November 16, 2021 • 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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host
job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio
and I love all things tech and I am currently
vacationing in sunny Orlando, Florida. Hopefully it's sunny when I'm
(00:25):
down there. And yeah, we're going to continue our look
back on General Electric a k A. G E. So
yesterday we replayed an episode called the Founding of GE.
Today we are going to the second part. This one
is called g E Through World War Two. Then it
originally published on September four, two thousand nineteen. Enjoy. In
(00:52):
our last episode, I was talking about General Electric, and
I was really focusing on the 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
(01:13):
of August twenty nineteen, some analysts have expressed concern for
the integrity of the company. This is 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
(01:33):
talk about, including advances in some of the basic technology
that GE was built off of. For example, in nineteen
of physicists and chemist named Irving Langmuir proved that by
filling lightbulbs within inert gas like are Gone, it would
not only extend the useful life of the tungusten filaments
(01:54):
inside the lightbulb that's the part that actually lights up
in a light bulb, but it would also for the
the inside of the light bulb from turning black as
it got 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
(02:15):
thirty two, though that wasn't for light bulbs anyway. Another
thing that happened in ninet was that Charles Coffin, who
had been president of the company, would become General Electrics
first chairman of the board of directors. Edwin Wilbur Rice,
who had studied under Alahu Thompson at Central High School
(02:36):
in Philadelphia and who had worked for General Electrics since
the very beginning of the company became the new president
of GE. Rice had more than a hundred patents to
his 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
(02:57):
president of the company, someone who could wreck the operational aspects.
Under Rice, General Electric continued to expand its business and
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,
(03:22):
so GE then formed a new division within the company
itself called Edison Electric Appliance Company. Around that same time,
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,
(03:45):
electricity and infrastructure was still very slowly rolling out across
the United States, and GE had a very large hand
in that. In nineteen nineteen, General Electric became one of
the founding companies to create the Radio Corporation of America
or our c A, and I covered this in the
episodes I did about our CIA. So the super short
(04:08):
version of this is that leading up to World War One,
the United States military pretty much commondered the 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
(04:30):
sending wireless telegrams, so most transmissions were just limited to
Morse code. Now, there were a few early 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
(04:52):
actually owned and operated by companies that were from outside
the United States, and the First 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
(05:17):
for wartime communications for official military communications. 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,
(05:39):
T and T, and the United Fruit Company. Yeah, I'll
have to do an episode 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 up of our ci A. General
(06:01):
Electric held the majority. Steak didn't hold a fifty 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 built a supercharger for an airplane. So
(06:26):
there was an engineer named Sanford Moss who came up
with this idea. He had this hypothesis 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,
(06:49):
he designed 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 thousand,
eight hundred feet or about twelve thousand four dreds. Obviously,
we've left that way behind now, but at the time
(07:11):
that was a significant achievement. In nineteen twenty 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
(07:31):
my Heart Media. Fun 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. It gets a little more complicated
than that, but that's a general rule of thumb. Also,
(07:54):
in nineteen twenty two, Rice would step down as president
of the company and a guy named Gerald 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
(08:18):
while GE had made a few consumer products over the
previous twenty years, it hadn't really seriously delved 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
(08:41):
Rice was actually in 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,
(09:03):
I'm being a bit cheeky. Swope 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 some presumably he was making a bit more than
(09:23):
that by the time he took on the role of
company president in nineteen twenty two, and I don't mean
to suggest his employment and GE was unbroken from eighteen
ninety three 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,
(09:44):
which is a company that's even older than GE. Swope
had also served on 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 in nineteen nineteen.
Now as the president of GE, Swope would do more
(10:07):
than just push the company into manufacturing more consumer appliances.
He was also concerned about employee benefits. 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
(10:30):
of the company twice in fact, and his first run
that would stretch from nineteen twenty two 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
(10:52):
return to serve as president a second time, because generally
when you hear that someone left 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
(11:15):
g E subsidiary, when he was twelve years old, and
had been with a 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
(11:36):
Delano Roosevelt, who wanted Wilson to join the War Production
Board as vice chairman. 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
(11:59):
out of retirement and once again led the company until
nineteen forty five and 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
(12:19):
to illustrate how important General Electrics business had become. It
was integral to 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,
(12:41):
so let's get back to the timeline and learn what
GE was doing during all those years. One note I
saw pop up on several sites was that in nineteen
twenty four, g E opted to exit the utilities business
because of antitrust concerns from the U. S. Government. But
despite my certain change, I couldn't find any other information
(13:03):
on that, and I just saw essentially the same timeline
popping up on multiple websites. 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
(13:24):
confirmation outside that list, I got a little leery of it.
