Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, John Than Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and a love all things tech and uh I am on vacation, y'all. If you hadn't heard that already, then you need to listen to the last two episodes because we are going through a series of classic tech Stuff episodes. Classic Pig came out in two thousand nineteen. They're all classics in my mind. Anyway, We're going through this series about General Electric a k a. G. And the reason we're doing that is that recently the company announced that it plans to split into three separate companies over the next few years, one focusing on energy, one focusing on healthcare, and one focusing on aviation, with the aviation company retaining the name GE. So with that in mind, we're going to listen to part three of that series, G E and the House that Jack Built. Now. That episode originally published on September nine, two thousand nineteen. One more thing tomorrow, we should have a brand new Smart Talks with IBM episode, and so that will publish tomorrow. But then on Friday, we will conclude the g E series. So sit back, relax, and enjoy g E and the House that Jack built. We are continuing our journey through the history of General Electric or GE, a company that has encountered some pretty significant challenges over the last decade or so. Now. In our first two episodes, I went through the founding of g E and then made my way all the way up through World War Two, and I talked about how some of the top level executives of the company were called upon by the US government to serve in wartime government position to help the US meet the needs of supplying the military with the equipment necessary to fight the war. I also talked about how GE continued to grow as a company, building on new departments and divisions and diversifying the company's businesses. And I ended the last episode by talking about a court case that determined GE was being anti competitive by leveraging patents in order to act as an effective monopoly when it came to manufacturing lightbulbs. Now we're almost up to nineteen fifty and it's time to get out of this world. The one thing I want to mention before we get into the nineteen fifties. Is that in nineteen forty six a scientist at GE named Vincent Schaefer developed the process of cloud seating. And the idea is pretty elegant but has long been a subject of scientific dispute. So here's the process. It involves distributing tiny particles into clouds in an effort to make it rain. And the thought is that these particles will act as nucleic sites for rain drops to form. When the raindrops get large enough, they have enough weight to fall to Earth. And so that is the general thought behind cloud seating. It's been practiced ever since, but there have been many questions over whether or not cloud seating actually works. Sometimes it would rain, sometimes it wouldn't, and if it did rain, is there any way to be sure that it was the cloud seating that actually made the difference. I mean, you had to have a cloud there in the first place. You couldn't just manufacture a cloud. Experiments and labs suggested that it should work, but the natural world is very different from the controlled conditions of a lab environment. It didn't help that many of our measuring instruments lacked the precision to detect very small raindrops. So you couldn't really monitor to see if it was actually doing what it was supposed to do. An experiment in two thousand eighteen suggests that cloud seating does in fact work, at least to some extent. But there's another question that's still open, which is does cloud seeding make economic sense? Does the amount of water produced by rainfall justify the cost of flying aircraft up and distributing the particles in the first place. Because it may very well work, but it might not work well enough to make sense from a financial perspective. I just find it fascinating that we've essentially been doing this for seventy years and we still don't know if we should be doing it. Now. I can certainly see why cloud seating companies feel we should be doing it. I mean, that's their business. But the jury is still technically out over whether or not it makes sense, and there's still a little bit debate on whether or not it really truly works, or if it works in enough conditions for it to be reasonable. Now, in ve Ge made the first two door refrigerator freezer combo, and I only mentioned it here because I think it's cool. That's a pun. Now we're up to the nineteen fifties. So in nineteen fifty one, GE built a new jet engine called the J seven nine. And here's an interesting historical note. When engineers tested the J seven nine, which had variable statters, the efficiency ratings were so high that the engineers thought their instruments were malfunctioning. There's no way we're getting this level of energy efficiency out of this thing. But then that raises a question for a lot of people, what is a statter? What does that actually mean? Well, the name gives you a hint. Statter stationary, that kind of thing. So in jet engines, you have fan blades that rotate. Those are rotors, and you had fan blades that hold in place. Those are called statters. And the purpose of this combination is to both draw air into the engine and to compress that air before it enters into the combustion chamber. The adjustable status meant that the engine could be finely tuned to produce higher compressor pressures and to produce more usable energy as opposed to waste heat when you're actually burning fuel. In nineteen four, g E Research Laboratory scientists named Tracy Hall announced that his team had discovered a way to create synthetic diamonds in the lab. Hall's