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The Old GE, 1886-1986
Chapter 5: Proteus (1892-1912)

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This information is from pp. 90-124 of The Old GE, 1886-1986 by Dr. George Wise (2024). It is copyrighted by Dr. Wise and reproduced here with his permission.

Some linked sources may require use of America's News [SCPL library card required] or JSTOR, which is available at Union College's Schaffer Library.

The newspapers headlined it "An Electric Triumph." On June 30, 1895, electric power was transmitted from a new power station at Niagara Falls, received at a nearby factory, and put to work. The destination was the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, a company located less than a mile from the Falls. Honored guests at the triumph included, the newspapers reported, "Mr. Stillwell of the Westinghouse Company, and Mr. Greene, Professor Thomson and Mr. Steinmetz of the General Electric Company." (128)

The news clipping raises immediate questions. If it was the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, what was it doing at Niagara Falls? What was it reducing? What does all this have to with the history of the Old GE? The answers are hinted at in a single word near the end of the excerpt: Proteus. That word not only identified one major participant. It also suggests the particular emerging role of that new technology of electricity.

Proteus, Charles Steinmetz's self chosen middle name, began as a nickname given to him by university classmates at Breslau for the breadth and accessibility of his knowledge. Proteus was a Greek God able to take on many forms. Here that ability is used in its adjective form, protean. In the mid 19th century, scientists introduced a new concept called energy. It united many familiar phenomena, such as heat, light, motion and chemical change in one protean concept. Later in that century, electricity would emerge as the best way to exploit these protean possibilities of energy. It was those protean possibilities that put the General in General Electric. That generality came to mean equipment to convert other forms of energy to electromagnetic energy, to get that electromagnetic energy to a place where energy was needed, and then to convert that electromagnetic energy into the particular form of energy needed at that particular place.

As earlier mentioned, the financiers who created General Electric in 1892 had no such grand purpose in mind. They had the more specific goal of stabilizing prices for light bulbs and street railway motors by suppressing competition. The company then passed from the hands of the financiers to those of Charles Coffin and his shoemakers. As it did, a question arose. Would GE remain that narrowly defined competition-stabilizing Specifically Electric company that the financiers initially intended? Or would it become a more vaguely defined protean-possibility-exploring Generally Electric that the financiers more expansive name choice suggested?

As Specifically Electric, the Old GE prevented excess competition that would result in too rapidly falling prices. It did this through exploring the limits of the law. The exploration focused on two areas of the law, antitrust and patents. Some might describe that exploration in less benign terms. For example, it might be called breaking the law, or using the letter of the law to violate its spirit.

In contrast, as Generally Electric, the Old GE participated strongly in electrical innovation. It did so by assembling strong teams of various kinds of professional technologists and skilled workers at works, factories, and laboratories under the direction of a leaders with access to lots of money. The result was rarely invention and discovery by GE. It was rather innovation and improvement carried out with many other actors in a process that mixed competition and cooperation.

Which was more characteristic of the Old GE. Was it the innovating and improving Generally Electric? Or was it the limits-of-the-law exploring, competition suppressing Specifically Electric? That is the question this chapter addresses. This issue will be illustrated by two campaigns of innovation and improvement. In one, developing the Universal System of electricity GE played a supporting role. In the other, improving the light bulb, GE played a leading role. In both, success depended on electricity's superiority over all other energy transmission and distribution methods at exploiting energy's protean possibilities.

Consider first the search for a Universal System of electricity use. The 1880s had seen a stalemate between two ways of delivering electricity, direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC). The conceptually simpler, less costly, DC prevailed in densely populated cities. AC was more complicated and required additional equipment. It could, however, transmit electricity economically over much longer distances. This made it superior where customer locations were less densely packed.

By 1890, AC transmission distances were still increasing, widening its advantage. On the other hand, electric trolleys that ran on DC were dominating urban transportation. Stationary DC electric motors were finding increasing use in industries such as mining. The brand new field of electrochemistry also demanded DC. Was there a system that enabled the use of both AC and DC? Was there, in other words, a Universal System?

The emergence of the Universal System would be a transatlantic mixture of competition and cooperation among a large roster of individuals, companies, colleges, universities, and countries. It was far from mainly a U.S. story, much less mainly a GE story. Developing the Universal System required a command of science and engineering much closer to the leading edge of knowledge than had the first generation DC and AC systems. That knowledge mainly resided in Europe. The most important contributor had been a Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell. He had in the 1860s turned Michael Faraday's electromagnetic intuitions into a mathematical theory. By the 1880s that theory was widely being taught at European universities, but was only beginning to enter those of the U.S. So in this more theoretically based round of electrical innovation the U.S. started at a disadvantage compared to Europe. GE, in turn, started at a disadvantage compared to its remaining large U.S. competitor Westinghouse. In 1888, George Westinghouse had widened that advantage by buying a key patent from an independent inventor trained in European academia and industry.