So I'm including 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
(13:45):
list that is unsupported and other people have just copied
that exact, exact same list and put it up on
their own websites. 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 us 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
(14:05):
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 put the 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
(14:28):
be agreed upon that that piece will be distributed to
different outlets. But a lot of times people are just
taking whatever they think is cool or interesting or will
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 twenty four. Um, whether GE got the
(14:51):
utilities business because of antitrust issues, I can't speak to
because I couldn't find anything about it. But stuff that
got started or happened in nineteen why for, 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
(15:12):
light bulb. That is, they had a patent on the
tungsten filament in the 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 g
(15:34):
e s direction, and that it would have to follow
certain quotas. In other words, g was using its power
to say, you can sell lightbulbs 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 GE said, we
can change our our price at any time for any reason.
(15:56):
And that's really the issue that went to court. Now,
what the courts would all likely 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
(16:16):
a price for a product made from your patented invention. However,
in this case, GE had not just licensed out the
right to manufacture light bulbs and had 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
(16:38):
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, 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.
(17:00):
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 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
(17:24):
couldn't just come up with a cool invention, get it patented,
and then just sit on that patent and wait for
people to license 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 patent trolls 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
(17:47):
to say about General Electric, but before I get to that,
let's take a quick break. Early or I alluded to
the fact that a couple of big things happened in
nineteen four and they both had to do with lightbulbs.
And that's ironic because this next big thing was really shady.
(18:12):
Executives from g E attended a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.
That meeting was also attended by representatives of companies like
Phillips and the company de Lump and Oserum. 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.
(18:36):
But the 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
(18:58):
the world into read's 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
(19:21):
be one thousand hours. They were collectively agreeing to limit
a lightbulb's lifespan. And this is called planned 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
(19:43):
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 light bulb lifespan in n
was already twenty five hundred hours, so two point five
(20:06):
times as long. Now they were going to work to
reduce that lifespan in order to dram up more business.
Lightbulbs burned out faster, people have to go back and
buy more lightbulbs. 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,
(20:26):
there'd be nowhere else to go. Insert maniacal laugh here. Interestingly,
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
(20:49):
of the cartel, and it did have one subsidiary, a
British subsidiary called International General Electric that was part of
the cartel, but the overall company was not cut and
He's 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,
(21:09):
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, 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
(21:33):
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 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.
(21:55):
They 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 lightbulbs lifespan 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,
(22:17):
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, 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.
(22:40):
But still, there's something particularly sinister about a company or
group of companies that agree to 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 twenty seven, g E was one
(23:02):
of a few companies to demonstrate a live TV broadcast.
Now earlier in nineteen a T and T had 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
(23:25):
radio station w g Y, and the TV was in
a home located in Schenectady, New York, and GEES headquarters.
The television was not an electric electronic television that had
just recently been pioneered by Filo 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
(23:49):
in several earlier episodes of Tech Stuff, so I'm just
gonna move along here. In nineteen twenty eight, the Radio
Corporation of America, in which I remember g E OH
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
(24:12):
you could say GE had partial ownership of NBC at
this time, 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 our CIA for
monopolistic practices. The antitrust investigation was followed by formal charges
(24:33):
and a long period of negotiation, and ultimately the parties
agreed to our c A becoming its own incorporated company
and the various partners, including GE, would divest themselves of
their shares in our CIA. In addition, g E and
Westinghouse had to agree to stay out of the radio
broadcast business for two and a half years in order
(24:55):
to give our CIA a chance to stand on its own.