team used a process involving high pressure high temperature or hp HT. They were successful in producing synthetic diamonds on December sixteenth, nineteen fifty four. Now, other teams were using different methods to create diamonds of in other companies as well, but it was Hall's efforts that would receive the credit for designing the first reliable, reproducible methodology to create commercially viable synthetic diamonds. So there are a lot of qualifiers there because there were people who were working on different methodologies and they were also producing diamonds, but it wasn't considered to be as reliable nor as viable for a commercial use. And these were not diamonds meant to adore engagement rings or other jewelry. For one, they were brownish in color, so they weren't terribly attractive. They also were very very tiny. The largest diamond they produced in that early batch measured point one five millimeters across, so these were not large stones. More importantly, this purpose would be put to commercial uses. In fact, it wouldn't be until the nineteen seventies that scientists would actually be able to create diamonds of sufficient quality and clarity that they could be used in the gem industry. And even then, the process was so labor intensive and so expensive it was not economically feasible to create synthetic diamonds for decorative purposes. The cost of the synthetic diamond would be so high that would actually be cheaper for you to go out and buy a ring with a natural diamond on it. Also, the whole topic of diamonds is one that I find particularly upsetting, but that's a that's a topic for a totally different podcast. So how did they make synthetic diamonds? Well, I'm sure most of you know, diamonds are a form of carbon. It's a it's a crystalline form of carbon. You've gotta crystalline structure where you have a carbon atom that's surrounded by four other carbon atoms and they're all connected to each other through strong covalent bonds. And diamonds are incredibly hard. They are the hardest natural substance we found so far. They also have a lot of different industrial uses. They can operate at high temperatures where they can hold firm at high temperatures. They don't really operate at all. They're just minerals, but they hold together well at high temperatures, so you put it on something like a high speed cutting tool, and the hardness combined with the fact that it's not going to break down at high temperatures, means you can run that very high RPMs and start cutting through stuff pretty well. In nature, diamonds form as carbon is compressed at very high temperatures over a very long time, and if it weren't for stuff like volcanoes, we probably never would have found the things because they tend to form in the Earth's mantle, which is not easy to get to. They they the zone where they form is about a hundred miles beneath the surface of the Earth. That's far deeper than we've ever drilled. Hall's lab used a belt press, and this press could exert more than ten giga pascals of pressure. A pascal is a unit of measurement for pressure, and it equates to a Newton per square meter. Standard atmospheric pressure is about one one point three to five kilo pascals, so a giga pascal is one billion pascals. Ten giga pascals would be ten billion pascals, So that's a lot of pressure. G E would actually put it in another way for those of us who don't use you know, scientific notation for everything. They said, the press could exert one point five if million pounds per square inch of pressure, So in other words, it's just a whole lot of pressure. And plus it would operate at a very high temperature. It would be heated to a temperature of more than three thousand, six fifty degrees fahrenheit or two thousand ten degrees celsius. This press pushed against a mixture of graphite, which is another form of carbon, and the graphite would be dissolved in a catalyst metal and catalyst metals could include stuff like nickel or iron. A catalyst in a chemical reaction is something that facilitates and speeds up the chemical reaction. So in this case, and meant that we didn't have to wait millions of years for synthetic diamonds to form. Instead took about twenty minutes. The largest of those diamonds, like I said, was point one five millimeters across, so pretty darn tiny. The following year, g E introduced hermetically sealed relays. These are electronic components that could be used in lots of different applications that otherwise might be sensitive to their environments, particularly in stuff like high altitude airplanes and aerospace applications, and variations of these components would be used throughout the next few decades in those particular applications. There's just one early example of how GE would become an important part of the space race, which was just heating up in the nineteen fifties between the United States and the then Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the company continued to expand its consumer product line. It had introduced a toaster decades earlier, but in nineteen fifty six it introduced the toaster oven. Specifically, it was one called the tree toast our oven, and it's adorable. You should look up a picture of it. That same year, GE built a commercial jet engine based off the J seventy nine design, which was intended for military aircraft that wasn't meant to be for commercial aircraft. So this new engine, which had the designation c J eight oh five, would mark General Electrics entry into the commercial jet engine business. So now they were building jet engines not just for the U. S Military, but also for companies like Boeing and other companies were creating aircraft would be a really big year for GE. The company