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