Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works in iHeart Radio and I Love all
Speaker 1: Things tech. And in our last episode, I was talking
Speaker 1: about General Electric and I was really focusing on the
Speaker 1: origin of the company and its first two decades of
Speaker 1: its existence. And over the next few episodes, we're going
Speaker 1: to start picking up the pace a bit and exploring
Speaker 1: the full history of the company and why. In recent months,
Speaker 1: that is, as of August twenty nineteen, some analysts have
Speaker 1: expressed concern for the integrity of the company. This is
Speaker 1: not a new development. Actually, GE has had some struggles
Speaker 1: over the last decade or so, but we haven't gotten
Speaker 1: there yet. We're still pretty early on in its history,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot I could talk about, including advances
Speaker 1: in some of the basic technology that GE was built
Speaker 1: off of. For example, in nineteen thirteen, of physicists and
Speaker 1: chemist named Irving Langmuir proved that by filling lightbulbs with
Speaker 1: an inert gas like are gone, it would not only
Speaker 1: extend the useful life of the tungsten filaments inside the
Speaker 1: light bulb. That's the part that actually lights up in
Speaker 1: a light bulb, but it would also prevent the inside
Speaker 1: of the light bulb from turning black as it got
Speaker 1: an internal coding of what's essentially soot from the tungsten.
Speaker 1: Langmuir would make numerous contributions to science and would ultimately
Speaker 1: receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in nineteen thirty two,
Speaker 1: though that wasn't for light bulbs anyway. Another thing that
Speaker 1: happened in nineteen thirteen was that Charles Coffin, who had
Speaker 1: been president of the company, would become General Electrics first
Speaker 1: chairman of the board of directors. Edwin Wilbur Rice, who
Speaker 1: had studied under Allahu Thompson at Central High School in
Speaker 1: Philadelphia and who had worked for General Electric since the
Speaker 1: very beginning of the company, became the new president of
Speaker 1: ge Rice had more than a hundred patents to his
Speaker 1: name and had a strong hand in guiding how General
Speaker 1: Electrics manufacturing facilities operated. He was one of the founders
Speaker 1: for Gees Research Laboratory. Not a bad pick for president
Speaker 1: of the company, someone who could direct 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 g E had a very large
Speaker 1: hand in that. In nineteen nineteen, General Electric became one
Speaker 1: of the founding companies to create the Radio Corporation of
Speaker 1: America or r c A. And I covered this in
Speaker 1: the episodes I did about our CIA. So the super
Speaker 1: short version of this is that leading up to World
Speaker 1: War One, the United States military pretty much commondered the
Speaker 1: radio communications industry in the US. Now, at that time,
Speaker 1: radio stations weren't broadcasting entertainment and news and sound over
Speaker 1: to radios. There were no consumer radios. This was really
Speaker 1: all about sending wireless telegrams, so most transmissions were just
Speaker 1: limited to Morse code. Now. There were a few early
Speaker 1: radio broadcast pioneers around this time as well, but it
Speaker 1: was very limited. Now. The problem was, at least from
Speaker 1: the US military perspective, that many of these communications stations,
Speaker 1: these radio transmitters were actually owned and operated by companies
Speaker 1: that were from outside the United States, and the First
Speaker 1: World War was driving home how important it was to
Speaker 1: have a secure communications network within your own borders. So
Speaker 1: the US military, namely the the U. S. Navy, ultimately
Speaker 1: rested control of those transmission stations away from foreign companies
Speaker 1: and then used them for wartime communications for official military communications.
Speaker 1: But once the war was over, the government needed to
Speaker 1: figure out what to do with all these transmission stations,
Speaker 1: so rather than operate them as government owned entities, the
Speaker 1: government reached out to several companies US companies including General
Speaker 1: Electric and also Westinghouse, A, T and T, and the
Speaker 1: United Fruit Company. Yeah, I'll have to do an episode
Speaker 1: about the United Fruit Company at some point. It's a
Speaker 1: pretty interesting and controversial story. Anyway. It was this group
Speaker 1: that would form our c A, with each group partner
Speaker 1: in the group holding a certain percentage of the ownership
Speaker 1: of our CI, a General Electric held the majority steak.