And boy how they did it ever, But that's covered
in other episodes I did not too long ago. We'll
get back to both NBC and r c 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,
(25:19):
but those are limited because it's hard to get to
them 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 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
(25:40):
early as the mid nineteenth century, but the first fully
synthetic plastic 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. G E was one of those companies,
(26:02):
and throughout the nineteen thirties and into the nineteen forties,
g E engineers worked on lots of different experiments to
develop synthetic plastic. 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
(26:23):
beating GE to the punch as far as the development
of silicone goes. The two companies were in fierce competition
to 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
(26:45):
out how to make it more efficiently. G E introduced
the first electric household food waste disposer called the disposal.
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
(27:08):
an electric motor that then spins the plate rapidly and
the spinning pulverizes the food or whatever else is down
the disposal and turns into a slurry. They 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
(27:30):
out audiences and 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, and then
they're gonna put their hand down the drain, even as
we all scream, don't put your hand down there. Anyway,
the disposal went on sale in n I should also
(27:52):
mention that ge E did not invent the garbage disposal.
That honor goes to John Ham's. Not Jon Hamm, who's
a great actor, but John Hamm's. He invented the device
in nine 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 n G E provided
(28:18):
the lamps for the first Major League Baseball night game,
which 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
of baseball. It meant that folks who worked during the
day could still have the opportunity to watch a game
(28:41):
live in the evening, and it boosted crowd attendance and
gave a 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
(29:02):
car engines for a more let's say, elite clientele. Howard
Hughes 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
(29:22):
GE managed to reinvent the company wheel, by which I
mean the light bulb. The invention was a fluorescent lamp,
which works a different way from incandescent 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
(29:46):
fluorescent lamp is different. The idea for fluorescent lamps was
actually a few decades old, but the challenge was to
create one that was practical from both a use case scenario,
as in the 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
(30:09):
of people made various contributions, so there's not one single
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 break. Okay,
(30:39):
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
(31:02):
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 they're tubes
(31:22):
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
(31:43):
both contribute electrons into the tube, though they do this
one at a time. It's another example of thermionic emission,
like with a 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
(32:06):
makes the arc go one way, then it goes the
opposite way many times a second. A C works better
for fluorescent lamps than d C 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 within the lamp. If there was one side that
(32:29):
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 with those early bulbs. That requires a spike of
(32:50):
high voltage, and you can think of voltage kind of
light pressure. So in a hydraulic system, In 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 cathote across to the other electrode,
(33:13):
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 would be built into the
lamps themselves. It's not something that you would have to
(33:35):
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. But hey, I hear you
(33:57):
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 coding
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, you could
(34:19):
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
(34:39):
figured out how to make the fluorescent light 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 and equi volent amount of light.
(35:01):
So we measure the amount of light given off by
stuff in units called lumens, and we measure electricity and watt's.
The typical incandescent light bulb 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
(35:22):
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,
(35:46):
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,
(36:06):
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,
(36:30):
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
(36:51):
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
(37:14):
just swear by the fact that fluorescent lights generate a
light that is unpleasant to them, and they much preferred
the warmer light from an incandescent bulb. In nineteen thirty nine,
a remarkable woman named Catherine Burr joined the GE Research Laboratory.
She was the first woman to be part of the
Ge Research labl and she developed a non reflective glass.
(37:38):
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 nineteen forty, g E began to relay t V
(38:00):
broadcasts from 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,
(38:23):
much of the world was already involved in World War Two,
and as it became more apparent that the US would
likely become involved 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 production
(38:46):
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 jet
(39:08):
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
(39:29):
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
(39:53):
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 GE Capital, which is a financial services
company within General Electric. It was sort of evolved from
(40:15):
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
out right, So GE formed this as a way to
(40:38):
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
(40:58):
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 n General Electric demonstrated the first commercial
(41:23):
use of radar 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,
(41:45):
capable 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 for an aircraft, including the Boeing
B forty seven strato Jet, the Martin x B fifty one,
(42:06):
the Conveyor B thirty six Peacemaker, and the Republic X
F nine 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
(42:26):
been working its way through the system for the better
part of a decade, and it all had to do
with 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.
(42:48):
The court decision stated that g 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 sited numerous smaller companies that had been in
(43:09):
the lamp manufacturing business but had 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 release its patents on those particular technologies.