That inventor was a Serbian immigrant named Nikola Tesla. He had been earlier employed and brought to the U.S. by Edison. In 1886-87, having gone out on his own, he (and, simultaneously and independently an Italian physics professor, Galileo Ferraris) had invented the first potentially generally useful AC electric motor, the AC induction motor, and the system required to run it, the polyphase AC system. (129)

The AC induction motor eliminates the most problematic part of the DC motor, the commutator. That commutator reverses one magnetic field within the motor, enabling it to chase a second magnetic field in a circle, giving the motor its rotary motion. The commutator can wear out or get out of alignment, reducing motor reliability.

In the AC induction motor, the magnet chasing is produced not by contacts opened and closed by that commutator, but by electromagnetic induction, that contactless phenomenon discovered by Michael Faraday. No physical contact or frequent making and breaking of an electical circuit is required. This leads to far greater reliability, making, for example the modern form of household refrigerator practical (not to mention the motor driving a 21st century electic automobile named after that Serbian-American inventor).

For electric power systems to use the AC induction motor, a wholly new system of circuitry, from generator to motor, was required. This new system, polyphase AC, sends electricity through not just one electrical AC circuit, but through two or three of them arranged side by side. The timing of the peaks and troughs of the AC wave carried by each circuit (the phase) leads or lags the other peaks and troughs by a small fraction of a second. These multiple phases play a role analogous to multiple cylinders in an automobile engine. They power rotary motion more evenly and with more torque than a single phase in an electric motor, or a single cylinder in a gasoline engine.

Polyphase AC would eventually, despite its added complexity, become universally useful. At first however, in 1888-1890, it was only potentially useful. Even with the consulting aid of Tesla, George Westinghouse and his engineering team initially failed to turn it into an innovation. In 1890, under financial pressure, Westinghouse temporarily suspended the effort.

By then the technologically superior European companies had raced into the lead. The German Company AEG and the Swiss Company Oerlikon built by 1890 the first really useful AC induction motors. All of a sudden, that AC induction motor, previously confined to low power and low torque, could compete with and often surpass DC motors.

Then, in 1891, those two European companies demonstrated the beginnings of a Universal System. At a time when most electricity transmission was less than five miles, Oerlikon and AEG used polyphase AC to electrify the electrical world. They generated electricity in three phases at a water power site on the Nekar River at Lauffen, Germany. They then transmitted it 111 miles to Frankfurt Germany. There, in an exhibition, it drove AC induction motors more powerful than any previously demonstrated. (130)

That got the attention of Thomson-Houston Vice President of Engineering, Wilbur Rice, who visited that Frankfurt Exhibition. His company then hired a Swedish electrical engineer, Ernst Danielson, to bring to Thomson-Houston the successful European advances in induction motors and polyphase. This help enabled the company to recommission a DC transmission line it was attempting unsuccessfully to build for the Hartford, CT Electric Co. It became first Thomson-Houston's, and then GE's, first development project using polyphase AC. Even with Danielson's help, however, GE lagged far behind Oerlikon and AEG.

The major initial U.S. contribution to the Universal System was not from GE or Westinghouse. Indeed, it did not involve technology leadership at all. It was leadership in finance, and possession of a unique natural resource. That resource was Niagara Falls. In 1890 it offered the world's most promising combination of massive concentrated water power and accessibility. Why not tap some 20 MW of the power of that falls, and send it 22 miles to the booming industrial city of Buffalo NY? A new company, the Cataract Construction Co. set out to do this. It attracted in 1890 an investment of $2 million from many of the top names in U.S. finance including J. P. Morgan. The company's president, banker Edward Adams, secured expert advice that proposed an innovative way to tap that power. Bypass the falls with a water tunnel, put a central power station in the tunnel, and then transmit energy to customers. (131)

Suggested methods of energy transmission ranged from electricity to wire cables to hydraulics to compressed air. To choose among them Adams in 1890 staged a competition with monetary awards (first prize £2000, about $10,000). Fifteen plans were submitted, almost all from Europe. Notably missing from the competition was Edison General Electric. It was focused on electric lighting and transportation, was entering the application of DC motors to industry, and was just beginning research on AC. It was not ready for a project on such a large scale as Niagara. Thomson-Houston and Westinghouse were ready. Both had developed both DC and AC systems, and both were achieving power transmission distances greater than five miles. Their absence from the competition was not because they lacked capability. George Westinghouse remarked that the Cataract Construction Company was offering to pay $10,000 for information he estimated as worth $100,000. His contribution was, as mentioned earlier, to recommend not electricity at all, but compressed air.