Speaker 1: Didn't hold a fifty percent steak. It was more like
Speaker 1: but it held more interest in our cier than any
Speaker 1: other party did. In I saw, we saw something pretty
Speaker 1: darn cool. Well I didn't, I wasn't born yet, but
Speaker 1: the world in general saw something pretty cool. In E
Speaker 1: built a supercharger for an airplane. So there was an
Speaker 1: engineer named Sanford Moss who came up with this idea.
Speaker 1: He had this hypothesis us that fuel would burn better
Speaker 1: in a chamber with compressed air. It would actually produce
Speaker 1: more energy, would be a greater energy output with compressed
Speaker 1: air inside the chamber. And it turned out that this
Speaker 1: hypothesis was correct, and so using that knowledge, he designed
Speaker 1: what was called a supercharger to produce a lot more
Speaker 1: power in an engine. Now, a plane with one of
Speaker 1: those superchargers would set an altitude record at the time,
Speaker 1: and it reached a new altitude of forty eight hundred
Speaker 1: feet or about twelve thousand fours Obviously we've left that
Speaker 1: way behind now, but at the time that was a
Speaker 1: significant achievement. In N two G S own radio station
Speaker 1: in Schenectady, New York, with the identity of w g
Speaker 1: Y would go on the air, the station had a
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred what transmitter Now today that station is owned
Speaker 1: by the company I work for, my Heart Media. Fun
Speaker 1: little fact, though. It has also changed a bit since
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty two. For example, the transmitter today is at
Speaker 1: fifty thousand watts, so that's a big change, and the
Speaker 1: wattage pretty much determines how far the transmissions can go.
Speaker 1: Gets a little more complicated than that, but that's a
Speaker 1: general rule of thumb. Also, in nineteen twenty two, Rice
Speaker 1: would step down as president of the company and a
Speaker 1: guy named Gerard Swope became the new president of GE
Speaker 1: and pushed the company to produce more consumer appliances. So
Speaker 1: this is really the era where g E started to
Speaker 1: seriously get into the consumer appliance manufacturing business, stuff like
Speaker 1: refrigerators and electric stoves. So while GE had made a
Speaker 1: few consumer products over the previous twenty years, it hadn't
Speaker 1: really seriously dealt into that market. And then in the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties that all changed. GE branded appliances became more
Speaker 1: and more common. So who was this Swope fellow, Well,
Speaker 1: unlike Rice, he wasn't at General Electric at the very
Speaker 1: start of the company, and technically Rice was actually in
Speaker 1: the precursor company. He had worked for the Thompson Houston
Speaker 1: Electric Company that preceded General Electric. But Swope wasn't like that. Nope,
Speaker 1: Swope was a newcomer. He originally joined g E in
Speaker 1: eight three, one whole year after the company was founded.
Speaker 1: Johnny come lately, Okay, I'm being a bit cheeky. Swope
Speaker 1: had joined the company as a helper while he was
Speaker 1: still in school. It's sort of like a gopher, someone
Speaker 1: who did whatever it was that needed doing at any
Speaker 1: given time. His starting salary back then was an entire
Speaker 1: dollar a day of princely sum. Presumably he was making
Speaker 1: a bit more than that by the time he took
Speaker 1: on the role of company president in nineteen twenty two.
Speaker 1: And I don't mean to suggest his employment and GE
Speaker 1: was un oaken from eighteen nine to nineteen twenty two.
Speaker 1: That was not the case. He left GE, he was
Speaker 1: attending m I T. He graduated from m I T
Speaker 1: with a degree in electrical engineering, and then he took
Speaker 1: on a job for Western Electric, which is a company
Speaker 1: that's even older than GE. Swope had also served on
Speaker 1: the United States War Department General Staff. During World War One,
Speaker 1: he aided in the procurement and supply operations for the army.
Speaker 1: Charles Coffin brought Swope back over to the fold at
Speaker 1: g E in nineteen nineteen. Now as the president of GE,
Speaker 1: Swope would do more than just pushed the company into
Speaker 1: manufacturing more consumer appliances. He was also concerned about employee benefits.
