Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech and I am currently on vacation. If you are in the Disney World area, you might see me. Um. By the way, it was a big decision to actually go through with this vacation and to go to Disney World, one that I'm still conflicted over. But I am fully vaccinated, as is my entire family, and we're all going to be super precautious, you know, making sure that we wash our hands thoroughly, and we were wearing masks and all that kind of stuff. But I'd be lying to you if I said I was comfortable with this, but hopefully we have a fun time and I were turn home healthy and happy, and um yeah, that's that's the best we can hope for. But I didn't want to leave you without any episodes while I'm away, and so I thought something that would be interesting to do. What to be revisit a series of episodes I did in September of two thousand nineteen, and it was a deep dive into the history of General Electric a k a. G And the reason I wanted to bring these back for this week is that we recently heard that g E is going to split into three separate companies, one that will focus on healthcare, one that will focus on energy, and one that will focus on aviation. It will be the aviation one that retains the name GE, by the way, so it's kind of the end of an era, and I thought it would be interesting to go back and listen to this series of episodes where we do a deep dive on the history of g E. So sit back and relax and listen to The Founding of GE, originally published on September second, two thousand nineteen. In mid August two thousand nineteen, a financial analyst named Harry Marcopolis released a one hundred seventy five page report alleging that g E, that is, General Electric, the venerable company that is more than a century old, was secretly on the verge of insolvency. He claimed the company was using accounting tricks to hide an enormous threat to its very existence, something akin to the Shenanigan's in Ron polled years ago, and giving Marcopolis some credibility was his own history. He had raised warning flags about Bernie Madeoff before the world found out about Madeoff's Ponzi scheme. And to learn more about Ponzi schemes, you should look up the classic stuff you should know episode all about It. It's great, particularly with the way Chuck adopted It's a Ponzi scheme into that and subsequent episodes. Now as I record these episodes, the report and the responses to it are still part of the news cycle. GE and some third party analysts have disputed Marcopolis's findings, claiming that Marcopolis himself actually stands to earn a lot of money by taking down GE. And Marcopolis has said he was hired by a Hedge fund to look into GES practices, but he refuses to name the fund as of the recording of this podcast. Meanwhile, some other third parties seem to agree with at least some of Marcopolis's findings, and GE has been under increased scrutiny for its accounting practices over the last few years. So there are a lot of unanswered questions around this, and it's by no means a settled matter. I don't know if Marcopolis's allegations reflect reality, and in fact, if I'm being totally honest, I don't even understand all of those allegations. And in the interest of full disclosure, I have not read the full one report, but I did think it would be good to do a full rundown on the history of General Electric. It is an incredibly influential company, and it spans many industries it has had and and it's heart to stress how big an impact it has had on the history of the United States in particular and tech in general. Now I should also add that back in two thousand twelve, Chris Palette and I recorded three episodes about the history of GE. But Tech Stuff was a different kind of show back in those days, so I thought it might be good to take a deeper dive into the history and see how GE shaped technology. And beyond that being said, if I were to do a comprehensive history on the company and all its subsidiaries, this series last a dozen episodes or more. So to avoid making this episode and this podcast turned into GE Stuff, I'm going to try and focus on what I think are some of the most important historical moments of GE, and a lot of that is in those early years. So let's go back to where it all began. And like many corporate histories, this involves going back to older companies that would form the foundation for the one we actually want to talk about. So strap in guys and women and all others. I don't mean to lump everybody in under the term guys. Anyway, we all know about Thomas Edison, right. He was an inventor, he was an entrepreneur, He was a master at self promotion and more. And some folks might throw in some less complementary labels in there, perhaps suggesting he was also a thief, or if that's going too far, someone willing to take credit for the work of people who are working beneath him. But whatever your opinion of the fellow, Edison got stuff done. In the eighteen seventies, Edison was working on the light bulb, and no, he didn't invent the light bulb, but that's a story for another podcast. In fact, my former co host Chris Poulett and I actually did cover that story in an episode titled tech Stuff Gets a Bright Idea, which published on October twenty nine, two thousand twelve. But Edison did make improvements on the lightbulb, working with his engineers to discover a material to serve as a suitable filament too in condess, brightly enough, and long enough to be a practical use. In eighteen seventy eight, Edison founded a company to concentrate on that goal. It was the Edison Electric Light Company. He had some big names in US history, particularly US financial history, as his investors, folks like the Vanderbilts and JP Morgan. Now Morgan is going to become very important to this story. Now. At the time, he had yet to find a suitable approach. The lightbulbs he made would burn out in just a few hours. The following year, in eighteen seventy nine, his company produced a lightbulb able to last for forty hours. Not superb by any means, but a real sign of progress, and Edison boldly stated that his company would make electricity affordable enough so that only the wealthy would ever burn candles. That same year, again, eighteen seventy nine, for those who have forgotten, a couple of teachers created their own company. Edwin James Houston was a physics teacher, and Alihu Thompson taught chemistry and mechanics at the Central High School for Boys in Philadelphia. They created a company called the American Electric Company in New Britain, Connecticut, with the help of some local investors. In eighty three, a different group of investors, this time from Massachusetts, bought out the company from the original group of investors and the company got a new name, the Thompson Houston Electric Company. Thompson would head up the research and development department, which was called the Model Room. A fellow named Charles A. Coffin, the head of the investors, would lead the company and act as a sort of president and chief financial officer, while Elwyn W. Rice led the manufacturing part of the business. Both of those names will be important for Ge and Charles Coffin wasn't a physicist by nature. No, he was a man with a lot of soul. And by that I meant he was a shoe manufacturer, as a dad joke for you. So where many of his fellow investors. They were all from the shoe manufacturing industry, and they were all located in Lynn, Massachusetts, and they pulled their money to purchase this burgeoning, this this blossoming electric utility company, the Thompson Houston Electric Company would relocate its headquarters to Lynn, Massachusetts, and get back to that company in just a second. Edison was not just working on lamps in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. He was also creating some of the first generators. These are devices that would convert mechanical energy into electrical energy. On December seventeen eighty, he founded the Edison Electric Illuminating Company. In eighteen eighty two, he was responsible for building and operating the first steam generated power station in London to power street lamps and a few private homes that were not far from the power plant. In New York, he was responsible for creating an electric power distribution system called Pearl Street Station, which supplied electricity to fifty nine whole customers in Lower Manhattan. Now, at the time, not everyone was sold on the idea of this new fangled electricity replacing candles and gas lamps, so as an incentive, Edison's company offered the first three months of service at no charge. He also began to acquire smaller businesses that were likewise getting into the electrical power generator game, and by eighteen ninety this motley group of companies merged to form Voltron, and by Voltron, I mean they became the Edison General Electric Company. It was this company that in eight installed electrical wires and switching equipment in the United States White House, and that made Benjamin Harrison, the twenty third President of the United States, the first US president to have electricity in the White House. Back to the Thompson Houston Electric Company. Like Edison, Charles Coffin was determined to be a big player in the electricity generating business. He had led Thompson Houston to go international and he bought out a British company called the Brush Company, which did not sell brushes. No, it was actually founded by a guy named Charles Brush, and it was a company that had patents for stuff like dynamos and had been in litigation with Thompson Houston Electric Company over some technologies. But we all know the old saying, right, if you can't beat them, by them, and that's what Thompson Houston Electric Company did. So both Edison General Electric Company and the Thompson Houston Electric Company were buying up competitors and more importantly, patent holders. So they each had dozens of patents to their name, and they were quickly becoming the dominant players in electricity generation and distribution in the Northeast United States, and there was just enough overlap to make business tricky for both companies. Without stepping on the toes of the other, they could have become great rivals, and in fact they kind of were. Henry