None of the entries won that £2000 first prize. The competition did have, however, a positive result. One competitor, British electrical engineer George Forbes was appointed in 1892 as the Cataract Corporation's chief consultant. He championed polyphase AC as the energy transmission method. Official announcement of that choice by the Cataract Corporation on May 6, 1893 marked the beginning of the creation of the Universal System. (132)

It was logical for Cataract Construction to commission a European company, the world leaders in polyphase AC, to lead the project. Adams tried to do just that. First he invited electrical engineer Charles Eugene Launcelot Brown, the Swiss born son of a British engineer and a principal figure in the Lauffen-Frankfort demonstration, to come to Niagara and set up a new electrical manufacturing company. Brown chose instead to create his own company in Switzerland. In the 21st century it would merge with a major Swedish competitor. That company, now ASEA Brown Boveri, is still a world leader in electrical manufacturing. Adams next invited Oerlikon and AEG to submit bids for a polyphase system for Niagara. However, after adding in the cost of the 40% U.S. tariff and the 10% transportation cost, Adams decided that the European companies were too expensive.

Only then, in 1893, did Adams and Forbes turn to the American companies. For Westinghouse, the Lauffen-Frankfurt demonstration had been a signal to resume induction motor and Polyphase AC efforts. In 1892 it had developed a full two phase system, which it would display at Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition. So in 1893 it was able to meet, and even improve on, the Cataract Construction Company's requirements.

For General Electric it was a game of catch up. Dana Greene was brought from Schenectady to Lynn to lead the effort. Though Ernst Danielson had returned to Europe in 1893, a capable team, including engineers Henry Reist and Henry Parshall, physicist Louis Bell and calculator Charles Steinmetz, remained at Lynn to provide the advanced knowledge needed for the effort. In 1893 the GE team installed the first commercial polyphase system in the U.S. at Redlands, CA. This was, however, proposed and led not by GE itself, but by pioneer, but by the consulting engineer of the Redlands Light and Power Company, Almarin Decker. He had insisted on, specified, and provided the initial design for the polyphase AC system used at Redlands. (133)

Perhaps indicating the fast follower urgency of that General Electric effort was an 1893 incident. There was found in an office at the General Electric Lynn Works some copies of blueprints for equipment being built by Westinghouse. A Westinghouse spokesman claimed they had been stolen from a Pittsburgh drafting room. This led to an indictment, and a trial that ended in a hung jury. (134)

Whether or not it had been assisted by industrial espionage, General Electric did succeed in demonstrating a polyphase system in 1893 at that year's Chicago Exposition. It used the three phases pioneered by that European 1891 Lauffen-Frankfurt demonstration and by Almarin Decker. That three phase idea, which would ultimately prove superior to Tesla and Westinghouse's two phases.

In 1893 the Cataract Construction Company requested bids from both Westinghouse and GE for generators based on the Forbes design. The competition resulted, deservedly, in a win for Westinghouse. Though smaller and less wealthy than its major competitor, Westinghouse had bet its future in polyphase AC, and won the bet. Its generators would, in April, 1895, send, from Niagara Power House Number One the first polyphase AC electricity generated from Niagara Falls.

General Electric found that loss to a smaller competitor perhaps embarrassing, but not damaging. The Cataract Construction Company wanted to maintain two competing suppliers. So it quickly offered other contracts to General Electric. For example, General Electric got the contract to build the 22 mile long, 10,000 volt transmission line from Niagara Falls to Buffalo.

In 1894, the General Electric polyphase AC effort moved from Lynn to Schenectady. At that time, a problem with the Universal System remained. Polyphase AC would indeed prove to be the best way to transmit electric power, and the induction motor would prove to be an excellent way to turn electrical energy into mechanical energy. There persisted, however, important places where DC power was needed. One was in electric railways. AC railway motors were possible, but would remain for some time inferior to DC. Another exclusively DC need involved chemistry.

It was this kind of chemical need that led to the "Electric Triumph" featured in that 1895 headline that began this chapter. The very first polyphase AC transmission of electric power from Niagara Falls went not over the 22 miles to Buffalo, but to the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, located less than a mile from the Falls. There electricity would be used to help turn aluminum oxide, a common mineral found in clay, into the then rare metal aluminum . Previously made at Pittsburgh with coal powered electricity, aluminum had been an expensive specialty metal. Now, made with inexpensive electricity from Niagara, aluminum would become an inexpensive commodity metal. Ultimately its uses would range from automobile parts to kitchen foil. The Pittsburgh Reduction Company would change its name to Alcoa.