secured a contract with the United States Air Force to provide the engine for an experimental supersonic aircraft, the x B seventy Valkyrie. Now the X in aircraft names is a big tip off that that's an experimental prototype. You'll often see X as part of the designation at the beginning of various aircraft that usually means experimental. The engine, called d J ninety three, was capable of producing enough thrust to propel the experimental aircraft to three times the speed of sound, and it would travel an altitude of seventy thousand feet or about twenty one meters. Not the time, the thinking was that the greatest threat to bombers were intercept aircraft. So if you could fly high enough and fast enough, you wouldn't have to worry about that. No one would ever be able to get a bead on you. They wouldn't be able to to track you and fire on you at that speed and at that altitude, so the Valkyrie would be safe against typical defenses. However, the Soviet Union was developing service to air missile technology and that started to bring into question whether or not the Valkyrie would be equally as effective against that sort of defense system. And one of the ways to get around that would be to fly the Valkyrie at lower altitudes where it could fly beneath radar. But if you did that, you also had to fly slower. You couldn't fly at the same mock three speed at lower altitudes. That meant that the bomber would be flying lower and slower than it was designed to do, and it would be no more effective than other bombers that were already in use at that time, and it was more expensive. So with all of those considerations stacked again into the Valkyrie, the ultimate decision was not to go into production and build those out as a production model, so it just remained an experimental prototype. But it is super cool to look at. If you ever want to look at a picture of a x B seventy Valkyrie, they're pretty neat looking. Something else that happened in nineteen fifty seven was that General Electric constructed a nuclear power plant in Alameda County, California, and it was the first nuclear reactor to be connected to a commercial electricity grid. In other words, General Electric was able to produce electricity that would go to average citizens over an Alameda County. And I've talked a little bit about how nuclear power plants work, I'll just give a very very high level rundown. So you have a nuclear material that undergoes nuclear decay, and as part of that process, it releases subatomic particles, typically neutrons, and those neutrons collide with other atoms of that same nuclear material. This is your fuel, and when they collide with those other atoms, it initiates a chain reaction. Those atoms then go undergo radioactive decay and they release neutrons and so on and so forth. So if there's enough thistle material, that is material that can split apart in the fuel, this reaction can be sustained until the amount of fuel dips below critical levels, in which case you start to have fewer and fewer reactions and you've spent the nuclear fuel. Doesn't mean that all the nuclear radiation stuff is gone, far from it, but it's no longer producing the reactions that the level you need to sustain that reaction indefinitely. This is a nuclear power plant. Now, the concentration of nuclear material is really high where that reaction starts to pick up speed over and over and over again, and this happens in the blink of an eye. Then you can set off a much more explosive chain reaction. In that case you have a nuclear bomb rather than a power plant, and that that concentration is key there. That's why you'll hear stories about how how much UH uranium you would need for a nuclear power plant versus one for you know, refined uranium for a nuclear bomb. Now, this reaction produces a lot of heat, and it's the heat that's the key for these nuclear power plants. That heat, usually through a paired system of pipes, transfers to a boiler, and the water in the boiler boils into steam, and that steam then turns turbines which generate electricity. So a nuclear power plant is, if you think about it, really just a way to boil water, really fast and really efficiently. Cold power plants also boil water, but obviously they do it through combustion rather than through a nuclear reaction. So the interesting thing to me is that the the part that generates the heat is different, but the end result is very much the same in the sense that you're boiling water to create steam to turn turbines to generate electricity. Now, I'll not go down the nuclear power rabbit hole because there's much more to talk about just with general electric But if you want to learn more about nuclear power plants, do a quick search over at tech stuff podcast dot com. That's where we have an archive of all of our past episodes. You can also learn the difference between fission nuclear reactors, which are what we use today, and fusion nuclear reactors, which we hope we can make feasible in the near future. We have done fusion reactions already, but the question is can you make that sustainable? Can you make it economically feasible. That's a question that we have not yet answered, but if we are able to do it, it could transform the world anyway. The GE facility, which was called the Valacitos Nuclear Center, it still exists. Uh. It was only an active power plant until nineteen sixty three. At that point the federal government told g E to shut it down, so the boiler reactor was shut down in nineteen sixty three, but GE maintains the facility mainly for the purposes of testing an analysis, particularly testing radiated materials to see how long they remain at dangerous levels of radiation. For example, So if you have instruments or