Speaker 1: Under his leadership, General Electric began to implement employee benefit
Speaker 1: programs such as voluntary unemployment insurance, profit sharing programs, and
Speaker 1: a cost of living wage adjustment program. Swope would serve
Speaker 1: as the president of the company life in fact, and
Speaker 1: his first run that would stretch from nineteen twenty two
Speaker 1: to nineteen forty, meaning that Swope also led the company
Speaker 1: as the entire world went through the Great Depression, a
Speaker 1: challenging time for everybody. And just to stick with this
Speaker 1: for a second, I should explain who Swope's successor was
Speaker 1: and why Swope would return to serve as president a
Speaker 1: second time, because generally when you hear that someone left
Speaker 1: as president and then had to come back as president,
Speaker 1: it sounds like something really wrong happened in the interim.
Speaker 1: That's not exactly the case. So in nineteen forty, Gerard
Speaker 1: Swope retired and Charles E. Wilson, who had first started
Speaker 1: working for GE UH specifically a g E subsidiary, when
Speaker 1: he was twelve years old, and had been with a
Speaker 1: company pretty much ever since. He actually completed his education
Speaker 1: by taking night courses. Wilson was promoted to president in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty and he led the company for about two
Speaker 1: and a half years, but then a different president called
Speaker 1: on him. That president was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who wanted
Speaker 1: Wilson to join the War Production Board as vice chairman.
Speaker 1: The United States had entered World War Two in December
Speaker 1: of nineteen forty one, and there was a pressing need
Speaker 1: to devote manufacturing capabilities towards producing equipment and weapons for
Speaker 1: American soldiers. Wilson responded to the request and he left
Speaker 1: General Electric. So Gerard Swope came out of retirement and
Speaker 1: once again led the company until nineteen forty five and
Speaker 1: World War Two's end. At that point, Wilson returned to
Speaker 1: GE and resumed his role as president of the company
Speaker 1: for another five years. Now, the reason I decided to
Speaker 1: follow that particular trail and kind of move away from
Speaker 1: the timeline for a second was again to illustrate how
Speaker 1: important General electrics business had become. It was integral to
Speaker 1: the modernization of the United States, and gees manufacturing facilities
Speaker 1: were formidable both for their industrial businesses and consumer appliance businesses.
Speaker 1: No wonder the President looked to GE for help in
Speaker 1: manufacturing and acquisitions for wartime production. Okay, so let's get
Speaker 1: back to the timeline and learn what GE was doing
Speaker 1: during all those years. One note I saw pop up
Speaker 1: on several sites was that in nineteen twenty four GE
Speaker 1: opted to exit the utilities business because of antitrust concerns
Speaker 1: from the U. S. Government. But despite my searching, I
Speaker 1: couldn't find any other information on that, and I just
Speaker 1: saw essentially the same timeline popping up on multiple websites,
Speaker 1: So that suggested to me that they were all pulling
Speaker 1: from a single common source. Now this does not mean
Speaker 1: that the information is wrong. It might be right, and
Speaker 1: I just wasn't able to find corroborating evidence of it.
Speaker 1: But because I couldn't find any confirmation outside that list,
Speaker 1: I got a little leery of it. So I'm including
Speaker 1: this whole story in this podcast simply to point out
Speaker 1: that it can be important to look for those corroborating
Speaker 1: sources that really indicate that you're looking at true information
Speaker 1: and you're not just looking at somebody's list that is
Speaker 1: unsupported and other people have just copied that exact, exact
Speaker 1: same list and put it up on their own websites.
Speaker 1: That does happen. It happens a lot, so you'll actually
Speaker 1: find a lot of plagiarism out there on the Internet.
Speaker 1: You'll be looking at a source for information, You'll be
Speaker 1: reading up on a paragraph and you think, all right,
Speaker 1: that's interesting, Let's see if I can find any more
Speaker 1: data about this, and you'll do a search and a
Speaker 1: different website will pop up. You start reading that and
Speaker 1: you think, well, this sounds really familiar, and if you
Speaker 1: put them side by side, you realize this is exact
Speaker 1: 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 it
Speaker 1: to different outlets, but a lot of times people are
Speaker 1: just taking whatever they think is cool or interesting or
Speaker 1: we'll drive traffic, and they'll just put it up on
Speaker 1: their 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 four. Um. Whether GE got the utilities
Speaker 1: business because of antitrust issues I can't speak to because
Speaker 1: I couldn't find anything about it. But stuff that got
Speaker 1: started or happened in nine there were some important things.
