History

The first of many appliances designed to make life in the kitchen easier, GE's first electric toaster, the model D-12, is placed on the market.

Recognizing that an essential element to doing business is capitalization and cash flow, GE organizes The Electric Bond and Share Co. to provide financing to small utilities; this is the precursor of GE's Commercial Finance division.

On Christmas Eve, 1906, the world's first voice radio broadcast passes into history. Behind that event stands a young General Electric engineer, Ernst Frederick Werner Alexanderson, who spent the previous two years designing and constructing the high-frequency alternator that makes the broadcast possible.

An early pioneer in electric locomotives, GE supplies 30 of these 94-ton gearless electric locomotives to the New York Central R.R. for use in Grand Central Station. Two 2800 hp locomotives, coupled together, are able to haul the heaviest loads yet handled.

The GE Research Lab's William D. Coolidge develops the ductile tungsten filament, making Edison's incandescent lamp far more efficient and creating the material still in use in light bulbs today.

Another appliance first improves life in the kitchen as GE helps us use electricity to cook: the Hotpoint, the first electric range, is manufactured.

Where would we be without electronics? GE improvements in vacuum tube design help make possible modern electronics and radio. These inventions are another radical transformation of our world, as for the first time events in remote places can be brought into our homes as they happen.

Construction is completed of the first electrically propelled U.S. Navy vessel, the 20,000 ton collier, U.S.S. Jupiter, which features a 7000 hp turbine GE generator.

Plastic enters our lives with important applications as an electrical insulator. The molding of plastic parts as insulation material is begun using phenolic resins in GE's newly formed Plastics Department.