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History

GE At 125: These Pioneers Helped Shape The Way We Live [Video]

Tomas Kellner
December 27, 2016
GE will be 125 years old in 2017, and the company has shaped many aspects of modernity we now take for granted. Over the last few years, we’ve visited pioneers such as Nick Holonyak, who developed in GE labs the first LED that emitted visible light, Joseph Sorota, who helped build the first American jet engine at GE Aviation, and Arnold Spielberg, who designed the computer that ran the first version of BASIC, the programming language that helped launch home computing.
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History

Kurt’s Cradle: Kurt Vonnegut was GE’s PR Man Before Becoming a Bestselling Author

November 30, 2016

Before Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote the bestsellers "Slaughterhouse Five" and "Cat’s Cradle," he lived near Schenectady, New York, and worked as a GE publicist. According to Vonnegut’s biographer Charles J.

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History

When This 3,000-Year-Old Mummy Finally Got Her Checkup, Doctors Discovered A Surprising Secret

Tomas Kellner
June 05, 2016

In 1909, a New York businessman named Samuel Brown traveled to Egypt to purchase a pair of ancient mummies for the Albany Institute of History and Art, where he served as a board member. Brown and generations of subsequent researchers believed that he brought home a female mummy dating from the 21st Dynasty and a male one from the Ptolemaic period.

But when Emory University Egyptologist Peter Lacovara visited the institute in the early 2000s, he felt that the female mummy wasn’t in the coffin in which she was originally buried. Maybe it wasn’t a mummy of a woman at all.

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History

The Home Front: Victory In Europe Was Won On The Beaches Of Normandy As Well As The Shores Of Lake Erie

Tomas Kellner
May 05, 2016
Airplane designed Larry Bell is climbing into the cockpit of the XP-59, the first U.S.-made jet. Image credit: Museum of Innovation and Science Schenectady
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History

The GE Store & GE Digital In 1964

Tomas Kellner
March 04, 2016
Both the GE Store - the idea that GE moves forward faster when its businesses share knowledge and technologies - and GE Digital - which is connecting machines to the cloud over the Industrial Internet - go way back at GE. Take a look at the photograph above from a 1964 issue of GE's Monogram magazine.
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An X-Ray Selfie with a Mummy? Explore the World’s Museums During Twitter’s #MuseumWeek

March 27, 2015
Every day, the New York Museum of Modern Art’s invaluable collections draw droves of visitors with gems like Henri Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy, The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
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Here Comes the Jet! Lost Film About the Jet Engine’s Top Secret Origins Found in GE Archives

March 09, 2015
In 1942, a group of GE engineers working in secret for ten months built America’s first jet engine. Their mission was to win the war, but they ended up shrinking the world. “They called us the Hush-Hush Boys,” says Joseph Sorota, one of the last living veterans of the project, who just turned 95.
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When Oscar Was Just Another Name: Hollywood's History Starts With 50 Seconds of Horseplay

March 01, 2014

“Monkeyshines” is very likely the first film shot in the United States. Movie pioneers William Heise and William K. L. Dickson made it for Edison Labs in 1889 or 1890.

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It’s a Wrap: GE, NBC Part Ways, Together They’ve Changed History

February 12, 2013
The sale of GE’s remaining stake in NBC Universal (NBCU) to Comcast today caps a historic, century-long journey for the two companies that gave birth to modern home entertainment. Together they’ve built the first TV and radio sets, pioneered commercial broadcasting, and launched the consumer electronics industry.
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Thomas Goes to Hollywood: There is Hardly an Industry that Thomas Edison Did Not Touch. New Book Gives Kids (and Adults) a Tour of His Genius

July 26, 2012

Where do tattoo needles come from? Once upon a time, there was a great inventor called the Wizard of Menlo Park. His name was Thomas Edison. One day, he built an electric pen designed to relieve clerks of the drudgery of duplicating documents. It had a sharp vibrating needle inside that traced text written on a sheet of paper. The needle punctured the text 50 times per second and turned it into a stencil. Ink would seep through the tiny holes and replicate the writing on sheets placed underneath.

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