Speaker 1: One of those was a lawsuit that would go all
Speaker 1: the way up to the Supreme Court. Now, let me explain.
Speaker 1: In the United States, GE held the patents for pretty
Speaker 1: much all the basic components for the light bulb. That is,
Speaker 1: they had a patent on the tungsten filament in the
Speaker 1: gas filled bulb and all this other stuff. Westinghouse had
Speaker 1: entered into a licensing agreement with GE so that Westinghouse
Speaker 1: could produce and more importantly, sell light bulbs. In return,
Speaker 1: GE said that Westinghouse would have to set its prices
Speaker 1: for light bulbs according to GES direction, and that it
Speaker 1: would have to follow certain quotas. In other words, G
Speaker 1: was using its power to say, you can sell light
Speaker 1: bulbs based on our designs, but they have to be
Speaker 1: at this price, and you can't make more than x
Speaker 1: number of them because that would eat into our own profits,
Speaker 1: and Gee said, we can change our our price at
Speaker 1: any time for any reason. And that's really the issue
Speaker 1: that went to court. Now, what the courts would ultimately
Speaker 1: find and the Supreme Court decision would come down in
Speaker 1: nine six, is that typically if you license out a patent,
Speaker 1: if you've invented something and you've got the patent for
Speaker 1: your invention and someone asks to license your invention, typically
Speaker 1: you cannot dictate a price for a product made from
Speaker 1: your patented invention. However, in this case, GE had not
Speaker 1: just licensed out the right to manufacture light bulbs, and
Speaker 1: it also licensed out the right to sell light bulbs,
Speaker 1: and that meant GE could determine other things like the
Speaker 1: selling price of the light bulb. At least, this is
Speaker 1: what the court found. And this is one of the
Speaker 1: more controversial business related decisions made by the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: It's been challenged several times and upheld a few times,
Speaker 1: sometimes with just a split court decision like split right
Speaker 1: down the middle. It means that you could potentially patent
Speaker 1: and invention and then not only licensed it out to
Speaker 1: other entities, but you can dictate at what price those
Speaker 1: entities could sell your invention. So you could in theory,
Speaker 1: produce your own products and sell them for a lower
Speaker 1: cost than your competitors could because of your demands, and
Speaker 1: thus you are undercutting them while you're simultaneously licensing your
Speaker 1: invention to them. It's pretty cut throat stuff. Now, there
Speaker 1: are limitations on this. The Supreme Court essentially said patent
Speaker 1: holders can only do this if they themselves are also
Speaker 1: manufacturing the product. So you couldn't just come up with
Speaker 1: a cool invention, get it patented, and then just sit
Speaker 1: on that patent and wait for people to life it's
Speaker 1: your ideas, and then tell them how much they have
Speaker 1: to sell the product for. That's off limits. You have
Speaker 1: to actually be actively using that patent yourself, So pat
Speaker 1: controls would not be able to do this. But again
Speaker 1: it shows how GEES business would end up shaping the
Speaker 1: world around it. I've got a lot more to say
Speaker 1: about General Electric, but before I get to that, let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break. Earlier I alluded to the fact
Speaker 1: that a couple of big things happened in and they
Speaker 1: both had to do with lightbulbs. And that's ironic because
Speaker 1: this next big thing was really shady. Executives from g
Speaker 1: E attended a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. That meeting was
Speaker 1: also attended by representatives of companies like Phillips and the
Speaker 1: company de Lump and as Rum. All of these are
Speaker 1: light bulb manufacturers, or were at the time. They signed
Speaker 1: a document that was titled Convention for the Development and
Speaker 1: Progress of the International Incandescent Electric Lamp Industry. But the
Speaker 1: 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 regions 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 plan 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 lightbulb lifespan in was already
Speaker 1: twenty five hundred hours, so two point five times as long.
