General Electric

One of the original 12 companies on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, General Electric (GE) is now the world's largest company, with products ranging from jet engines and television shows to lightbulbs and trivection ovens. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jeff Immelt named nanotechnology one of GE's top three priorities in 2004, and in a subsequent interview with Fortune magazine about GE's research and development (R&D) plans said, “Molecular medicine—we're going to own it. Nanotechnology—we're going to own it.”

General Electric was formed in 1892 by the merger between the Thomson-Houston Company and Edison [Page 272]General Electric, two companies that had each been formed in recent years in order to organize multiple patents and business interests under a single umbrella (in GE's case, those of inventor Thomas Edison). In the first half of the 20th century, GE was concerned primarily with power generation and aircraft parts, developing the first jet engine in 1941. GE Aviation quickly became one of the leading aircraft engine manufacturers.

In the 1960s, GE was small compared to the IBM's of the computer industry, alongside Burroughs, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, NCR, RCA, and UNI-VAC. Already a company of significant size, in the 1950s GE had been the largest computer consumer, apart from the federal government. Like most computer manufacturers of the time, GE focused mostly on computers designed for specific purposes, though the GE 200, GE 400, and GE 600 series were offered as general-purpose computers. The GE 600 series was the most advanced of these, a 36-bit magnetic tape-using mainframe primarily of interest as a time-sharing computer in the scientific community. The GE experiment with mainframes ended in 1970, when it sold its computer division to Honeywell, ending its smaller presence.

Much of the history of GE has been propelled by R&D, explorations of new territory, and a shifting product and services portfolio as a result of acquisitions on the one hand and the sale or spin-off of divisions on the other. In the 21st century, GE bought the television and movie assets of media conglomerate Vivendi, and has been active in exploring time-shifted forms of television viewing, with stakes in Hulu and TiVo and long-standing deals with the Apple iTunes Store and Comcast On Demand. Other 21st-century GE acquisitions have been as diverse as the credit card unit of the Dillard's department store (2004), medical software firm IDX Systems (2006), and Smiths Aerospace (2007).

GE is headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, but is more strongly associated with its New York offices at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Rockefeller Center; GE or RCA has been associated with Rockefeller Center since its construction in the 1930s.

Though associated most strongly with the lightbulb and with household appliances (a division it plans to sell off despite having the fourth most-recognized brand name in the world), over half of GE's revenue comes from its financial services, and it's one of the largest lenders in the world. Among the current divisions of GE are GE Capital, GE Consumer & Industrial

(one of the world's largest appliance manufacturers), GE Technology Infrastructure (including GE Aviation, the largest aircraft engine manufacturer in the world), and GE Energy Infrastructure.

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