In the early 20th century, more of Niagara's power would be used in such electrochemical applications than would be used at Buffalo. Those electrochemical applications required DC power. So did the main application at Buffalo, electric street railways. So to make a truly Universal System required DC. This in turn required a way of converting polyphase AC into DC. Fortunately, that conversion method already existed.

It began with an obvious and well known idea. One way to convert AC to DC was to use an AC induction motor to drive a DC generator. In 1887, an independent inventor named Charles Bradley was the first to take an only slightly less obvious step and combine motor and generator in a single machine. He asked his attorney to apply for a patent on the device. That attorney, Charles Curtis, was himself a significant inventor. He told Bradley that the device was insufficiently novel, non-obvious and useful to qualify as an invention. Fortunately for Bradley, Curtis' law partner was less fastidious. He applied for and got a patent for Bradley on this device, soon named the rotary converter. (135)

This turned also to be fortunate for General Electric. For Bradley's first stretch as an independent inventor and manufacturer was a brief one. He and his patents were in 1890 acquired by Thomson-Houston. Though he returned to independent invention, his patent became, with the 1892 merger, the property of General Electric. So when Benjamin Lamme, the leading electrical equipment designer at Westinghouse, developed improved versions of this seemingly obvious conversion method, he was in for an unpleasant surprise. He and his company learned that this important piece of the Universal System was protected by a rival company's patent.

So that choice of honored guests, presented at the beginning of this chapter, was appropriate. Lewis Stillwell was the head of the Niagara Falls project of Westinghouse, the company that was both the U.S. pioneer of polyphase AC and builder of those first Niagara generators. Elihu Thomson had much earlier led the initial entry of Thomson-Houston into AC and came close to anticipating the invention of the induction motor. Dana Greene led Edison General Electric's belated entry into AC, and then General Electric's rise to polyphase AC parity. Finally, the contributions of Charles Proteus Steinmetz were so varied and significant as to deserve a more detailed description.

Steinmetz indeed suggested design improvements to the transformers and rotary converter used in the Pittsburgh Reduction Company project. His contribution to the GE polyphase AC efforts, however, went much deeper. His ascent through the U.S. engineering profession had begun in 1890. By careful observation and simple mathematics, he had solved a puzzle about unexpected energy losses in electric motors and generators.

The explanation was labeled "Steinmetz's law of hysteresis". The word hysteresis, Greek for memory, indicated that in electric motors, a transitory applied magnetic field left a persisting magnetic effect, a sort of magnetic memory. Steinmetz's discovery was not actually a law of science. It was an experimentally determined empirical correlation. By any name, however, it was both extremely helpful to designers of electric motors, and suggestive to later physicists who did develop theories of magnetic effects.

Then, in 1891, while still with his first U.S. employer, Rudolf Eickemeyer, a fortunate circumstance enabled Steinmetz to shift his focus from experiment to theory. Eickemeyer's company, with its innovative electric motors, had become a bidding target among the three electrical manufacturing leaders, Edison General Electric, Thomson-Houston, and Westinghouse. (At this time, Steinmetz preferred Westinghouse). While the bidding went on, the Eickemeyer company's business slowed down. As Steinmetz wrote to a German friend in 1893:

While negotiations were in progress the Eickemeyer Co. performed no experiments. The regular business was done by the other electrical engineers so I had nothing to do and carried on scientific investigations or wrote mathematical treatises. (136)

He chose to combine science and mathematics and explore ways to simplify the application of Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism. This would prove to be the most important display of his electrical genius. Of what did that electrical genius actually consist? An engineering (and socialist) colleague, Vladimir Karpetoff of Cornell, put it best: Steinmetz generated electricity from the square root of minus one.

That is, while a student of mathematics at Breslau, Steinmetz had learned about a concept called imaginary numbers, of which that square root of minus one is the canonical example. Meanwhile, other European geniuses, such as Britain's James Clerk Maxwell and Oliver Heaviside, were developing a mathematical version of the laws of electromagnetism. Unfortunately, to even understand their original versions, you had to be a genius yourself.

Steinmetz, at the beginning of the 1890s, became a leader among a small group of engineers who recognized that the concept of imaginary numbers enabled the translation of those previously genius-level laws into a sort of algebra that an ordinary engineer could not only understand but also apply. Steinmetz did not invent this idea of an imaginary number based algebra of electromagnetic theory. It was his hearing the use of the idea in an 1892 lecture by an American electrical engineer, Arthur Kennelly, that prompted Steinmetz to explore this idea. His intensive study during that free time at the Eickemeyer company enabled Steinmetz to make a comprehensive follow up. He presented that comprehensive version in his own 1893 lecture to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. That presentation became the first generally useful and influential expression of electromagnetic theory as imaginary number algebra. It was the peak achievement of Steinmetz's life. (137)

Using that algebra, he introduced systematic methods for the design of induction motors, transformers, generators and other electrical equipment. Ascending far above his initial title as calculator, by 1900 he would earn the formal title of Chief Consulting Engineer of General Electric, and the nickname "the Supreme Court."