Speaker 1: Now they were going to work to reduce that lifespan
Speaker 1: in order to drum up more business. Light bulbs burn
Speaker 1: out faster, people have to go back and buy more
Speaker 1: light bulbs. It was making their own business by making
Speaker 1: the products worse in a way, and because it would
Speaker 1: be an agreement across multiple companies around the globe, there'd
Speaker 1: 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. Companies in
Speaker 1: the cartel had to send light bulbs to a testing
Speaker 1: facility in Switzerland to make certain they were manufacturing bulbs
Speaker 1: with the right lifespan. And like I said, they were
Speaker 1: given those strict quotas. If you sold more than your
Speaker 1: quota allowed, you would get fined. You would also get
Speaker 1: fined if the light bulbs you made didn't last long enough,
Speaker 1: or worse, lasted too long. This really did happen, and
Speaker 1: the plan was for the agreement to last until nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty five, so it was a thirty year agreement. The
Speaker 1: only reason that didn't actually happen was because of a
Speaker 1: little thing called World War two. But yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: heck of a thing to learn about. And g E
Speaker 1: engineers really did work on ways to decrease the useful
Speaker 1: life of light bulbs for various products, including flashlights. They
Speaker 1: were saying, well, you know, flashlight flash bulbs, they last
Speaker 1: three hole changes of batteries, right now, let's reduce that.
Speaker 1: And I got it down so that the light bulbs
Speaker 1: would only last two whole sets of batteries and then
Speaker 1: eventually got to a point where the light bulbs lifespan
Speaker 1: was about the same length as the useful lifespan of
Speaker 1: a set of batteries. That's the way progress works, I
Speaker 1: guess anyway. Uh, it's a it's a heck of a
Speaker 1: thing to read about, and it it does kind of stink.
Speaker 1: But I get it from a sales perspective. I mean,
Speaker 1: if Willie Wonka had actually made an everlasting gob stopper,
Speaker 1: he'd only have to sell one to each kid, and
Speaker 1: then he would have innovated himself out of business. He
Speaker 1: would never sell anymore. Why would he. Everyone already has
Speaker 1: one and it never gets smaller. That that's that's inventing
Speaker 1: yourself out of business. But still, there's something particularly sinister
Speaker 1: about a company or group of companies that agree to
Speaker 1: build into their products the intent for those products to
Speaker 1: stop working after a certain amount of time, forcing people
Speaker 1: to go and buy a new one. It's not super cool.
Speaker 1: On a less conspiratorial note, in nineteen seven, g E
Speaker 1: was one of a few companies to demonstrate a live
Speaker 1: TV broadcast. Now earlier in n T and T had
Speaker 1: to demonstrated a long distance broadcast of its own. GEES
Speaker 1: claim is that their demonstration was the first to broadcast
Speaker 1: to a television in an actual home, as opposed to
Speaker 1: a demonstration theater or a showroom. The broadcast came from
Speaker 1: GES radio station w g Y, and the TV was
Speaker 1: in 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 Philo 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 owned
Speaker 1: a large steak, created the NBC Networks. Now technically they
Speaker 1: were two networks of affiliates, so you had two NBC networks.
Speaker 1: There was NBC Red and NBC Blue, so you could
Speaker 1: say ge had partial ownership of NBC at this time,
Speaker 1: though that wouldn't last for very long for the time being.
Speaker 1: That's because in nineteen thirty the US government began to
Speaker 1: investigate GE Westinghouse and r c A for monopolistic practices.
Speaker 1: The antitrust investor stigation was followed by formal charges and
Speaker 1: a long period of negotiation, and ultimately the parties agreed
Speaker 1: to our CIA becoming its own incorporated company and the
Speaker 1: various partners, including GE, would divest themselves of their shares
Speaker 1: in our CIA. In addition, GE and Westinghouse had to
Speaker 1: agree to stay out of the radio broadcast business for
Speaker 1: two and a half years in order to give our
Speaker 1: CIA a chance to stand on its own. And boy
Speaker 1: how they did it ever, But that's covered in other
Speaker 1: episodes I did not too long ago. We'll get back
Speaker 1: to both NBC and our CI a later on in
Speaker 1: this series. For now, let's talk about plastic. Plastic was
Speaker 1: something that had been around for a while. Synthetic plastic
Speaker 1: was a relatively new idea. There are natural plastics, but
Speaker 1: those are limited because it's hard to get to them
Speaker 1: and you have to do some processing. It's not very efficient.