(43:35):
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 a big bully,
(43:55):
and so that was how this decision came down. Text
Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts
from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host
job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio
and I love all things tech and I am currently
vacationing in sunny Orlando, Florida. Hopefully it's sunny when I'm
(00:25):
down there. And yeah, we're going to continue our look
back on General Electric a k A. G E. So
yesterday we replayed an episode called the Founding of GE.
Today we are going to the second part. This one
is called g E Through World War Two. Then it
originally published on September four, two thousand nineteen. Enjoy. In
(00:52):
our last episode, I was talking about General Electric, and
I was really focusing on the 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
(01:13):
of August twenty nineteen, some analysts have expressed concern for
the integrity of the company. This is 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
(01:33):
talk about, including advances in some of the basic technology
that GE was built off of. For example, in nineteen
of physicists and chemist named Irving Langmuir proved that by
filling lightbulbs within inert gas like are Gone, it would
not only extend the useful life of the tungusten filaments
(01:54):
inside the lightbulb that's the part that actually lights up
in a light bulb, but it would also for the
the inside of the light bulb from turning black as
it got 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
(02:15):
thirty two, though that wasn't for light bulbs anyway. Another
thing that happened in ninet was that Charles Coffin, who
had been president of the company, would become General Electrics
first chairman of the board of directors. Edwin Wilbur Rice,
who had studied under Alahu Thompson at Central High School
(02:36):
in Philadelphia and who had worked for General Electrics since
the very beginning of the company became the new president
of GE. Rice had more than a hundred patents to
his 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
(02:57):
president of the company, someone who could wreck the operational aspects.
Under Rice, General Electric continued to expand its business and
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,
(03:22):
so GE then formed a new division within the company
itself called Edison Electric Appliance Company. Around that same time,
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,
(03:45):
electricity and infrastructure was still very slowly rolling out across
the United States, and GE had a very large hand
in that. In nineteen nineteen, General Electric became one of
the founding companies to create the Radio Corporation of America
or our c A, and I covered this in the
episodes I did about our CIA. So the super short
(04:08):
version of this is that leading up to World War One,
the United States military pretty much commondered the 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
(04:30):
sending wireless telegrams, so most transmissions were just limited to
Morse code. Now, there were a few early 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
(04:52):
actually owned and operated by companies that were from outside
the United States, and the First 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
(05:17):
for wartime communications for official military communications. 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,
(05:39):
T and T, and the United Fruit Company. Yeah, I'll
have to do an episode 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 up of our ci A. General
(06:01):
Electric held the majority. Steak didn't hold a fifty 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 built a supercharger for an airplane. So
(06:26):
there was an engineer named Sanford Moss who came up
with this idea. He had this hypothesis 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,
(06:49):
he designed 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 thousand,
eight hundred feet or about twelve thousand four dreds. Obviously,
we've left that way behind now, but at the time
(07:11):
that was a significant achievement. In nineteen twenty 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
(07:31):
my Heart Media. Fun 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. It gets a little more complicated
than that, but that's a general rule of thumb. Also,
(07:54):
in nineteen twenty two, Rice would step down as president
of the company and a guy named Gerald 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
(08:18):
while GE had made a few consumer products over the
previous twenty years, it hadn't really seriously delved 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
(08:41):
Rice was actually in 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,
(09:03):
I'm being a bit cheeky. Swope 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 some presumably he was making a bit more than
(09:23):
that by the time he took on the role of
company president in nineteen twenty two, and I don't mean
to suggest his employment and GE was unbroken from eighteen
ninety three 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,
(09:44):
which is a company that's even older than GE. Swope
had also served on 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 in nineteen nineteen.
Now as the president of GE, Swope would do more
(10:07):
than just push the company into manufacturing more consumer appliances.
He was also concerned about employee benefits. 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
(10:30):
of the company twice in fact, and his first run
that would stretch from nineteen twenty two 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
(10:52):
return to serve as president a second time, because generally
when you hear that someone left 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
(11:15):
g E subsidiary, when he was twelve years old, and
had been with a 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
(11:36):
Delano Roosevelt, who wanted Wilson to join the War Production
Board as vice chairman. 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
(11:59):
out of retirement and once again led the company until
nineteen forty five and 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
(12:19):
to illustrate how important General Electrics business had become. It
was integral to 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,
(12:41):
so let's get back to the timeline and learn what
GE was doing during all those years. One note I
saw pop up on several sites was that in nineteen
twenty four, g E opted to exit the utilities business
because of antitrust concerns from the U. S. Government. But
despite my certain change, I couldn't find any other information
(13:03):
on that, and I just saw essentially the same timeline
popping up on multiple websites. 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
(13:24):
confirmation outside that list, I got a little leery of it.