suits, things like that that would exist in a radiation radiation UH filled area, you want to know how long is that stuff going to be dangerous UM. That's just part of what they do now. A major part of that facility. UH One of the largest of the reactors on that site got shut down in ninety seven. It was still being used for research purposes, but not to generate electricity. Why was it shut down, Well, it was discovered that it had the unfortunate distinction of sitting nearly directly on top of a fault line. There was a legitimate concern over what might happen should an earthquake hit while the reactor was an operation. There is still a smaller reactor on the site that operates in the one kilowatt range, but it's the only one as far as I can tell. Otherwise, all the other reactors have been completely decommissioned to shut down. We've got a lot more to say about general electric but before I get into that, let's take a quick break. The work out of GEES Research Lab was pretty incredible in the nineteen fifties. You had the nuclear scientists building that first licensed power plant to provide electricity to a grid. You had synthetic diamonds, and you had Robert H. Windorf who created a substance called borazon in the lab. Borizon is is a man made substance. You don't find it in nature, but it's almost as hard as diamond, and it can be used in temperatures much higher than even diamonds can be used in. Like, diamonds will break down once you get over a certain temperature, but borizon can hold together longer. So it would also become a very useful component in industrial cutting tools, for example. Now around the same time, a different group of engineers were building something perhaps a bit less lofty in the grand scheme of things, but that would be the humble electric can opener. G introduced the first consumer electric can opener in nineteen fifty eight, and pet ownership has never been the same since. In nine g E introduced the halogen lamp. These work in a way very similar to incandescent lamps. There's a tungsten filament inside a very small bulb, and encasing the filament is a quartz envelope. Inside the envelope is a gas from the halogen group of gases, so this is different from what the kind of gas you would find in your typical incandescent bulb. The benefit of halogen gas is that it can combine with tungsten vapor. So when the tungsten filament heats up and it starts to give off light, it's also giving off tungsten vapor. You know, tungsten is essentially burning off of the filament. That vapor combines with the halogen gas, and then it gets deposited back onto the tungsten filament, at least some of it does, so some of that vaporized tungsten gets returned. That actually helps extend the useful life of the halogen lamp. Halogen lamps can produce a lot more light per unit of energy compared to an incandescent bulb. They also produce a lot more heat, and as someone who has sadly a few halogen lamp fixtures in his house, I can speak from experiences. Those things get real hot. Guys like you will burn your fingers. I know I have. Anyway. In nineteen sixty a device built by g E became the first man made object to be recovered after going into orbit around the Earth. It was codenamed by g E the r v X to a reentry vehicle that was part of the Discoverer thirteen satellite. The discovered thirteen satellite kind of set the stage for space based connaissance and spy missions. Now, granted, that was not the public facing part of the mission. Obviously, letting everyone know, hey, this is a spy satellite is not the best plan if you want to use it for you know, spy stuff. So there was a cover story, and the cover story was essentially that it was a science experiment, but in reality it was a classified mission that was overseen by both the Air Force and the c I A. G would go on to open up a space center in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania in nineteen sixty one because they were getting more and more involved in building components for the space race. Also in nineteen sixty there was a guy named Jack Welch who joined GE as a chemical engineer. He'll be really important later, so remember that name, Jack Welch. We'll get back to it. Nineteen sixty two, scientists from GE would develop one of the first solid state lasers using semiconductors. Interestingly, siists at IBM and over at M I T were independently doing the exact same thing, and all the parties pretty much cracked the problem right around the same time. This set off a bit of a patent rush, with GE beating IBM to the punch by a little more than a week. I just find it fascinating that the solid state laser was one of those things that multiple parties invented at around the same time, independently of each other. But to be fair, the stage had already been set with early work in masers and lasers, so these were not the first lasers. They were the first solid state ones. Solid state lasers would then find their way into numerous technologies and applications. Early on, scientists theorized that they could be incredibly useful in communications, but they would become so commonplace that we'd rely on them to play our tunes for us. Because the laser and stuff like CD players, DVD players, Blu ray players, those are all solid state lasers. So what was truly cutting edge technology in nineteen sixty two is also commonplace that you can go out and buy one and use it to frustrate your pets. You know, you can just go get a little key chain with a solid state laser on it um. But I'm pretty sure back in nineteen sixty two, no one thought that that was going to be a future possibility. D E scientists were also working with superconductors and magnetism. Now, a conductor is a material that