Speaker 1: So synthetic plastics was something that people really wanted to
Speaker 1: be able to to develop because plastic is incredibly useful stuff,
Speaker 1: but you have to have a more efficient way to
Speaker 1: make it. That had been experimented with as early as
Speaker 1: the mid nineteenth century, but the first fully synthetic plastic
Speaker 1: was developed in nineteen o seven. It was called bake
Speaker 1: Light by the way, and companies since then had been
Speaker 1: working to try and find cheaper, more efficient ways to
Speaker 1: produce synthetic plastic because it could be put to so
Speaker 1: many applications. GE was one of those companies, and throughout
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties and into the nineteen forties, g E
Speaker 1: engineers worked on lots of different experiments to develop synthetic plastic.
Speaker 1: It was around this time that James Wright, an engineer
Speaker 1: for GE, who was trying to make synthetic rubber, ended
Speaker 1: up developing Silly putty. So you may remember that from
Speaker 1: a recent Tech Stuff episode. Corning would end up beating
Speaker 1: GE to the punch as far as the development of
Speaker 1: silicone goes. The two companies were in fierce competition to
Speaker 1: 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 it into a slurry that can
Speaker 1: get washed down the holes on the outer edge of
Speaker 1: the disposal and then down into the pipe system of
Speaker 1: your house. And it also would create an effective means
Speaker 1: of creeping out audiences in horror movies, because we all
Speaker 1: know what happens when a character is at a garbage disposal.
Speaker 1: Something important, usually a ring, is gonna fall down there,
Speaker 1: and then they're gonna put their hand down the drain,
Speaker 1: even as we all screamed, don't put your hand down there. Anyway,
Speaker 1: The disposal went on sale in nineteen thirty five. I
Speaker 1: should also mentioned that ge did not invent the garbage disposal.
Speaker 1: That honor goes to John Ham's. Not John Hamm who's
Speaker 1: a great actor but John Hams. He invented the device
Speaker 1: in nineteen 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 nineti GE provided the
Speaker 1: lamps for the first Major League Baseball night game, which
Speaker 1: took place in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Cincinnati Reds played the
Speaker 1: Philadelphia Phillies and they won two to one. Night games
Speaker 1: actually were really important. They helped transform the sport at baseball.
Speaker 1: It meant that folks who worked during the day could
Speaker 1: still have the opportunity to watch a game live in
Speaker 1: the evening, and it boosted crowd attendance and gave a
Speaker 1: healthy dose of umph to the sport. And of course
Speaker 1: other sports would follow suit. Throughout the nineteen thirties, the
Speaker 1: company continued to work on multiple industries. G E introduced
Speaker 1: more consumer products for the average joe, and the company
Speaker 1: also worked on high tech components for airplane and car
Speaker 1: engines for a more let's say, elite clientele. Howard Hughes
Speaker 1: himself used a g E supercharger in nineteen thirty seven
Speaker 1: to set a transcontinental air record he flew across the
Speaker 1: United States in seven hours, twenty eight minutes, and twenty
Speaker 1: five seconds. In nineteen thirty eight, the labs at GE
Speaker 1: managed to reinvent the company wheel, by which I mean
Speaker 1: the light bulb. The invention was a fluorescent lamp, which
Speaker 1: works a different way from condescent lamps. And incandescent lamp
Speaker 1: creates light by using electricity to heat up a filament
Speaker 1: until it gives off light when it incandesses, and that's
Speaker 1: the basic premise behind all incandescent lights, but a fluorescent
Speaker 1: lamp is different. The idea for fluorescent lamps was actually
Speaker 1: a few decades old, but the challenge was to create
Speaker 1: one that was practical from both a use case scenario,
Speaker 1: as in, this 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 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 their 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 the 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 DC direct current because it means
Speaker 1: one electrode will act as a cathode and then the
Speaker 1: other electrode will act as the cathode, and they'll switch
Speaker 1: back and forth, and that creates a more even lighting
Speaker 1: within the lamp. If there was one side that was
Speaker 1: just always the cathode, that side would be much brighter
Speaker 1: than the other side. That's what you would get with
Speaker 1: direct current. So that's why fluorescent lamps work best with
Speaker 1: a C electricity rather than d C. Now, getting the
Speaker 1: arc started can be a bit of a challenge, especially
Speaker 1: with those early bulbs. That requires a spike of high voltage,
Speaker 1: and you can think of voltage kind of like pressure.