As such he participated in the competition with Westinghouse. Competition was, however, only part of the story, and perhaps the smaller part. While the company teams competed the individual technologists collaborated. They formed technical societies, set standards, and expanded engineering education. Steinmetz, for example, while keeping his GE job, joined the faculty at Schenectady's Union College and created its Electrical Engineering program. In 1923 Union supplied 20 entrants to the Schenectady Works Test Program, more than any other college or university. (138)

As Steinmetz participated in these efforts, he and his Westinghouse counterpart Benjamin Garver Lamme were much more than merely competitors. They worked together on setting those electrical standards, mentoring young engineers, organizing a professional society for electrical experts, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE, now IEEE). They even shared lists of their favorite science fiction books and exchanged thoughts on world politics.

Steinmetz, though deserving the attention he drew, was far from the whole story of General Electric's contribution to the universal system. Other more practical engineers, such as GE's Sidney Paine, sold this new way of using energy to old industries. An example was one of America's oldest industries, cotton spinning. (139)

The movement in the late 19th century of that industry from New England to the South had not been driven by energy considerations. The driver was lower labor costs by the exploitation of poor whites and child labor. Energy could be supplied sufficiently cheaply by direct application of water power.

So it was an impressive feat of salesmanship in 1892 for Paine to sell the new and costly idea of polyphase AC to the owner and the technical consultant of a new cotton mill at Columbia, SC. He was aided by topography. The best location for the new cotton mill was atop a hill. This ruled out direct water power from the nearby Columbia River. Electric power could most cheaply be provided by DC. Two competitors had offered this solution at half the price of Paine's polyphase AC proposal. Paine countered by explaining that GE had tried DC at a cotton mill in Connecticut. The DC motors could not provide the constant rotation speed needed by cotton mill spindles. An AC induction motor, by contrast, had an inherently constant rotation speed.

This argument won him the order. It came at a bad time, as GE's 1892-1893 financial troubles were beginning to surface. Indeed, the GE Executive Committee intially declared, in August, 1892, that "the proposed contract with the Columbia Mills Company was discussed" and "this committee witholds its appproval for this contract." Fortunately for GE, when recovery began a year later the opportunity was still open. (140)

The subsequent success of that GE powered Columbia Mills plant became the model for a slow but steady increase of the use of polyphase AC to drive Southern cotton mills. That increase did not happen overnight. The many further innovations and improvements needed to adapt the induction motor to the needs of cotton spinning and many other industries have been detailed by historian Ulrich Wengenroth. "Before electrification could succeed," he wrote, "what was really needed was that the new motors accommodate the way industrial production was organized." This required significant improvements in such technologies as gears and speed control. (141)

That effort took decades. By 1920, however, the versatle, reliable polyphase AC induction motor, in ratings from 10 to 7200 horsepower, was doing everything, said a GE publicist,"from running an ice cream freezer to turning the propellor shaft of a battleship." (142)

At Schenectady by 1920, some 2500 GE employees, 508 of them women, were annually producing 25,000 induction motors. The rapidity of this induction motor and polyphase conversion should not be exaggerated. In 1900, only 5% of U.S. industry's mechanical power was delivered by electricity, the rest coming directly from water power or steam engines. Most of that electricity was still DC. It would not be until the 1920s that more than half of U.S. industry's mechanical power was delivered electrically, by then mainly via polyphase AC. (143)

Still, it was in the 1890s that the vision emerged. It provided a new way to jump start General Electric's stagnant sales and profits. The writer of the company's 1896 Annual Report had gloomily pointed out the devastating effect of the recent depression, and of more recent Westinghouse competition, on sales and profits of established products. Turning to the future, however, he waxed Whitmanesque. He heard America singing the music of polyphase, via "the operation of milk tramways, cranes, elevator pump hoists, coal cutters, drills, picks, blowers, air compressors, draw bridges, printing presses, powder mills, the operation of turrets and the training of guns, and machines of all sizes, large and small."