Villard, who was the president of Edison General Electric Thomas Edison, wasn't involved in the day to day operations of the company. Villard had an idea both Edison and Thompson Houston were in a bit of a cash crunch as the market was in a bit of a slump. In addition, because both companies owned dozens of patents, that made it hard to be the sole provider of any kind of electrical infrastructure. Business was too expensive. It was not just expensive to lay out the infrastructure, but you had all these legal battles that would come up because one company would allege that the other company was infringing on one or more patents. There were several lawsuits pending around patents, and there would likely be even more in the future. Villard wanted to solve all these problems by having the two companies merge. Edison reportedly hated this idea and advised against it. Villard felt that the Edison Company was in a dominant position and could effectively define the terms of the merger, and so he tried to move on ahead. Then we get back to JP Morgan, the financier. He had arrived at a similar conclusion regarding the merger, but he felt that the Thompson Houston Company was actually the one that was in a stronger position, and because Morgan was Mr. Money Bags, he went behind Villard's back and began wheeling and dealing to make the merger happen, but on very different terms than what Villard was thinking. Morgan spearheaded the effort to merge these two companies together to form a new entity, one that would become known as the General Electric Company and later g E. The headquarters for the company would be in Schenectady, New York, and Morrigan effectively removed Thomas Edison and Henry Villard from any sort of leadership role. Edison didn't even know about the merger until the day before it actually happened. Yikes, with their powers and patents combined, the two former competitors could rapidly expand throughout the Northeast and beyond and moreover, the merger meant that the electric utilities industry in the United States was now split between just two companies because General Electric companies had been swooped up, you know, all Thomas Houston and Edison Electric had brought up all these smaller utilities, as had Westinghouse, the other big competitor in the US. So now the electric utilities industry in the United States was a dowopoli. It was either General Electric or it was Westinghouse and General Electric and Westinghouse had been part of a patent pool agreement in eight so this was a big deal. It would also mean the end of the war of the currents between direct current and alternating current. I have a little bit more to say about that in a minute. Now. I'm of two minds about this merger that JP Morgan initiated. Generally speaking, I'm in favor of competition in markets because that's usually what ends up being best for the consumer. It's way better if you have options and choices, because companies will do different things in order to get customers, which usually means cutting a better deal. But we're also talking about rain, which most people didn't even have access to electricity. The infrastructure itself had not been laid out, so there was a real need to do that, and with competition in the way, it made laying out the basic infrastructure to get electricity to people harder to do. The same thing would be true of the telecommunications industry, getting telephone lines out to people. It was tough to do that while also competing with other companies, and it could mean that you could have different standards, corporate defined standards that are incompatible with one another, laying out different regions. It was just a big mess. So you could argue that the monopoly like approach was actually been a official at least to establish the infrastructure. It just wasn't a good thing to have as an ongoing thing. The newly formed company started in eighteen nine two, and Charles Coffin would serve as the first president. So though you could trace the history as far back as eighteen seventy eight, I think is a reasonable reckoning day for g E. S Natal day. Now we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, we'll talk a little bit more about what GE was doing during its first few years of existence. In eighteen nine three, Edison's company developed an electric locomotive that could use electricity to reach speeds of around thirty miles per hour, which the company showed off at the Chicago Exposition. This was another opportunity to demonstrate how electricity could be used to a curious audience, and it helped promote the industry. You gotta remember again in eighteen nine, electricity is a brand new concept and to show that it had the power to do something that typically would be done with a steam engine was a very compelling use case. In eighteen four, Thomas Edison chose to sell his shares in General Electric. He would continue to serve as a consultant for the company, but the Wizard of Menlo Park would no longer be seen as the driving force or voice for General Electric, and to be fair, ever since the formation of the company he had little say in its direction. While the name and headquarters favored Edison's old company, the management for General Electric largely came from the Thompson Houston Electric Company. So Edison out and at just four years old, General Electric would become part of financial history. See in eighteen ninety six, there was this guy named Charles Dow and he took stocks of twelve large industrial companies to create a stocks average, and it was a sort of indicator as to how things were going in the industrial market overall. You would watch the averaged performance of these twelve companies and that would kind of tell you how things were going. As a broad rule of thumb, one of those twelve original companies was you guessed it, General Electric. All of the original dozen companies, GE would be the only one to survive and remain on the dal Jones Industrial Average for more than a century, though spoiler alert, GE was removed from the dal Jones Industrial Average in two thousand and eighteen, but I'll talk more about that in a later episode. Also in eighteen ninety six, Eli Hu Thompson, one of the founders of the Thompson Houston Electric Company and a consultant at GE, created an improved X ray tube. So let's talk about X rays for a second. X rays are a type of electromagnetic radiation and they have a very short wavelength, much shorter than visible light. So if you were to look at a spectrum of electromagnetic radiation from longer wavelengths to shorter at the longest end would be radio waves. Those stretch very long, in some cases more than a kilometer. Then if you move down the spectrum, you come to microwaves below that are infrared waves. Then you have visible light, then you have ultra violet light. Then you have X rays. If you were to go even smaller on the wavelength scale, you would then reach gamma rays. X rays form when a charged particle like an electron, experiences acceleration or deceleration, and you want to have it be in a very controlled way to generate specific X rays of a particular wavelength. Wilhelm Conrad Rerunchen and I always mess up that name. I apologize, but anyway, this is the fellow who first discovered X rays. In eight he was working with cathode ray tubes in a lab. These are crt s. Is the source of stuff you would find in old television sets. And he had concluded that there was a type of ray that was invisible to the eye, and it could pass through lots of solid stuff like heavy black paper. In fact, he figured it could passed through lots of different stuff, and it could cast shadows of solid objects. It could pass through flesh but not bone. And one of the earliest experiments he conducted with this discovery was to use film to capture an X ray image of his wife's hand so that she could see the skeletal structure of her hand. So an X ray tube converts energy. Specifically, it converts electrical energy into two other types of energy. One of those is heat and the other is X radiation. Ideally, you want to produce specific X radiation and you want to minimize heat production because really heat represents waste, it's lost energy in this case, so are the way we think of heat being waste energy for a car engine as another example. So, an X ray tube is a particular type of cathode ray tube. That means inside the tube, which looks a little bit like a lightbulb, you have an element called a cathode and you have another called an anode. Electrical current flows through the tube and electrons flow from cathode to anode. The cathode connects to the negative side of the circuit, the anode connects to the positive side. So in other words, you can think of the cathode as the component that sheds or contributes electrons. The anode is the component that accepts electrons. As part of this process, electrons lose energy as they move through the circuit, and this generates X radiation. The material in the anode and the energy of the electrons determines how the energy gets converted into heat rather than X radiation. Modern X ray tubes frequently have tungsten anodes, and there's a lot more we could explore with X rays, but honestly, I think that would require its own episode, so we'll just leave it here. Just know that the X ray tubes are pretty similar to the tubes you'd find in old CRT televisions or monitors, though not modern TVs or displays because they they don't use cathode ray tubes anymore. The important thing for our episode here is that GE became a leader in that space, with Thompson creating the improved X ray tube just one year after X rays had even been discovered. In nineteen hundred, Thomas Edison, still working as a consultant for General Electric, partnered with Willis R. Whitney and Charles Steinmitz to create the first industrial research laboratory in the United States. The purpose of the facility was to act as an experimental division for GE, where engineers and scientists would work on innovating new technologies and new applications of existing tech, and even making scientific breakthroughs. It was in this facility where GE researchers could conduct original research projects. The functions of this facility closely resembled a model practiced in German