allows electrons to pass through it. You know, it conducts electricity. A superconductor is a material that does this with no resistance to the flow of electricity. So, under normal conditions, conductors have a bit of resistance to electricity, and the amount of resistance is dependent upon several factors, like how what what the actual material is. You know, what is the conductive material. Also, it's thickness or gauge. So a thin copper wire, for example, has higher resistance than a thick copper cable. They're both made of the same thing, but the physical structure is different and that changes the resistance of the material. Ges superconducting magnet was the first to break through the one hundred thousand goths limit. The GOSS is a unit of measurement for magnetic flux density. I'll give you the technical definition of a GOSS as laid out by the Encyclopedia Britannica. So here we go. One GOSS quote corresponds to the magnetic flux density that will induce an electromotive force of one ab volt in each linear centimeter of a wire moving laterally at one centimeter per second at right angles to a magnetic flux end quote. Okay, so that's a bit of a mouthful. Anyway, we rate magnets in GAUSS, that's how we measure their strength. So g s super conducting magnet was incredibly powerful. It would also lay the foundation for practical applications of that type of a magnet, particularly in the creation of magnetic resonance imaging technologies, and GE would play a very important role in developing that technology, or the m r I as we would say, um very important part of gees business. One of the fun facts I discovered while researching these episodes is that the footprints that the Apollo eleven astronauts left on the Moon are there in thanks to GE. Specifically, the boots worn by the astronauts had silicone rubber in them that had been manufactured by GE. So that's a g E footprint up there in a way. But that was just one of the contributions g e made to the Apollo program. I don't want to discount or dismiss any of the other ones that the company made. They actually provided a lot of technology to the space program. General Electric was involved in designing or manufacturing several systems related to the space race, including the ship to satellite communication system that allowed the Apollo crew to send TV images from the capsule to satellites orbiting the Earth, which in turn beamed those images down to terrestrial stations. In nineteen seventy three, another ge researcher, dr Ivar Giev, would get a Nobel prize. He had back in nineteen sixty discovered the truly odd behavior of super conductive tunneling. So what the heck is tunneling? What it all has to do with the weird weird world of of quantum mechanics and quantum physics. So when I was in school, we learned that electrons orbit the nucleus of atoms in a certain energy state, and electrons would quote unquote want to occupy the lowest energy state available. Once that energy state was full of electrons, then the next electrons would fill up the next available state further out from the nucleus, and so on and so on until you had all the electrons that that particular atom would have, whether it was a base version of the atom or an eye on or whatever. This was a pretty big simplification of what is actually going on. And in my books, I remember seeing the old illustrations. We had newer ones too, but I remember those old illustrations made it look like an electron was sort of like a planet orbiting around us, unlike nucleus. So, in other words, according to those illustrations, it would appear that an electron has a specific position around the nucleus that you could measure and detect and predict. But as scientists would later learn, we could really only determine partial information about a sub atomic particles velocity and location. The more we knew about one of those two things, the less we would know about the other. So the more you know about a particle's velocity, the less you know about its position. The more you know about its position, the less you know about velocity. So really we don't know whether an electron quote unquote is in a specific place, but we we know where it can be the various positions where the electron could possibly be found, So you can think of it as kind of a zone of probability or a field of probability. There's a chance the electron will be at any of those points within that field. It has to be within that field unless you've poured more energy into the atom and thus pushed the electron out. But it has to be somewhere in that field. You just don't know where it is. So it's kind of this amorphous fog that the electron could inhabit. Now, if you have a situation in which this field, this imaginary field, because we don't actually have a fog here, but if this field spans a barrier that normally you would have to use energy to get across, it means that the there's actually a possibility that the electron could appear on the other side of that barrier. So imagine you have a hallway and there's a door closed at the end of the hallway, and you have this electron field, and the electron field actually overlaps the door to the point where part of the field extends to the other side of the closed door. Now, you would expect the electron to be in the hallway. You you didn't open the door. You saw the electron go into the hallway. You figure that's where it's got to be. But because that field overlap the door, there is the possibility that the electron could be on the other side. And because there's a possibility, it means that sometimes there will be an electron on the other side of that door, and it's as if the electron has tunneled through or climbed over the door. But at no time