Even, however, with polyphase AC, big hydroelectric generators, transmission at tens of thousands of volts over tens of miles, the AC induction motor, the rotary converter, and installations ranging from Southern cotton mills to Western waterfalls, the Universal System was not quite complete. Water power was electrifying the far west, and the Niagara region of Western New York. Most places east of the Mississippi, however, were not within convenient transmission distance of Niagara or a comparable water power. What was needed was a sort of Land Niagara — a means of using coal at any location to produce electricity that would approach the cost reduction offered by Niagara. The conventional method for driving electrical generators, the steam engine, could not do this. It was too low in capacity and efficiency.

Pressure for this next key piece of the Universal System came not from inventors but from customers. They will be exemplified here by a man who was last seen in 1892, leaving Schenectady and the new General Electric Company to take a significant pay cut to become President of the Chicago Edison Company, then just one of many small and unprofitable electric companies in the Chicago vicinity. This was Samuel Insull. In the 1890s he began his shaping of the U.S. electric utility industry. He applied to Chicago Edison a profit-increasing technique he had used successfully at the Edison Machine Works. This was exploiting economies of scale. More powerful electricity generators might produce energy for fewer cents per kilowatt hour than smaller generators. Those big machines could be concentrated in a few big power stations instead of being dispersed among many small ones. So construction costs could also be cut. The older small power stations could be converted to substations to distribute power locally. Those substations could hold rotary converters to serve applications needing DC. To make it work, however, a piece was still missing: that Land Niagara.

It came, as polyphase AC had, from Europe. As a frequent visitor there, Insull was aware by the late 1890s that Europeans had invented a promising step in that Land Niagara direction. It was called the steam turbine. It was conceptually simple. A series of metal pinwheels spun around inside a metal cylinder. The pinwheels were driven round and round by a blast of steam. The steam entered fast, hot and at high pressure at one end. It left slow, cool and at low pressure at the other.

That idea had been around for centuries. Hundreds of attempts had failed to produce a practical machine. Only with the 19th century advances in thermodynamics and stronger metals did the idea become an invention. By 1880 two inventors had solved the steam turbine problem independently and nearly simultaneously, though in different ways. Gustaf de Laval of Sweden had invented a very high speed small steam turbine initially used for driving cream separators. Charles Parsons of Great Britain, the younger son of a duke and a trained engineer, developed a slower speed bigger steam turbine initially for ship propulsion. Both inventors were, by the 1890s, applying their inventions to electric power generation.

By the 1890s it was becoming clear that 5 MW, the power of the largest steam engine then in use, was about as powerful as a steam engine was ever going to get. Those reciprocating dinosaurs were too bulky and slow for future use in the power stations of the Universal System. Recognizing this, U.S. electrical manufacturers went to Europe to explore patent rights on the turbine inventions of Parsons and de Laval. General Electric was, in 1897, offered a license on the Parsons turbine. Vice President of Manufacturing and Engineering Wilbur Rice called on Steinmetz for advice.

Steinmetz replied that General Electric would indeed need to build steam turbines if it hoped to be a leader in electrical manufacturing. The Parsons turbine, however, was the not the one to build. It required too many parts and too tight tolerances. General Electric should seek a better approach. Rice did turn down the Parsons license, which was taken up by Westinghouse. At Schenectady a team under John Kruesi designed and built its own small experimental steam turbine. A witness to the first startup recalled it emitting a horrible squeal, then shutting down for good. It was then carried off to a remote part of the Works and unceremoniously buried.

At this point, in 1897, an independent inventor came to General Electric. He brought his own turbine idea, and a proposal for a joint venture. The inventor was Charles Curtis. He was encountered earlier as the patent attorney who turned down Charles Bradley's proposed rotary converter patent. Like Bradley's rotary converter (and, indeed, like most technology advances) the Curtis Turbine was a combination of previous ideas. In this case those were the inventions of De Laval and Parsons. That Curtis' design became covered by a strong U.S. Patent may have owed as much to the legal skills of Curtis the patent attorney as to the originality of Curtis the inventor.

Rice recommended purchase of both the rights to use the Curtis turbine patents, and the services of Curtis as a consultant at Schenectady. Royalty fees would be determined later should the project succeed. (144)

In 1897-1898, Schenectady's first experimental Curtis turbines were built under Curtis' supervision. They failed to show superiority over steam engines. There was some question about continuing the development effort. Before giving up, Rice asked for one more opinion. This was from engineer William Le Roy Emmet. He was fresh off successfully contributing to the Niagara effort. There he had become familiar with the powerful hydro turbines driving the 5 MW generators. This familiarity would play a significant part in the steam turbine story.