universities. Much of the early work in the research lab focused on improving the existing technologies that GE was producing at the time. It was only after a few years that the engineers were starting to look at totally new types of technology, scientific principles and applications. Also, this is where we get a little Monty Python and the Holy Grail with the lab. The original lab was not particularly grandiose. It was a barn located behind the house of one of the researchers for GE. But, and this will probably come as a surprise to absolutely nobody, because they were working with electricity and heating elements, that particular lab ended up catching fire and it burned down. After that, GE re established the lab in Schenectady, New York. The head of the research division was a professor from m I. T. And I'm sure there were many more fires over the following years, but as far as I know, none of them burned The whole lab down to the ground again. One early invention to come out of the lab was the electric fan in n two. Now, there is a small issue with this, and that other inventors had already created electric fans years earlier. An inventor with the fabulous name Skyler Scott's Wheeler built one in eighteen eighty two, twenty years before GE would file patents for its electric fan design. Another guy named Philip Deal took the electric fan and flipped it a bit, creating the first ceiling fan. He essentially took a fan blade, attached it to a sewing machine motor, and then bolted that motor to the ceiling in seven Now, I'm not sure what innovations General Electric contributed to the electric fan, but I will tell you I looked at lots of different sources when I was creating these these episodes, and many of them talk about two G E invents the electric fan, which clearly is not the case. Uh. Now, they might have come out with an electric fan, and they probably did create some interesting innovations with the fan, but they didn't truly invent it. It'd been around for two decades already. In nineteen o three, GE acquired the Stanley Electric Manufacturing Company, which manufactured transformers. In fact, William Stanley, the founder of the company, was the developer of the transformer. And a transformer in this case isn't a robot in disguise. Rather, it's an electrical device that converts alternating current electricity from one voltage to another. And depending upon its design, a transformer can step up or step down the voltage and it only works on alternating current. So let's talk a bit about this and why it's important. Alright, at the dawn of the age of electricity, you had the current Wars, the brew haha over whether regions should invest in direct current or alternating current for the purposes of distributing electricity. Edison was in favor of direct current. Direct current is the same sort of current you'd get with a battery. The electricity flows one way only through the circuit. It's a one direction type of thing. It's simple. But at the time, transmitting direct current over longer distances was impractical. So it worked fine if you were in a dense urban environment and you could build power generation plants at regular spots around the region, but it wouldn't didn't work so great if you're talking about stretching across rural areas, that the transmitting direct current at lower voltages was inefficient. You lost too much electricity along the way, and it higher curtains. That was considered higher voltages, I should say it was considered very dangerous. Now, inter alternating current with alternating current, the flow of electricity reverses many times a second, going one way down the path and then reversing to go the other way. And one benefit of this approach is that you can create transformers to step up the voltages for purposes of transmitting electricity over long distances, and then have another transformer on the other end to step the voltage back down so it can be used in households safely. And it all has to do with electromagnetism. Electricity flowing through a coil of wire creates a magnetic field, and if it's alternating current going through that coil, so it's you can think of it as going down the coil of wire and then reversing and going up the coil of wire and doing that many, many, many times per second. Well, then it creates a fluctuay eating magnetic field. Now, if you were to bring a second coil of wire within that fluctuating magnetic field from the first coil of wire, something interesting happens. All right, we've got coils A and B. Each coil is wrapped around its own ferro magnetic core of iron or steel, something that can be magnetized. We run an alternating current of electricity through coil A. Then we bring coil B, with no current running through it, close enough so that it is within the fluctuating magnetic field that is generated as a consequence of coil a's electric current. That fluctuating magnetic field then induces a second electric current to flow through coil B. So now coil B is carrying a current because of being in that fluctuating magnetic field from coil A. Even more interesting is that if coil B has more coils or turns, as we call it, then coil A does, The current running through coil B will have a higher voltage. The relationship between the number of turns is called the transformer turns ratio. So a power plant could run current through a line to a transformer and through the use of two sets of coils, step up the voltage significantly. For a long distance transmission, where higher voltage is more efficient. I wonder if Thomas Edison was peeved the General Electric was purchasing companies that were building tech for alternating current applications. Actually, I don't have to wonder he was. He was pretty pretty upset about He did not like the idea of losing the War of the currents, even well after that war was settled. In nineteen o five, GE formed the Electric Bond and Share Company also known as Abasco e B A s c O. This was a holding company. Holding company as a company that exists largely to hold onto the stock of other companies. Usually, a holding company doesn't actually, you know, do anything. Its purpose is truly just financial in nature. GE used the employee Retirement Investment Fund for its employees to purchase securities from smaller electric utility companies. This was largely in an effort to monopolize the electric utility industry. This was something that financier JP Morgan was very keen on doing. A few other utilities holding companies would be would would pop up and scoop up other regional companies, and so you started to see even less competition in the region, and this would spell trouble. I'll explain more in a second, But first let's take another quick break. Now I'm going to stick with this story about the holding company for a moment, and then we'll give back to the timeline. We're gonna go down this particular path just to get a complete picture of this story. So Abasco ends up controlling tons of companies and would even form subsidiaries of its own holding company to oversee groups of these because there were just so many. So you might have a subsidiary of Abasco that itself was a holding company for like ten other companies. So eventually the United States government pays attention and comes to oppose the monopolization of utilities and says, you know, it was okay when we were laying out the infrastructure to make sure people got access to electricity, but now we're not so comfortable with one company having this much control over electricity distribution. This reached a crescendo in ninety five when Congress passed the Public Utility Company Holding Act. That act gave the securities an Exchange Commission, or sec the authority to break up holding companies so that the individual states in the United States could oversee operations within their borders. Abasco fought tooth and nail to keep its holdings, but ultimately lost that battle, and afterwards the entity that was Abasco would reorganize and become an investment company. Now I include the story here because it's just one of many examples of how General Electric drew focus and criticism for its operations, and it shows how powerful and influential the company has been over the years. All right, now we're gonna jump back to the timeline that we were covering before. So around the same time that Abasca was forming, a GE engineer named Ernst Alexanderson developed a type of high frequency alternator and we now call the Alexanderson alternator, and it was for the purposes of creating a radio transmitter. He was doing this upon request from another guy, an inventor named Reginald Fessenden, who had been trying to solve the problem of sending sound over radio waves, essentially radio broadcasting. Fessenden had figured out that he needed a much higher frequency alternator than what was currently available to achieve his goal, so he sent out the request to GE and Alexanderson started to work on the project. An alternator, by the way, is a device that creates an alternating current. The Alexanderson alternator could create a continuous radio wave, and that's a radio wave with a constant amplitude and frequency. I won't go into it further here, as I've done plenty of episodes about radio waves and technology, but it would be an early example of how General Electric would become an important part of the history of radio. So far, I've been talking about electric utilities and radio waves. But around the same time so nineteen o five or so, General Electric would also dip its enormous corporate toe into the tempting waters of consumer appliances. The first one I could find on General Electric's own website was the Model D twelve and electric toaster. Other sources cite a nineteen o six electric range as the first consumer product. The toaster, by the way, looks terrifying to me because it doesn't have any solid surfaces. It's essentially a couple of racks, open air racks that holds slices of bread and they are placed on either side of a series of unprotected heating coils. So I would imagine this thing was quite the fire hazard in its day. Oh and in case you wonder like, how does this stuff work? That's easy. Conductive materials, that is, materials that can conduct electrons are usually not perfect