Speaker 1: So in a hydraulic system and a water based system
Speaker 1: like pipes, it's the more pressure you put behind the water,
Speaker 1: forcing water through the pipe system faster. With a fluorescent lamp,
Speaker 1: the higher voltage forces a current to flow from the
Speaker 1: cathote across to the other electrode, but the gas inside
Speaker 1: the tube actually resists this, and the colder the gas is,
Speaker 1: the more it resists the current. So it might take
Speaker 1: a few false starts to get that that arc actually going,
Speaker 1: And there are a couple of different ways of doing that,
Speaker 1: including like preheating the gas. These are all things that
Speaker 1: would be built into the lamps themselves. It's not something
Speaker 1: that you would have to do in addition to that,
Speaker 1: But that whole discussion deserves its own podcast. So the
Speaker 1: arc will vaporize the mercury that's inside the tube, turning
Speaker 1: that liquid mercury into a gas, and as the arc
Speaker 1: passes through this vaporized mercury, it gives off ultra violet light.
Speaker 1: But hey, I hear you say, ultra violet light is
Speaker 1: outside the visible spectrum for we puny humans. Ha ha ha,
Speaker 1: puny humans. I say that is true, And that's where
Speaker 1: the fluorescent powder coating the inside of the tube comes
Speaker 1: into play. Stuff like phosphor will give off light or fluoresce,
Speaker 1: or if you really want to make it easy to understand,
Speaker 1: you could just say glow when exposed to certain types
Speaker 1: of energy, such as ultra violet light. So the light
Speaker 1: given off by the vaporized mercury is invisible to we
Speaker 1: puny humans, but the light given off by the fluorescing
Speaker 1: phosphor isn't. And that's how fluorescent lamps generate light. G
Speaker 1: E engineers figured out how to make the fluorescent light
Speaker 1: bulb in a way that was efficient and suitable for
Speaker 1: actual applications as opposed to interesting lab experiments. And the
Speaker 1: fluorescent lamp had some distinct advantages and a few disadvantages
Speaker 1: compared to incandescent lamps. For one, it was more energy efficient.
Speaker 1: It required less energy to generate an equivalent 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
Speaker 1: what's the typical incandescent lightbulb 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 prefer
Speaker 1: the warmer light from an incandescent bulb. In ninety nine,
Speaker 1: a remarkable woman named Katherine Burr joined the ge Research Laboratory.
Speaker 1: She was the first woman to be part of the
Speaker 1: g E Research leavel, 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 ninety g E began to relay TV broadcasts from
Speaker 1: New York City to its television station w r g B,
Speaker 1: which was in Schenectady, New York, and this would set
Speaker 1: the path for the development of television networks TV stations
Speaker 1: that would end up carrying the broadcast of neighboring stations,
Speaker 1: and this would follow the path that was pioneered by
Speaker 1: radio networks like NBC. Now, by this time, much of
Speaker 1: the world was already involved in World War Two, and
Speaker 1: as it became more apparent that the US would likely
Speaker 1: become of it as well, the government and particularly the
Speaker 1: military began to seek out innovation from American companies to
Speaker 1: augment the military capabilities of the United States. GE would
Speaker 1: work on many of those projects, including the design and
Speaker 1: production of the first jet engine in the United States,
Speaker 1: called the I A. Now I should stress that this
Speaker 1: was not the first jet engine in the world. Other
Speaker 1: countries had already produced jet engines, but it would be
Speaker 1: the first one designed and produced in the United States.