Emmet's favorable arguments helped save the project. There was, however, another reason to continue. Westinghouse had not only licensed that more complex Parsons turbine, but was claiming to be succeeding with it, even to the point of taking orders. (Actually, Westinghouse was encountering difficulties similar in seriousness, though different in kind, to General Electric's). Emmet was chosen to lead a redoubled GE development effort. (145)

William Le Roy Emmet's path from the Naval Academy to engineering leadership was more rocky than those of his fellow Annapolis graduates Frank Sprague and Dana Greene. They had used top of the class academic performance to earn special assignments as naval electrical experts. This eased their transition to electric railway entrepreurship. Emmet finished near the bottom of his class. After a round the world cruise, he had been honorably discharged from the Navy in a year of budget austerity. He descended to the role of a common laborer. It was, he said, a dismal fate for a man who had recently commanded deck watches on a man of war. Emmet also, however, studied up on electricity, and got a job with Sprague. Within a decade, he was respected enough to be offered the job of chief engineer of the Niagara Power Plant. Turning it down, he took up design responsibilities at Schenectady. (146)

As an engineer and manager of engineers, he was an iconoclast and individualist, blending contradictory qualities. He could be irascible, but also inspire teamwork and loyalty. He could be well organized, but also be absent minded enough, or at least so he claimed in his memoirs, to be seen on the first tee of Schenectady's Mohawk Golf Course without his trousers.

Under his leadership, General Electric's first successful experimental turbine was built. By 1899, a 500 kW Curtis Turbine was running in the Schenectady Works power house. A 1500 kW turbine would be delivered to the Port Huron Michigan Electric Co in 1901. This was fast progress. Soon, however, it was judged not fast enough. The judge was Samuel Insull. He was pursuing his scale up plans. He saw the steam turbine as essential, and his industry leadership as being challenged by the Hartford Electric Company. Hartford Electric was already beginning installation of a 1.5 MW Westinghouse Parsons turbine. Insull came directly to Charles Coffin, seeking to leapfrog his Hartford rival. Coffin offered a 2 MW Curtis turbine. No, Insull replied, he wanted a 5 MW turbine. After consulting Rice and Steinmetz, Coffin agreed. A measure of the high level level of risk involved can be seen both in architecture and in an unusual clause in the contract. Insull's Fisk St. Power House was built tall enough to hold the much bigger 5 MW steam engines, if their use as replacements for failed turbines became necessary. The two companies also agreed in advance to share the high costs that might result from the not unlikely event that the GE turbine proved a failure. This contrasted to the usual way of waiting until after failure to point fingers and perhaps initiate legal action. (147)

The effort did not fail. Two aspects of the success will be emphasized here because they illustrate general features of fast follower engineering. They are the mobilization of manufacturing skills, and what will be called here the conquest of dislocations of scale. A steam turbine generator has been described as a 200 ton watch. The manufacturing challenge combines gargantuan size with thousandth of an inch precision. Choice of the Curtis turbine over the Parsons turbine resulted in fewer parts and less demanding tolerances. It made manufacturing less difficult but far from easy. An advantage of a big company is the capability to put together quickly skills addressing both the large scale and the high precision. The company can quickly reassign workers already on hand.

To lead that manufacturing effort, Schenectady Works Manager Emmons picked Billy Madigan. As chief foreman of newest "big shop" of the Works, Building 60, he already managed 1500 men. He he had also already presided over the machining of some of the most demanding parts for that Chicago turbine when he was called on to be foreman of the entire turbine effort . Madigan was not colorful like Steinmetz, or eccentric like Emmet. "A pleasant-spoken quick moving master mechanic," is the way the GE Works News reporter described him. "He is all over the floor space, and as it covers about 11 acres of floor space one has to hunt for him." (148)

Under Madigan the lagging manufacturing program leading to that first 5 MW turbine was brought onto schedule. As it did, another feature of innovation emerged. Here it is called dislocation of scale. It refers to a new problem that often emerges when a so far successful innovation is scaled up in size or power. For example, when a steam turbine was increased in power output by a factor of three, new and unanticipated problems of balance, vibration, or control emerged. In scaling up GE's steam turbine from the previous 1.5 MW size to 5 MW, the dislocation of scale was in balancing. Steam turbines contain a series of disks spinning on a horizontal axis. Trying to raise the power output meant lengthening that axis. That tended to put the turbine out of balance. The resulting friction could unacceptably reduce efficiency.

Here Emmet drew on his experience at Niagara. The 5 MW hydro turbine generators there had a vertical axis. This made balancing easier. Why not try this with a steam turbine? Why not tip it on its end and spin it like a top? (149)

Emmet first tried this out on a 500 kW vertical turbine built for and shipped to a utility customer at Newport, RI. It worked fine in the Schenectady shop. When reassembled and turned on at Newport however, there soon arose loud discordant noises, indicating unacceptable vibration.