conductors most of the time. Now, if you can cool one down to near absolute z euro you can get a super conductor that doesn't lose any conductivity. Uh. And if you use larger gauges of conductive material, you reduce resistance. But because of a variety of factors, most conductors have a certain amount of resistance to electric current. Based on all these different variables, that resistance manifests as heat. Now, normally we don't want heat in our conductive materials. Electronics don't respond too well with getting hot. But with stuff like electric ranges and toasters, the whole point is to generate heat. We use materials that have a resistance so that enough electrical energy will convert to heat in order to cook or toast whatever it is we're exposing to those elements. On the other end of the scale from a countertop toaster is the delivery g E made to the New York Central Railroad in nine. The company supplied thirty electric locomotives, each weighing in at ninety four tons. The locomotives had two thousand, eight hundred horsepower each. This isn't just an interesting tidbit in gees history. The electric locomotive and rails in New York would shape the development of Manhattan itself, as did the electrical infrastructure. So one could argue that modern Manhattan wouldn't look anything like it does today without General Electrics business in the area. That General Electrics involvement itself was what helped shape the modern appearance of Manhattan. And because I'll probably forget about it before I get to the recent past. In a later episode, not very long ago from the recording, General Electrics spun off its locomotive business in a merger with another locomotive company called wab Tech w A B T e C. The eleven billion dollar deal saw ge and its shareholders take fifty point one at stake in the ownership of this new company, with wab Text shareholders getting the other forty nine point nine. This was part of the larger effort to shed some of g S businesses, as I think it's already apparent that the company had grown extremely large, with lots of different departments involved in various industries. That was true even in the early nineteen hundreds, but it gets way more apparent as this series will go on. In nineteen o nine, engineers at General Electric, led by a guy named William Coolidge, developed the ductal tungsten filament for incandescent light bulbs. Tungsten holds together well at high temperatures, and it gives off a warm light when it incandescees, but it's also a pretty tough metal to work with. Coolidge created a process that made the metal easier and more pliable to work with, and it was off to the races. It made the Edison design much more efficient and practical, and it quickly became the standard material for light bulbs. It's essentially the same stuff you'd find in the filament in an incandescent light bulb today. In nineteen eleven, we have another acquisition sort of General Electric absorbed a company called the National Electric Lamp Association or NILA in e l A, and that organization traced its own history back to nineteen o one. G had already been part of NILA's history, having become a shareholder in the company back in nineteen o two, just one year after it was founded, and providing the old Brush Electric Company facilities to serve as NILA's headquarters. Over time, General Electrics stake in the company grew, and federal courts took notice, and there were talks of antitrust concerns and GE was essentially told it had to dissolve NILA, so General Electric absorbed NILA into its own overall business. NILA had recently finished building an industrial complex in Cleveland, Ohio, and NILA Park would become the first industrial park in the United States. And here's where I admit I finally looked up the definition for an industrial park, because I've heard the term hundreds of times but never really thought to see exactly what the definition was, So imagine my surprise to find out it means pretty much what it sounds like. An industrial park is an area that is zoned for industrial development, kind of like how a business park or an office park is an area zoned for offices. Sometimes the obvious answer is in fact the correct one. In nineteen twelve, GE researchers developed improved vacuum tubes, which would help usher in the early era of electronics. Before the development of the transistor, the vacuum tube was crucial for electronics. A vacuum tube is also known as a thermionic valve. Thermionic gives you a hint of One of the important concepts in this device has to do with heat and Vacuum tubes are in many ways similar to cathode ray tubes or light bulbs. Like a cathode ray tube, a vacuum tube has a cathode and an anode separated from each other inside a glass tube, and as the name vacuum tube tells us, the inside of the tube has no air in it. It is a vacuum. Heating the cathode causes it to shed electrons in a process called thermionic emission. Applying a positive voltage to the anode plate attracts those electrons across the gap in the vacuum, creating a current flow. A vacuum tube with just two electrodes, the cathode and the anode, is called a diode. This is a type of tube that allows electricity to only flow in a single direction, so it's like a one way street for electrical current. That we also have to remember that we describe current as the direction of positive to negative, so this is confusing. Electrons are traveling from negative to positive, but we call the currents direction the opposite, So current flows from anode to cathode even though electrons are flowing from cathode to anode. And I know it's confusing, and I blame Benjamin Franklin, But that's another story. One important task these diodes did was convert alternating current to direct current. This was important since electricity transmission was through alternating current, but most devices you would plug into outlets relied on direct currents, so you had to be able to convert them. But vacuum tubes didn't just stop there. Back in seven lead to Forest, an American inventor, created the first triode vacuum tube. So this was a vacuum tube with three electrodes. You had the anode, you had the cathode, and the third electrode was a control grid. Think of it as a sort of filter or mesh between the cathode and the anode. So the cathode is shedding electron, the anode is accepting electrons, and the control grid is between the two. Connectors to the control grid allow for a change and voltage to be applied to the grid itself. So adjusting the voltage to the control grid acts as a kind of valve adjusting exactly how many electrons can flow from the cathode to the an notte. So if you applied a negative voltage to the control grid, the control grid will repel electrons, right because like charge will repel like charge. Negative repels negative, and that would mean that you would slow down the stream going from cathode to an notte. So it's almost like turning a tap of water and turning it so that the water is barely trickling out. If you apply a strong enough negative charge to the control grid, you turn off the flow entirely. But if you apply a positive voltage, that increases the number of electrons that flow through to the anode. And in fact, such a YouTube can be used to amplify an electrical signal. So let me explain how that works really quickly. See a small signal coming into the control grid, perhaps one created by say a radio wave, can be converted into a much larger signal with the exact same wave form. Another example is using a microphone. If you're using a microphone, you're speaking into the microphone. The vibrations caused by the sounds you are making cause a diaphragm to move inside the microphone. That in turn causes a tiny electro magnet to generate a weak electrical signal, and this signal is far too weak to power a speaker. But let's say you send this electrical signal so that feeds into the control grid of a triode vacuum tube. It will control the flow of electrons through that tube, and you can have a much more powerful electrical signal coming out of that tube that matches the one you created coming out of your microphone, and that one would be enough for you to send to a speaker to power it. It's really pretty darn cool. Vacuum tubes would be used in all sorts of early electronics, and they would usher in an age of rapid development, though it was also one in which those electronics were all very large, because vacuum tubes are pretty big themselves, so a computer with vacuum tubes and computers would come much later. But a computer running on vacuum tubes would by necessity take up a great deal of space, and it would also generate a lot of heat. It wouldn't be until the development of the transistor that these problems would be surmounted and we'd be able to miniaturize electronics. Now, I think this is a good place for us to leave off with the story of GE. To recap, the company formed during an era of industrialization and was largely under the influence of a monopolistic capitalist, that being JP Morgan. It had hardly any competition to speak of, being part of a duopoli with Westinghouse and having far more of the mark A share in the United States, and it's focus on research and development as well as acquisitions meant it was becoming increasingly powerful and cementing its near future. Now, in the next episode, we'll look at how GE would play an important part in establishing radio broadcasting in the United States, as well as its early history with NBC, and we'll also learn about how the US government began to chip away at some of the moves Morrigan had made in the early years of the company. But for now, it's time to sign off. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, why not send me an email the addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com or pop on over to our website that's tech Stuff podcast dot com. You're gonna find an archive of all of our past episodes there. You're also going to find links to our social media accounts, so you can leave us a message on things like Facebook or Twitter. And you'll also find a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show and we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y 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 my Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech and I am currently on vacation. If you are in the Disney World area, you might see me. Um. By the way, it was a big decision to actually go through with this vacation and to go to Disney World, one that I'm still conflicted over. But I am fully vaccinated, as is my entire family, and we're all going to be super precautious, you know, making sure that we wash our hands thoroughly, and we were wearing masks and all that kind of stuff. But I'd be lying to you if I said I was comfortable with this, but hopefully we have a fun time and I were turn home healthy and happy, and um yeah, that's that's the best we can hope for. But I didn't want to leave you without any episodes while I'm away, and so I thought something that would be interesting to do. What to be revisit a series of episodes I did in September of two thousand nineteen, and it was a deep dive into the history of General Electric a k a. G And the reason I wanted to bring these back for this week is that we recently heard that g E is going to split into three separate companies, one that will focus on healthcare, one that will focus on energy, and one that will focus on aviation. It will be the aviation one that retains the name GE, by the way, so it's kind of the end of an era, and I thought it would be interesting to go back and listen to this series of episodes where we do a deep dive on the history of g E. So sit back and relax and listen to The Founding of GE, originally published on September second, two thousand nineteen. In mid August two thousand nineteen, a financial analyst named Harry Marcopolis released a one hundred seventy five page report alleging that g E, that is, General Electric, the venerable company that is more than a century old, was secretly on the verge of insolvency. He claimed the company was using accounting tricks to hide an enormous threat to its very existence, something akin to the Shenanigan's in Ron polled years ago, and giving Marcopolis some credibility was his own history. He had raised warning flags about Bernie Madeoff before the world found out about Madeoff's Ponzi scheme. And to learn more about Ponzi schemes, you should look up the classic stuff you should know episode all about It. It's great, particularly with the way Chuck adopted It's a Ponzi scheme into that and subsequent episodes. Now as I record these episodes, the report and the responses to it are still part of the news cycle. GE and some third party analysts have disputed Marcopolis's findings, claiming that Marcopolis himself actually stands to earn a lot of money by taking down GE. And Marcopolis has said he was hired by a Hedge fund to look into GES practices, but he refuses to name the fund as of the recording of this podcast. Meanwhile, some other third parties seem to agree with at least some of Marcopolis's findings, and GE has been under increased scrutiny for its accounting practices over the last few years. So there are a lot of unanswered questions around this, and it's by no means a settled matter. I don't know if Marcopolis's allegations reflect reality, and in fact, if I'm being totally honest, I don't even understand all of those allegations. And in the interest of full disclosure, I have not read the full one report, but I did think it would be good to do a full rundown on the history of General Electric. It is an incredibly influential company, and it spans many industries it has had and and it's heart to stress how big an impact it has had on the history of the United States in particular and tech in general. Now I should also add that back in two thousand twelve, Chris Palette and I recorded three episodes about the history of GE. But Tech Stuff was a different kind of show back in those days, so I thought it might be good to take a deeper dive into the history and see how GE shaped technology. And beyond that being said, if I were to do a comprehensive history on the company and all its subsidiaries, this series last a dozen episodes or more. So to avoid making this episode and this podcast turned into GE Stuff, I'm going to try and focus on what I think are some of the most important historical moments of GE, and a lot of that is in those early years. So let's go back to where it all began. And like many corporate histories, this involves going back to older companies that would form the foundation for the one we actually want to talk about. So strap in guys and women and all others. I don't mean to lump everybody in under the term guys. Anyway, we all know about Thomas Edison, right. He was an inventor, he was an entrepreneur, He was a master at self promotion and more. And some folks might throw in some less complementary labels in there, perhaps suggesting he was also a thief, or if that's going too far, someone willing to take credit for the work of people who are working beneath him. But whatever your opinion of the fellow, Edison got stuff done. In the eighteen seventies, Edison was working on the light bulb, and no, he didn't invent the light bulb, but that's a story for another podcast. In fact, my former co host Chris Poulett and I actually did cover that story in an episode titled tech Stuff Gets a Bright Idea, which published on October twenty nine, two thousand twelve. But Edison did make improvements on the lightbulb, working with his engineers to discover a material to serve as a suitable filament too in condess, brightly enough, and long enough to be a practical use. In eighteen seventy eight, Edison founded a company to concentrate on that goal. It was the Edison Electric Light Company. He had some big names in US history, particularly US financial history, as his investors, folks like the Vanderbilts and JP Morgan. Now Morgan is going to become very important to this story. Now. At the time, he had yet to find a suitable approach. The lightbulbs he made would burn out in just a few hours. The following year, in eighteen seventy nine, his company produced a lightbulb able to last for forty hours. Not superb by any means, but a real sign of progress, and Edison boldly stated that his company would make electricity affordable enough so that only the wealthy would ever burn candles. That same year, again, eighteen seventy nine, for those who have forgotten, a couple of teachers created their own company. Edwin James Houston was a physics teacher, and Alihu Thompson taught chemistry and mechanics at the Central High School for Boys in Philadelphia. They created a company called the American Electric Company in New Britain, Connecticut, with the help of some local investors. In eighty three, a different group of investors, this time from Massachusetts, bought out the company from the original group of investors and the company got a new name, the Thompson Houston Electric Company. Thompson would head up the research and development department, which was called the Model Room. A fellow named Charles A. Coffin, the head of the investors, would lead the company and act as a sort of president and chief financial officer, while Elwyn W. Rice led the manufacturing part of the business. Both of those names will be important for Ge and Charles Coffin wasn't a physicist by nature. No, he was a man with a lot of soul. And by that I meant he was a shoe manufacturer, as a dad joke for you. So where many of his fellow investors. They were all from the shoe manufacturing industry, and they were all located in Lynn, Massachusetts, and they pulled their money to purchase this burgeoning, this this blossoming electric utility company, the Thompson Houston Electric Company would relocate its headquarters to Lynn, Massachusetts, and get back to that company in just a second. Edison was not just working on lamps in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. He was also creating some of the first generators. These are devices that would convert mechanical energy into electrical energy. On December seventeen eighty, he founded the Edison Electric Illuminating Company. In eighteen eighty two, he was responsible for building and operating the first steam generated power station in London to power street lamps and a few private homes that were not far from the power plant. In New York, he was responsible for creating an electric power distribution system called Pearl Street Station, which supplied electricity to fifty nine whole customers in Lower Manhattan. Now, at the time, not everyone was sold on the idea of this new fangled electricity replacing candles and gas lamps, so as an incentive, Edison's company offered the first three months of service at no charge. He also began to acquire smaller businesses that were likewise getting into the electrical power generator game, and by eighteen ninety this motley group of companies merged to form Voltron, and by Voltron, I mean they became the Edison General Electric Company. It was this company that in eight installed electrical wires and switching equipment in the United States White House, and that made Benjamin Harrison, the twenty third President of the United States, the first US president to have electricity in the White House. Back to the Thompson Houston Electric Company. Like Edison, Charles Coffin was determined to be a big player in the electricity generating business. He had led Thompson Houston to go international and he bought out a British company called the Brush Company, which did not sell brushes. No, it was actually founded by a guy named Charles Brush, and it was a company that had patents for stuff like dynamos and had been in litigation with Thompson Houston Electric Company over some technologies. But we all know the old saying, right, if you can't beat them, by them, and that's what Thompson Houston Electric Company did. So both Edison General Electric Company and the Thompson Houston Electric Company were buying up competitors and more importantly, patent holders. So they each had dozens of patents to their name, and they were quickly becoming the dominant players in electricity generation and distribution in the Northeast United States, and there was just enough overlap to make business tricky for both companies. Without stepping on the toes of the other, they could have become great rivals, and in fact they kind of were. Henry