did it ever have to expend energy to do that. It just appeared on the other side. This is tunneling, and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to us because that's not how we observe things in our normal world. You don't go down the hallway and suddenly a little Jimmy is just on the other side of the door because there was a chance little Jimmy was gonna be there. That doesn't happen in our real world, but in quantum physics it's totes a thing. It's also one of the reasons why developing microchips with smaller and smaller components becomes a really huge challenge because electron tunneling is a problem if you're determined to channel electrons down specific pathways, as is the case with a circuit, then you run into an issue. If an electron can encounter a gay, the gate is closed, but because of electron tunneling, there's the possibility of the electron appearing on the other side of the gate. It means that you can create errors this way. Anyway, let's get back to g E S timeline. In ninety eight, g ES Medical Systems Division developed an improved method for taking X ray cross section pictures which reduced the scanning time down to less than five seconds, which was an enormous improvement, a huge leap forward and meant that patients wouldn't have to sit still for as long to get a cross section X ray done. Now, I'm reminded of a time when I had to get an X ray done and I was having a kidney stone and that was painful. It was so painful that just trying to stay still was a huge challenge for me. And it was technology like this, this breakthrough I was just talking about that made those sort of X ray scans much faster, much more efficient, and reduced blurring, so that if the patient we're moving because the scanning took so so little time, there was a better chance that you're going to get a nice clear picture. Otherwise, obviously, if the patient moves while the picture is being taken, you're gonna get blur. So I'm very thankful that GE was able to make X rays much more efficient and take less time. GE celebrated one years of innovation in nineteen seventy eight, which might be a little confusing at first because General Electric as a company was founded in eighteen two, not eighteen seventy eight. However, g also traces its historical roots back to an earlier company. If you listen to the first episode, you know about that Edison Electric Light company, that one began in eighteen seventy eight. According to a timeline on the GE website, specifically a timeline that's on gees website in India, the company states that nine became the first company to have received fifty thousand patents. Wow. While the company continued to diversify and work in various industries, a big change was around the corner and that change happened in nineteen eighty one when Jack Welch, that chemical engineer I mentioned earlier, would become the company's youngest chairman and CEO. He replaced the outgoing CEO, which was a guy named Reginald H. Jones. Welch's tenure is an incredibly important one in the history of GE, so I figured it'd be good to get a little background on the man first. He was born in Peabody, Massachusetts, in ninety five. His father was a railroad conductor. Jack Welch would grow up in Salem, Massachusetts, and as a kid he loved playing sports. He really loved winning, and he despised losing. That would be a fundamental part of his character that would carry over to his work at GE. He received a bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and he received his master's and his pH d at the University of Illinois Champagne. Upon graduating and got a job at GE and he worked in their plastics division, and he had nearly quit his job after just a short while. He felt that GES organization was twu cumbers him that was filled with middle management positions, it was bloated, and he felt his own work wasn't being valued properly. But an executive named Ruben Gutoff convinced Welch to stay with the company, so he did, and he would end up leading the plastic division after working there for a while, then he moved on to other executive roles. He oversaw the Chemical and Metallurgical division, then he headed up GE strategic planning. Then he became a sector executive for the consumer products division. And despite all of that, he wasn't first and foremost in the minds of the board of directors who were looking to fill that position of CEO. When we come back, I'll talk a little bit more about how he got his position and what he did with it, but first let's take another quick break. Welch was just one of seven people under consideration for the role of g E CEO in nine He didn't even have a formalized plan for where he wanted the company to go, but he did have the determination to lead GE to being the number one company in every industry in which GE had a presence. This was enough to commence the board to name him CEO, and his first moves were really to streamline g E. While he had risen through the ranks in his decades at General Electric, he still felt that the company was bloated. That opinion had not changed, even though he had gone from being an engineer to an executive at the time he assumed the position of CEO. G E was a mega giant, consisting of three hundred different businesses, and Welch saw that as a problem because how could you focus and be the absolute best when your presence is spread so thin across so many businesses. And so Welch began to consolidate departments. He began to sell off divisions. He was trimming the fat. Part of that meant laying off employees, and Welch did that too. He that a lot. By the mid nineteen eighties, just a few years after he had become CEO g E had laid off around one hundred twenty thousand employees. This