
(43:22):
a big bully, and so that was how this decision
came down. In our next episode, we'll look at how
General Electric played a big part in the space race,
and we'll try and skip over a whole bunch of
other stuff, because obviously this is going at a pretty
slow pace, and for a company that's more than a
hundred thirty years old, it's gonna take us a while.
(43:42):
I finally take it in twenty year chunks. But in
the meantime, if you guys have suggestions for other topics
I should cover. Whether it's a company, a technology product,
maybe a trend in tech, or just a general concept
in tech and you want to know more about it,
send me an email the addresses tech Stuff at how
stuff works dot com. Pop on over to our website
(44:04):
that's text stuff podcast dot com. You'll find an archive
of all of our past episodes. There. You also find
links to where we are on social media, and you'll
find a link to our online store, where every purchase
you make goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it,
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff
(44:28):
is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.