Villard, who was the president of Edison General Electric Thomas Edison, wasn't involved in the day to day operations of the company. Villard had an idea both Edison and Thompson Houston were in a bit of a cash crunch as the market was in a bit of a slump. In addition, because both companies owned dozens of patents, that made it hard to be the sole provider of any kind of electrical infrastructure. Business was too expensive. It was not just expensive to lay out the infrastructure, but you had all these legal battles that would come up because one company would allege that the other company was infringing on one or more patents. There were several lawsuits pending around patents, and there would likely be even more in the future. Villard wanted to solve all these problems by having the two companies merge. Edison reportedly hated this idea and advised against it. Villard felt that the Edison Company was in a dominant position and could effectively define the terms of the merger, and so he tried to move on ahead. Then we get back to JP Morgan, the financier. He had arrived at a similar conclusion regarding the merger, but he felt that the Thompson Houston Company was actually the one that was in a stronger position, and because Morgan was Mr. Money Bags, he went behind Villard's back and began wheeling and dealing to make the merger happen, but on very different terms than what Villard was thinking. Morgan spearheaded the effort to merge these two companies together to form a new entity, one that would become known as the General Electric Company and later g E. The headquarters for the company would be in Schenectady, New York, and Morrigan effectively removed Thomas Edison and Henry Villard from any sort of leadership role. Edison didn't even know about the merger until the day before it actually happened. Yikes, with their powers and patents combined, the two former competitors could rapidly expand throughout the Northeast and beyond and moreover, the merger meant that the electric utilities industry in the United States was now split between just two companies because General Electric companies had been swooped up, you know, all Thomas Houston and Edison Electric had brought up all these smaller utilities, as had Westinghouse, the other big competitor in the US. So now the electric utilities industry in the United States was a dowopoli. It was either General Electric or it was Westinghouse and General Electric and Westinghouse had been part of a patent pool agreement in eight so this was a big deal. It would also mean the end of the war of the currents between direct current and alternating current. I have a little bit more to say about that in a minute. Now. I'm of two minds about this merger that JP Morgan initiated. Generally speaking, I'm in favor of competition in markets because that's usually what ends up being best for the consumer. It's way better if you have options and choices, because companies will do different things in order to get customers, which usually means cutting a better deal. But we're also talking about rain, which most people didn't even have access to electricity. The infrastructure itself had not been laid out, so there was a real need to do that, and with competition in the way, it made laying out the basic infrastructure to get electricity to people harder to do. The same thing would be true of the telecommunications industry, getting telephone lines out to people. It was tough to do that while also competing with other companies, and it could mean that you could have different standards, corporate defined standards that are incompatible with one another, laying out different regions. It was just a big mess. So you could argue that the monopoly like approach was actually been a official at least to establish the infrastructure. It just wasn't a good thing to have as an ongoing thing. The newly formed company started in eighteen nine two, and Charles Coffin would serve as the first president. So though you could trace the history as far back as eighteen seventy eight, I think is a reasonable reckoning day for g E. S Natal day. Now we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, we'll talk a little bit more about what GE was doing during its first few years of existence. In eighteen nine three, Edison's company developed an electric locomotive that could use electricity to reach speeds of around thirty miles per hour, which the company showed off at the Chicago Exposition. This was another opportunity to demonstrate how electricity could be used to a curious audience, and it helped promote the industry. You gotta remember again in eighteen nine, electricity is a brand new concept and to show that it had the power to do something that typically would be done with a steam engine was a very compelling use case. In eighteen four, Thomas Edison chose to sell his shares in General Electric. He would continue to serve as a consultant for the company, but the Wizard of Menlo Park would no longer be seen as the driving force or voice for General Electric, and to be fair, ever since the formation of the company he had little say in its direction. While the name and headquarters favored Edison's old company, the management for General Electric largely came from the Thompson Houston Electric Company. So Edison out and at just four years old, General Electric would become part of financial history. See in eighteen ninety six, there was this guy named Charles Dow and he took stocks of twelve large industrial companies to create a stocks average, and it was a sort of indicator as to how things were going in the industrial market overall. You would watch the averaged performance of these twelve companies and that would kind of tell you how things were going. As a broad rule of thumb, one of those twelve original companies was you guessed it, General Electric. All of the original dozen companies, GE would be the only one to survive and remain on the dal Jones Industrial Average for more than a century, though spoiler alert, GE was removed from the dal Jones Industrial Average in two thousand and eighteen, but I'll talk more about that in a later episode. Also in eighteen ninety six, Eli Hu Thompson, one of the founders of the Thompson Houston Electric Company and a consultant at GE, created an improved X ray tube. So let's talk about X rays for a second. X rays are a type of electromagnetic radiation and they have a very short wavelength, much shorter than visible light. So if you were to look at a spectrum of electromagnetic radiation from longer wavelengths to shorter at the longest end would be radio waves. Those stretch very long, in some cases more than a kilometer. Then if you move down the spectrum, you come to microwaves below that are infrared waves. Then you have visible light, then you have ultra violet light. Then you have X rays. If you were to go even smaller on the wavelength scale, you would then reach gamma rays. X rays form when a charged particle like an electron, experiences acceleration or deceleration, and you want to have it be in a very controlled way to generate specific X rays of a particular wavelength. Wilhelm Conrad Rerunchen and I always mess up that name. I apologize, but anyway, this is the fellow who first discovered X rays. In eight he was working with cathode ray tubes in a lab. These are crt s. Is the source of stuff you would find in old television sets. And he had concluded that there was a type of ray that was invisible to the eye, and it could pass through lots of solid stuff like heavy black paper. In fact, he figured it could passed through lots of different stuff, and it could cast shadows of solid objects. It could pass through flesh but not bone. And one of the earliest experiments he conducted with this discovery was to use film to capture an X ray image of his wife's hand so that she could see the skeletal structure of her hand. So an X ray tube converts energy. Specifically, it converts electrical energy into two other types of energy. One of those is heat and the other is X radiation. Ideally, you want to produce specific X radiation and you want to minimize heat production because really heat represents waste, it's lost energy in this case, so are the way we think of heat being waste energy for a car engine as another example. So, an X ray tube is a particular type of cathode ray tube. That means inside the tube, which looks a little bit like a lightbulb, you have an element called a cathode and you have another called an anode. Electrical current flows through the tube and electrons flow from cathode to anode. The cathode connects to the negative side of the circuit, the anode connects to the positive side. So in other words, you can think of the cathode as the component that sheds or contributes electrons. The anode is the component that accepts electrons. As part of this process, electrons lose energy as they move through the circuit, and this generates X radiation. The material in the anode and the energy of the electrons determines how the energy gets converted into heat rather than X radiation. Modern X ray tubes frequently have tungsten anodes, and there's a lot more we could explore with X rays, but honestly, I think that would require its own episode, so we'll just leave it here. Just know that the X ray tubes are pretty similar to the tubes you'd find in old CRT televisions or monitors, though not modern TVs or displays because they they don't use cathode ray tubes anymore. The important thing for our episode here is that GE became a leader in that space, with Thompson creating the improved X ray tube just one year after X rays had even been discovered. In nineteen hundred, Thomas Edison, still working as a consultant for General Electric, partnered with Willis R. Whitney and Charles Steinmitz to create the first industrial research laboratory in the United States. The purpose of the facility was to act as an experimental division for GE, where engineers and scientists would work on innovating new technologies and new applications of existing tech, and even making scientific breakthroughs. It was in this facility where GE researchers could conduct original research projects. The functions of this facility closely resembled a model practiced in German