So I'm including 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
(13:45):
list that is unsupported and other people have just copied
that exact, exact same list and put it up on
their own websites. 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 us 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
(14:05):
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 put the 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
(14:28):
be agreed upon that that piece will be distributed to
different outlets. But a lot of times people are just
taking whatever they think is cool or interesting or will
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 twenty four. Um, whether GE got the
(14:51):
utilities business because of antitrust issues, I can't speak to
because I couldn't find anything about it. But stuff that
got started or happened in nineteen why for, 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
(15:12):
light bulb. That is, they had a patent on the
tungsten filament in the 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 g
(15:34):
e s direction, and that it would have to follow
certain quotas. In other words, g was using its power
to say, you can sell lightbulbs 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 GE said, we
can change our our price at any time for any reason.
(15:56):
And that's really the issue that went to court. Now,
what the courts would all likely 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
(16:16):
a price for a product made from your patented invention. However,
in this case, GE had not just licensed out the
right to manufacture light bulbs and had 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
(16:38):
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, 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.
(17:00):
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 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
(17:24):
couldn't just come up with a cool invention, get it patented,
and then just sit on that patent and wait for
people to license 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 patent trolls 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
(17:47):
to say about General Electric, but before I get to that,
let's take a quick break. Early or I alluded to
the fact that a couple of big things happened in
nineteen four and they both had to do with lightbulbs.
And that's ironic because this next big thing was really shady.
(18:12):
Executives from g E attended a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.
That meeting was also attended by representatives of companies like
Phillips and the company de Lump and Oserum. 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.
(18:36):
But the 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
(18:58):
the world into read's 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
(19:21):
be one thousand hours. They were collectively agreeing to limit
a lightbulb's lifespan. And this is called planned 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
(19:43):
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 light bulb lifespan in n
was already twenty five hundred hours, so two point five
(20:06):
times as long. Now they were going to work to
reduce that lifespan in order to dram up more business.
Lightbulbs burned out faster, people have to go back and
buy more lightbulbs. 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,
(20:26):
there'd be nowhere else to go. Insert maniacal laugh here. Interestingly,
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
(20:49):
of the cartel, and it did have one subsidiary, a
British subsidiary called International General Electric that was part of
the cartel, but the overall company was not cut and
He's 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,
(21:09):
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, 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
(21:33):
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 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.
(21:55):
They 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 lightbulbs lifespan 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,
(22:17):
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, 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.
(22:40):
But still, there's something particularly sinister about a company or
group of companies that agree to 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 twenty seven, g E was one
(23:02):
of a few companies to demonstrate a live TV broadcast.
Now earlier in nineteen a T and T had 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
(23:25):
radio station w g Y, and the TV was in
a home located in Schenectady, New York, and GEES headquarters.
The television was not an electric electronic television that had
just recently been pioneered by Filo 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
(23:49):
in several earlier episodes of Tech Stuff, so I'm just
gonna move along here. In nineteen twenty eight, the Radio
Corporation of America, in which I remember g E OH
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
(24:12):
you could say GE had partial ownership of NBC at
this time, 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 our CIA for
monopolistic practices. The antitrust investigation was followed by formal charges
(24:33):
and a long period of negotiation, and ultimately the parties
agreed to our c A becoming its own incorporated company
and the various partners, including GE, would divest themselves of
their shares in our CIA. In addition, g E and
Westinghouse had to agree to stay out of the radio
broadcast business for two and a half years in order
(24:55):
to give our CIA a chance to stand on its own.