is hard for me to even imagine. The town I grew up in has a population of around forty thousand people today. G E laid off three times as many people as were in my hometown. That's tough for me to even imagine. The layoffs earned Welch a nickname neutron Jack because he was like a neutron bomb going off in the company. He would eliminate employees while leaving the corporate assets intact. A neutron bomb is thought of as the same thing it's a sort of bomb that can kill living stuff and leave physical infrastructure untouched. Welch hated this nickname. It was a pretty cutthroat and brutal strategy, but Welch was pretty much demanding that approach. He wanted to get out of any business where g E did not occupy the number one or number two spot in the industry. If g were further behind them, that he would rather ditch that part of the business than to continue to just sort of muddle along. It made little sense, he said, to be in businesses where other companies could go to market selling stuff cheaper than what it cost GE to manufacture those same things in the first place. So he gave an example of this. He talked about television sets and Schenecta in New York. They were still making television sets when Jack Welch took over GE, but Welch said that Japanese companies were selling TV sets for less money to the final customer than it would cost g E to manufacture a set. So Japanese television set might sell for a hundred dollars and it might cost a hundred ten dollars for g E to even make a TV set there was no way to compete in that space and at all make a profit, so it made no sense to keep the business. He preferred focusing the company's efforts on indus trees where they could outperform their competitors, rather than remain in a business just to have a foot in the door. Through a limiting divisions, selling off businesses, and through laying off thousands of employees, the company ended up saving a lot of money, to the tune of billions of dollars, and Welch wasn't just going to sit on those savings. He looked to reinvest in the company, and as part of that he was looking for a possible acquisition, and he decided upon an old, familiar name. That name was R c A. Now, if you listen to the earlier GE episodes, or if you listen to my r c A episodes, you'll remember that General Electric was one of the founding companies that created our CIA in the first place. GE was also the majority shareholder until it was compelled to sell off those shares of our CIA along with the other founders. This was because the United States government at the time had antitrust concerns about the radio industry. Well. The merger of g E and r c A was a six point three billion dollar deal, which was the largest in history at that point, and Welch took the same approach to our CIA as he had to GE. Namely, he began hacking away at businesses he viewed as being distractions. So within three years of this deal, Welch had reduced the number of our CIA employees to half of what they once were. He oversaw r c A selling off almost all of its businesses. Really only two remained. One was the defense business that our ci A would do for the U. S Military and also for NASA. The other was the NBC television network, So this was the time when GE would own NBC. This was a subject that become a frequent plot point on the TV series Thirty Rock. It's also when our c A effectively just became a name. It was no longer the company at once was, So if you listen to the r c A episodes, this is pretty much at the point where the r c A story ended. Working for Welch was really off. If you were really good at your job, and your job was in a division that Welch viewed as being central to g e s mission you had decent job security. Welch had employees go through regular performance reviews, and the employees who were in the top twenty would get bonuses. Those who were in the bottom ten percent were likely to get fired and holy cats did. His strategy pushed GE to new heights. The company became known as the House that Jack built. The stock price for GE rose four thousand per cent. Meanwhile, the company was still churning out innovations such as groundbreaking work and fiber optics and magnetic resonance imaging systems. The company also launched the Consumer News and Business Channel or c NBC, in nine so it wasn't just a powerful company in industry, it was now also becoming a powerful media company. One other area Welch pushed g E into was financial services. With GE Capital, Welch led acquisition efforts to buy foreign banks, and GE also would become a major insurance provider. These services were at the time remarkably profitable. In fact, that's an understatement. When Welch took over GE, the company's value was fourteen billion dollars. By the time Welch would retire in two thousand one, the company's value was an excess of four hundred ten billion dollars, and a large part of that was due to the profitability of the financial services during that time. Also, we have to say that when this happened, it was a brilliant move from a business perspective. He pushed GE to new heights and it made Welch a very wealthy man. It would also end up being the major pain point for GE several years later that I'm going to get to that in our next episode as it begins to play into the more recent allegations about g E and its accounting practices. But before we get to those dark tidings, let's finish up with some of the tech things that the company was doing under Welch's command in n g E, through its r c A Space division, delivered the Mars Observer to NASA. It had been seventeen years since NASA had sent a spacecraft to study Mars, so the intent was to launch the Mars Observer and insert it into an orbit around the red