universities. Much of the early work in the research lab focused on improving the existing technologies that GE was producing at the time. It was only after a few years that the engineers were starting to look at totally new types of technology, scientific principles and applications. Also, this is where we get a little Monty Python and the Holy Grail with the lab. The original lab was not particularly grandiose. It was a barn located behind the house of one of the researchers for GE. But, and this will probably come as a surprise to absolutely nobody, because they were working with electricity and heating elements, that particular lab ended up catching fire and it burned down. After that, GE re established the lab in Schenectady, New York. The head of the research division was a professor from m I. T. And I'm sure there were many more fires over the following years, but as far as I know, none of them burned The whole lab down to the ground again. One early invention to come out of the lab was the electric fan in n two. Now, there is a small issue with this, and that other inventors had already created electric fans years earlier. An inventor with the fabulous name Skyler Scott's Wheeler built one in eighteen eighty two, twenty years before GE would file patents for its electric fan design. Another guy named Philip Deal took the electric fan and flipped it a bit, creating the first ceiling fan. He essentially took a fan blade, attached it to a sewing machine motor, and then bolted that motor to the ceiling in seven Now, I'm not sure what innovations General Electric contributed to the electric fan, but I will tell you I looked at lots of different sources when I was creating these these episodes, and many of them talk about two G E invents the electric fan, which clearly is not the case. Uh. Now, they might have come out with an electric fan, and they probably did create some interesting innovations with the fan, but they didn't truly invent it. It'd been around for two decades already. In nineteen o three, GE acquired the Stanley Electric Manufacturing Company, which manufactured transformers. In fact, William Stanley, the founder of the company, was the developer of the transformer. And a transformer in this case isn't a robot in disguise. Rather, it's an electrical device that converts alternating current electricity from one voltage to another. And depending upon its design, a transformer can step up or step down the voltage and it only works on alternating current. So let's talk a bit about this and why it's important. Alright, at the dawn of the age of electricity, you had the current Wars, the brew haha over whether regions should invest in direct current or alternating current for the purposes of distributing electricity. Edison was in favor of direct current. Direct current is the same sort of current you'd get with a battery. The electricity flows one way only through the circuit. It's a one direction type of thing. It's simple. But at the time, transmitting direct current over longer distances was impractical. So it worked fine if you were in a dense urban environment and you could build power generation plants at regular spots around the region, but it wouldn't didn't work so great if you're talking about stretching across rural areas, that the transmitting direct current at lower voltages was inefficient. You lost too much electricity along the way, and it higher curtains. That was considered higher voltages, I should say it was considered very dangerous. Now, inter alternating current with alternating current, the flow of electricity reverses many times a second, going one way down the path and then reversing to go the other way. And one benefit of this approach is that you can create transformers to step up the voltages for purposes of transmitting electricity over long distances, and then have another transformer on the other end to step the voltage back down so it can be used in households safely. And it all has to do with electromagnetism. Electricity flowing through a coil of wire creates a magnetic field, and if it's alternating current going through that coil, so it's you can think of it as going down the coil of wire and then reversing and going up the coil of wire and doing that many, many, many times per second. Well, then it creates a fluctuay eating magnetic field. Now, if you were to bring a second coil of wire within that fluctuating magnetic field from the first coil of wire, something interesting happens. All right, we've got coils A and B. Each coil is wrapped around its own ferro magnetic core of iron or steel, something that can be magnetized. We run an alternating current of electricity through coil A. Then we bring coil B, with no current running through it, close enough so that it is within the fluctuating magnetic field that is generated as a consequence of coil a's electric current. That fluctuating magnetic field then induces a second electric current to flow through coil B. So now coil B is carrying a current because of being in that fluctuating magnetic field from coil A. Even more interesting is that if coil B has more coils or turns, as we call it, then coil A does, The current running through coil B will have a higher voltage. The relationship between the number of turns is called the transformer turns ratio. So a power plant could run current through a line to a transformer and through the use of two sets of coils, step up the voltage significantly. For a long distance transmission, where higher voltage is more efficient. I wonder if Thomas Edison was peeved the General Electric was purchasing companies that were building tech for alternating current applications. Actually, I don't have to wonder he was. He was pretty pretty upset about He did not like the idea of losing the War of the currents, even well after that war was settled. In nineteen o five, GE formed the Electric Bond and Share Company also known as Abasco e B A s c O. This was a holding company. Holding company as a company that exists largely to hold onto the stock of other companies. Usually, a holding company doesn't actually, you know, do anything. Its purpose is truly just financial in nature. GE used the employee Retirement Investment Fund for its employees to purchase securities from smaller electric utility companies. This was largely in an effort to monopolize the electric utility industry. This was something that financier JP Morgan was very keen on doing. A few other utilities holding companies would be would would pop up and scoop up other regional companies, and so you started to see even less competition in the region, and this would spell trouble. I'll explain more in a second, But first let's take another quick break. Now I'm going to stick with this story about the holding company for a moment, and then we'll give back to the timeline. We're gonna go down this particular path just to get a complete picture of this story. So Abasco ends up controlling tons of companies and would even form subsidiaries of its own holding company to oversee groups of these because there were just so many. So you might have a subsidiary of Abasco that itself was a holding company for like ten other companies. So eventually the United States government pays attention and comes to oppose the monopolization of utilities and says, you know, it was okay when we were laying out the infrastructure to make sure people got access to electricity, but now we're not so comfortable with one company having this much control over electricity distribution. This reached a crescendo in ninety five when Congress passed the Public Utility Company Holding Act. That act gave the securities an Exchange Commission, or sec the authority to break up holding companies so that the individual states in the United States could oversee operations within their borders. Abasco fought tooth and nail to keep its holdings, but ultimately lost that battle, and afterwards the entity that was Abasco would reorganize and become an investment company. Now I include the story here because it's just one of many examples of how General Electric drew focus and criticism for its operations, and it shows how powerful and influential the company has been over the years. All right, now we're gonna jump back to the timeline that we were covering before. So around the same time that Abasca was forming, a GE engineer named Ernst Alexanderson developed a type of high frequency alternator and we now call the Alexanderson alternator, and it was for the purposes of creating a radio transmitter. He was doing this upon request from another guy, an inventor named Reginald Fessenden, who had been trying to solve the problem of sending sound over radio waves, essentially radio broadcasting. Fessenden had figured out that he needed a much higher frequency alternator than what was currently available to achieve his goal, so he sent out the request to GE and Alexanderson started to work on the project. An alternator, by the way, is a device that creates an alternating current. The Alexanderson alternator could create a continuous radio wave, and that's a radio wave with a constant amplitude and frequency. I won't go into it further here, as I've done plenty of episodes about radio waves and technology, but it would be an early example of how General Electric would become an important part of the history of radio. So far, I've been talking about electric utilities and radio waves. But around the same time so nineteen o five or so, General Electric would also dip its enormous corporate toe into the tempting waters of consumer appliances. The first one I could find on General Electric's own website was the Model D twelve and electric toaster. Other sources cite a nineteen o six electric range as the first consumer product. The toaster, by the way, looks terrifying to me because it doesn't have any solid surfaces. It's essentially a couple of racks, open air racks that holds slices of bread and they are placed on either side of a series of unprotected heating coils. So I would imagine this thing was quite the fire hazard in its day. Oh and in case you wonder like, how does this stuff work? That's easy. Conductive materials, that is, materials that can conduct electrons are usually not perfect