And boy how they did it ever, But that's covered
in other episodes I did not too long ago. We'll
get back to both NBC and r c 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,
(25:19):
but those are limited because it's hard to get to
them 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 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
(25:40):
early as the mid nineteenth century, but the first fully
synthetic plastic 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. G E was one of those companies,
(26:02):
and throughout the nineteen thirties and into the nineteen forties,
g E engineers worked on lots of different experiments to
develop synthetic plastic. 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
(26:23):
beating GE to the punch as far as the development
of silicone goes. The two companies were in fierce competition
to 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
(26:45):
out how to make it more efficiently. G E introduced
the first electric household food waste disposer called the disposal.
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
(27:08):
an electric motor that then spins the plate rapidly and
the spinning pulverizes the food or whatever else is down
the disposal and turns into a slurry. They 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
(27:30):
out audiences and 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, and then
they're gonna put their hand down the drain, even as
we all scream, don't put your hand down there. Anyway,
the disposal went on sale in n I should also
(27:52):
mention that ge E did not invent the garbage disposal.
That honor goes to John Ham's. Not Jon Hamm, who's
a great actor, but John Hamm's. He invented the device
in nine 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 n G E provided
(28:18):
the lamps for the first Major League Baseball night game,
which 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
of baseball. It meant that folks who worked during the
day could still have the opportunity to watch a game
(28:41):
live in the evening, and it boosted crowd attendance and
gave a 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
(29:02):
car engines for a more let's say, elite clientele. Howard
Hughes 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
(29:22):
GE managed to reinvent the company wheel, by which I
mean the light bulb. The invention was a fluorescent lamp,
which works a different way from incandescent 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
(29:46):
fluorescent lamp is different. The idea for fluorescent lamps was
actually a few decades old, but the challenge was to
create one that was practical from both a use case scenario,
as in the 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
(30:09):
of people made various contributions, so there's not one single
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 break. Okay,
(30:39):
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
(31:02):
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 they're tubes
(31:22):
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
(31:43):
both contribute electrons into the tube, though they do this
one at a time. It's another example of thermionic emission,
like with a 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
(32:06):
makes the arc go one way, then it goes the
opposite way many times a second. A C works better
for fluorescent lamps than d C 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 within the lamp. If there was one side that
(32:29):
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 with those early bulbs. That requires a spike of
(32:50):
high voltage, and you can think of voltage kind of
light pressure. So in a hydraulic system, In 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 cathote across to the other electrode,
(33:13):
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 would be built into the
lamps themselves. It's not something that you would have to
(33:35):
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. But hey, I hear you
(33:57):
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 coding
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, you could
(34:19):
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
(34:39):
figured out how to make the fluorescent light 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 and equi volent amount of light.
(35:01):
So we measure the amount of light given off by
stuff in units called lumens, and we measure electricity and watt's.
The typical incandescent light bulb 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
(35:22):
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,
(35:46):
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,
(36:06):
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,
(36:30):
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
(36:51):
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
(37:14):
just swear by the fact that fluorescent lights generate a
light that is unpleasant to them, and they much preferred
the warmer light from an incandescent bulb. In nineteen thirty nine,
a remarkable woman named Catherine Burr joined the GE Research Laboratory.
She was the first woman to be part of the
Ge Research labl and she developed a non reflective glass.
(37:38):
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 nineteen forty, g E began to relay t V
(38:00):
broadcasts from 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,
(38:23):
much of the world was already involved in World War Two,
and as it became more apparent that the US would
likely become involved 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 production
(38:46):
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 jet
(39:08):
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
(39:29):
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
(39:53):
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 GE Capital, which is a financial services
company within General Electric. It was sort of evolved from
(40:15):
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
out right, So GE formed this as a way to
(40:38):
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
(40:58):
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 n General Electric demonstrated the first commercial
(41:23):
use of radar 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,
(41:45):
capable 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 for an aircraft, including the Boeing
B forty seven strato Jet, the Martin x B fifty one,
(42:06):
the Conveyor B thirty six Peacemaker, and the Republic X
F nine 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
(42:26):
been working its way through the system for the better
part of a decade, and it all had to do
with 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.
(42:48):
The court decision stated that g 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 sited numerous smaller companies that had been in
(43:09):
the lamp manufacturing business but had 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 release its patents on those particular technologies.
(43:35):
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 a big bully,
(43:55):
and so that was how this decision came down. Text
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