Speaker 1: It was largely based off the design of a British
Speaker 1: jet engine called the Power Jets W DOT two B
Speaker 1: The I A was essentially a prototype jet engine, the
Speaker 1: result 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 g E Capital, which is a financial
Speaker 1: services company within General Electric. It was sort of evolved
Speaker 1: from an earlier division called the General Electric Contracts Corporation.
Speaker 1: That one formed in nineteen thirty two as a way
Speaker 1: to help customers purchase GE products through various finance plans.
Speaker 1: Because that was around the time of the Great Depression,
Speaker 1: so people who wanted appliances couldn't really afford to buy
Speaker 1: them outright, 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 general. Electric demonstrated the first commercial use
Speaker 1: of radar, a 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 six,
Speaker 1: the company would design and produce the world's most popular
Speaker 1: jet engine. It was called the J forty seven, capable
Speaker 1: of providing up to five thousand pounds of thrust per engine.
Speaker 1: The company and others licensed to produce the J forty
Speaker 1: seven would build more than thirty thousand of the things
Speaker 1: over the following decades, and this engine was used in
Speaker 1: lots of different aircraft, including the Boeing B forty seven
Speaker 1: strato Jet, the Martin x B fifty one, the Conveyor
Speaker 1: B thirty six peacemaker, and the Republic XF ninety one
Speaker 1: thunder Scepter, in addition to many others. And if I
Speaker 1: ever get fired from tech stuff, I want to get
Speaker 1: a job naming jets, because that seems like it's a
Speaker 1: pretty cool gig. In nineteen forty nine, the U. S.
Speaker 1: Courts ruled on a case that had been working its
Speaker 1: way through the system for the better part of a decade,
Speaker 1: and it all had to do patents about light bulbs
Speaker 1: and lamps. The argument was essentially that through the control
Speaker 1: of patents, GE was restricting competition and practicing monopolistic company policies,
Speaker 1: which was a big no no and in violation of
Speaker 1: the Sherman Antitrust Act. The court decision stated that g
Speaker 1: E had made numerous undeniable contributions to the advancements of
Speaker 1: technology in general and the light bulb in particular, but
Speaker 1: it had also used its leverage to quote insulate itself
Speaker 1: from competition end quote. The finding cited numerous smaller companies
Speaker 1: that had been in the lamp manufacturing business but had
Speaker 1: either gone out of business or were entirely beholden to
Speaker 1: General Electric as licensees of the company's patents, and the
Speaker 1: ruling essentially stated that all those patents on lamp and
Speaker 1: lamp parts should be quote dedicated to the public end quote,
Speaker 1: and so General Electric was compelled to lease its patents
Speaker 1: on those particular technologies. Um the company certainly had performed
Speaker 1: in ways that gave it all the advantages, which again,
Speaker 1: from the perspective of a company, seems like a no brainer.
Speaker 1: You want to give yourself every chance of success. But
Speaker 1: from an external perspective that it looked like GE was
Speaker 1: a big bully, and so that was how this decision
Speaker 1: came down. In our next episode, we'll look at how
Speaker 1: General Electric played a big part in the space race,
Speaker 1: and we'll try and skip over a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: other stuff, because obviously this is going at a pretty
Speaker 1: slow pace, and for a company that's more than a
Speaker 1: hundred thirty years old, it's gonna take us a while.
Speaker 1: I finally take it in twenty year chunks. But in
Speaker 1: the meantime, if you guys have suggestions for other topics
Speaker 1: I should cover. Whether it's a company, a technology product,
Speaker 1: maybe a trend in tech, or just a general concept
Speaker 1: in tech and you want to know more about it,
Speaker 1: send me an email the addresses tech Stuff at how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Pop on over to our website
Speaker 1: that's text stuff podcast dot com. You'll find an archive
Speaker 1: of all of our past episodes. There. You also find
Speaker 1: links to where we are on social media, and you'll
Speaker 1: find a link to our online store, where every purchase
Speaker 1: you make goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it,
Speaker 1: and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff
Speaker 1: is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
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