conductors most of the time. Now, if you can cool one down to near absolute z euro you can get a super conductor that doesn't lose any conductivity. Uh. And if you use larger gauges of conductive material, you reduce resistance. But because of a variety of factors, most conductors have a certain amount of resistance to electric current. Based on all these different variables, that resistance manifests as heat. Now, normally we don't want heat in our conductive materials. Electronics don't respond too well with getting hot. But with stuff like electric ranges and toasters, the whole point is to generate heat. We use materials that have a resistance so that enough electrical energy will convert to heat in order to cook or toast whatever it is we're exposing to those elements. On the other end of the scale from a countertop toaster is the delivery g E made to the New York Central Railroad in nine. The company supplied thirty electric locomotives, each weighing in at ninety four tons. The locomotives had two thousand, eight hundred horsepower each. This isn't just an interesting tidbit in gees history. The electric locomotive and rails in New York would shape the development of Manhattan itself, as did the electrical infrastructure. So one could argue that modern Manhattan wouldn't look anything like it does today without General Electrics business in the area. That General Electrics involvement itself was what helped shape the modern appearance of Manhattan. And because I'll probably forget about it before I get to the recent past. In a later episode, not very long ago from the recording, General Electrics spun off its locomotive business in a merger with another locomotive company called wab Tech w A B T e C. The eleven billion dollar deal saw ge and its shareholders take fifty point one at stake in the ownership of this new company, with wab Text shareholders getting the other forty nine point nine. This was part of the larger effort to shed some of g S businesses, as I think it's already apparent that the company had grown extremely large, with lots of different departments involved in various industries. That was true even in the early nineteen hundreds, but it gets way more apparent as this series will go on. In nineteen o nine, engineers at General Electric, led by a guy named William Coolidge, developed the ductal tungsten filament for incandescent light bulbs. Tungsten holds together well at high temperatures, and it gives off a warm light when it incandescees, but it's also a pretty tough metal to work with. Coolidge created a process that made the metal easier and more pliable to work with, and it was off to the races. It made the Edison design much more efficient and practical, and it quickly became the standard material for light bulbs. It's essentially the same stuff you'd find in the filament in an incandescent light bulb today. In nineteen eleven, we have another acquisition sort of General Electric absorbed a company called the National Electric Lamp Association or NILA in e l A, and that organization traced its own history back to nineteen o one. G had already been part of NILA's history, having become a shareholder in the company back in nineteen o two, just one year after it was founded, and providing the old Brush Electric Company facilities to serve as NILA's headquarters. Over time, General Electrics stake in the company grew, and federal courts took notice, and there were talks of antitrust concerns and GE was essentially told it had to dissolve NILA, so General Electric absorbed NILA into its own overall business. NILA had recently finished building an industrial complex in Cleveland, Ohio, and NILA Park would become the first industrial park in the United States. And here's where I admit I finally looked up the definition for an industrial park, because I've heard the term hundreds of times but never really thought to see exactly what the definition was, So imagine my surprise to find out it means pretty much what it sounds like. An industrial park is an area that is zoned for industrial development, kind of like how a business park or an office park is an area zoned for offices. Sometimes the obvious answer is in fact the correct one. In nineteen twelve, GE researchers developed improved vacuum tubes, which would help usher in the early era of electronics. Before the development of the transistor, the vacuum tube was crucial for electronics. A vacuum tube is also known as a thermionic valve. Thermionic gives you a hint of One of the important concepts in this device has to do with heat and Vacuum tubes are in many ways similar to cathode ray tubes or light bulbs. Like a cathode ray tube, a vacuum tube has a cathode and an anode separated from each other inside a glass tube, and as the name vacuum tube tells us, the inside of the tube has no air in it. It is a vacuum. Heating the cathode causes it to shed electrons in a process called thermionic emission. Applying a positive voltage to the anode plate attracts those electrons across the gap in the vacuum, creating a current flow. A vacuum tube with just two electrodes, the cathode and the anode, is called a diode. This is a type of tube that allows electricity to only flow in a single direction, so it's like a one way street for electrical current. That we also have to remember that we describe current as the direction of positive to negative, so this is confusing. Electrons are traveling from negative to positive, but we call the currents direction the opposite, So current flows from anode to cathode even though electrons are flowing from cathode to anode. And I know it's confusing, and I blame Benjamin Franklin, But that's another story. One important task these diodes did was convert alternating current to direct current. This was important since electricity transmission was through alternating current, but most devices you would plug into outlets relied on direct currents, so you had to be able to convert them. But vacuum tubes didn't just stop there. Back in seven lead to Forest, an American inventor, created the first triode vacuum tube. So this was a vacuum tube with three electrodes. You had the anode, you had the cathode, and the third electrode was a control grid. Think of it as a sort of filter or mesh between the cathode and the anode. So the cathode is shedding electron, the anode is accepting electrons, and the control grid is between the two. Connectors to the control grid allow for a change and voltage to be applied to the grid itself. So adjusting the voltage to the control grid acts as a kind of valve adjusting exactly how many electrons can flow from the cathode to the an notte. So if you applied a negative voltage to the control grid, the control grid will repel electrons, right because like charge will repel like charge. Negative repels negative, and that would mean that you would slow down the stream going from cathode to an notte. So it's almost like turning a tap of water and turning it so that the water is barely trickling out. If you apply a strong enough negative charge to the control grid, you turn off the flow entirely. But if you apply a positive voltage, that increases the number of electrons that flow through to the anode. And in fact, such a YouTube can be used to amplify an electrical signal. So let me explain how that works really quickly. See a small signal coming into the control grid, perhaps one created by say a radio wave, can be converted into a much larger signal with the exact same wave form. Another example is using a microphone. If you're using a microphone, you're speaking into the microphone. The vibrations caused by the sounds you are making cause a diaphragm to move inside the microphone. That in turn causes a tiny electro magnet to generate a weak electrical signal, and this signal is far too weak to power a speaker. But let's say you send this electrical signal so that feeds into the control grid of a triode vacuum tube. It will control the flow of electrons through that tube, and you can have a much more powerful electrical signal coming out of that tube that matches the one you created coming out of your microphone, and that one would be enough for you to send to a speaker to power it. It's really pretty darn cool. Vacuum tubes would be used in all sorts of early electronics, and they would usher in an age of rapid development, though it was also one in which those electronics were all very large, because vacuum tubes are pretty big themselves, so a computer with vacuum tubes and computers would come much later. But a computer running on vacuum tubes would by necessity take up a great deal of space, and it would also generate a lot of heat. It wouldn't be until the development of the transistor that these problems would be surmounted and we'd be able to miniaturize electronics. Now, I think this is a good place for us to leave off with the story of GE. To recap, the company formed during an era of industrialization and was largely under the influence of a monopolistic capitalist, that being JP Morgan. It had hardly any competition to speak of, being part of a duopoli with Westinghouse and having far more of the mark A share in the United States, and it's focus on research and development as well as acquisitions meant it was becoming increasingly powerful and cementing its near future. Now, in the next episode, we'll look at how GE would play an important part in establishing radio broadcasting in the United States, as well as its early history with NBC, and we'll also learn about how the US government began to chip away at some of the moves Morrigan had made in the early years of the company. But for now, it's time to sign off. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, why not send me an email the addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com or pop on over to our website that's tech Stuff podcast dot com. You're gonna find an archive of all of our past episodes there. You're also going to find links to our social media accounts, so you can leave us a message on things like Facebook or Twitter. And you'll also find a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show and we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y 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.