planet. The Mars Observer had instruments meant to study the climate, geophysics, and the geology of Mars. The launch went off beautifully on September n The orbiter began its long journey to Mars and that would take nearly a full year, and on August twenty one, NINETEE, just a couple of days before the orbiter was meant to officially enter Mars orbit, all communication was lost between the spacecraft and Earth. NASA was unable to re establish contact, so the mission was ultimately a failure, though NASA was at least able to learn some things through the process of sending the orbiter to Mars in the first place, but none of the primary mission objectives were achieved. In nine in another move to dominate media, NBC and Microsoft partner together to launch the twenty four hour news channel ms NBC. In g E began to adhere to a quality control strategy called six Sigma, which calls for fewer than three defects per million opportunities. Now. To achieve that goal, GE would spend millions of dollars on training and new production processes, so it was a very expensive and time consuming effort, but Welch's view was that it would ultimately benefit the company and result in massive savings. Fewer defects would mean less waste. The first product from GE to go through this process was a medical scanner called the light Speed q X slash i CT system. In GE secured a contract with Boeing to build massive, powerful jet engines for Boeing seven seventy seven line of jets. The company produced the g E nine D family. Now, this is not the only type of engine used on a seven seventy seven. There's a whole bunch of different variations of the seven seventy seven, and some of them use engines from other companies, So it all depends upon the version of the seven seventy seven you're looking at, but it is the largest and most powerful jet engine produced to date. In g E opened a new research lab. This one is called GE Global Research. It's located in Bangalore, India, and this marked an effort for g E to not just expand its overseas markets, which it had been doing for the previous decades, but also to attract new talent in the field of technology, talent that wasn't just located in Europe or the United States. In two thousand, the company unveiled the TM twenty hundred, which is a power plant on wheels. It's a gas turbine generator that can supply twenty two point eight megawatts of electricity. Takes a couple of days to set up once it's on location, and it's used for lots of different purposes, and looting has a way to supply electricity to areas that have been affected by natural disasters. Gas turbines, by the way, work in a very similar way to jet engines. You've got a compressor that draws air into the engine. The air gets compressed, and that's what a compressor does, and then it enters into the combustion chamber where it combines with fuel from fuel injectors. This mixture gets ignited and then it burns at a very high temperature. It generates high temperature, high pressure gas. The gas moves out of the combustion chamber into a turbine section. That's where the gas can expand and escape, and as it does so, the force of that escaping expanding gas turns a turbine. The turbine does two things. One, it drives the compressor, so it pulls in more air and thus keeps the process going as long as you have fuel to burn. And it also spends a generator to create electricity. Jack Welch planned to retire from ge and two thousand but one thing kept him around a little bit longer. That thing was a prize Welch really wanted for GE. There was a company called Honeywell International. Now. Honeywell makes advanced electronics for the aviation industry, among other things, and Welch led a forty billion dollar plus acquisition effort to get this company. He knew that Honeywell had another suitor, that of United Technologies Corporation, and he added a promise to Honeywell that he would stay on with GE until this acquisition was complete. He would delay his retirement until two thousand one. So they decided they would pursue this acquisition deal and things were going pretty well. The United States seemed fully on board, but then you get to the summer of two thousand one, and that's when European regulators expressed concern that this merger would stifle competition in the industry. Welch reportedly reached out to US government officials to see if anything could be done to smooth things out and get the deal approved. This had the effect of royally taking off those regulators, and ultimately the European Union denied authorization for this merger, and the deal fell apart. Welch, who hated losing, lost this one. The CEO of Honeywell, Michael Bunt Sire, was shown the door not long after the deal was scrapped, and Welch would continue on towards his retirement. Jack Welch stepped down as CEO of g E on September seven, two thousand one. His replacement would be Jeffrey R. Emilt, and just four days after Emilt would take the helm of g E, the terrorist attacks on the United States on September eleven would change the company's course. We'll talk about how that happened in our next episode. In the meantime, if you have a suggestion for a future episode of tech Stuff, whether it's a company, a technology, just a concept in tech, anything like that, let me know. You can send me an email the addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com or pop on over to tech Stuff podcast dot com. That's where you're gonna find the archive of all of our past episodes, all one thousand, one hundred sixty plus of them, and you'll also find links to where we are on social media, as well as 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. Yeah. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.