Fortunately, Emmet had accompanied the turbine to Newport. In a day of intense effort, he was able to devise and install a fix. He brought the fix back to Schenectady, and applied it to the 5 MW Chicago turbine. Without that Newport prototype, test, warning, and quick fix, this dislocation of scale might have caused unacceptable delays in the Chicago project. Instead, in March 1903, the first 5 MW General Electric Curtis turbine was delivered on time to Insull's Fisk St. Chicago power station, and started up on schedule. (150)

As usually told, the story ends on that triumphant note. Actually, more dislocations of scale followed. The turbine ran erratically, and failed to meet its efficiency guarantees. With some demanding customers this could have caused trouble. Insull, however, was undisturbed. He had confidence that the Works he once ran would fix the problems. The turbine had already promised to generate future construction savings by requiring only a small power house due to the machine's compact size.

Emmet left his assistant, Oscar Junggren, to solve the initial difficulties. "When the turbine ran the General Electric stock price went up", Junggren said. "When it did not run, the price went down". The first turbine did eventually run smoothly. It never did meet that efficiency guarantee. In later GE turbine installations at Fisk Street, however, that efficiency guarantee was not only met but significantly exceeded. Junggren would later succeed Emmet as General Electric's chief turbine engineer. Under his leadership, in 1910, much more efficient 10 MW General Electric Curtis turbines, using a horizontal axis again to solve further dislocations of scale, replaced those 5 MW vertical pioneers. The first 5 MW model was brought back to Schenectady Works and became outdoor statuary. Labeled "a monument to courage", it can still be seen there today. (151)

GE would sell more than 1200 Curtis turbines by 1912. By 1920, when the steam turbine generator had become the dominant way of supplying electricity in the U.S, GE had supplied 70% of those turbine generators. The business at that time had a profit rate of 18% of sales, about three times as great as the average for the company as a whole. (152)

Building turbines soon became the most important business of General Electric's Schenectady Works. It also confirmed an already established GE pattern of innovation. Generally, for GE innovations, the inventors were independent outsiders, as De Laval and Parsons were. Often those inventors, such as Curtis, brought their ideas to GE, and served as consultants. A knowledgeable customer with a powerful vision, such as Insull, was often the human engine behind the effort. So even though a corporation's name may be on the final product, that corporation should be modest about its role. It was just one player in an improvisational innovation repertory company.

That said, a giant corporation and its giant Works did bring special assets. Exposure to earlier large projects sparked applicable ideas. This was the case for Emmet's vertical turbine idea, sparked to the hydro turbines he saw at Niagara. GE also became resilient regarding dislocations of scale. By participating all the way through to installation at a customer's site, such as Emmett did at Newport and Junggren at Chicago, project leaders could both troubleshoot the problems, and bring back ideas for solution. Finally, giant Works could rapidly assemble a diverse collection of workers with varied essential skills.

GE also had some less fair advantages. The Edison-descended early 20th century U.S. utility companies were already predisposed to buy from GE. Other utilities were under the financial sway of Electric Bond and Share, the GE subsidiary that bought utility stocks, packaged them and sold them as less risky bonds. This influenced those companies' turbine purchases. Said a Junggren successor as chief GE steam turbine engineer, Glenn Warren, "I think we established preeminence [in steam turbines] because the Edison Companies were affiliated with Edison General Electric originally, and also we had financial arrangements with Electric Bond and Share." (153)

The steam turbine completed the Universal System as it developd circa 1900. The major addition in the 20th century would be electronics. That would make the rotary converter obsolete, would make electric motors more flexible, blur the distinction between AC and DC, and ultimately revive DC transmission. Otherwise, the main elements of the early 20th century universal system — generation by hydropower and "land Niagara" scale steam turbines, transmission and distribution by polyphase AC, the dominance of the polyphase induction motor, and persistence of DC in uses ranging from recharging batteries to electrochemistry — survived into the 21st century.

In becoming a producer of virtually every element of the Universal System, GE also reshaped itself and its policies. For example, in producing complete Universal Systems, GE and Westinghouse were at an impasse over patents. It was Westinghouse's Tesla Patents on AC induction motors versus General Electric's Bradley Patents on rotary converters. In 1896, after four years of patent warfare, the two companies made peace. They did so by an earlier mentioned method, the patent pool. The two agreed to mutual use of some 300 patents. A compensation clause in the agreement specified that unbalanced benefits for one company required a compensation payment to the other. Balanced benefits were considered to be roughly two thirds of annual sales for the twice-as-big General Electric, one third for the smaller Westinghouse.

One motivation of this agreement was to enable both companies to produce full versions of the Universal System. Another use was less benign. The two companies created a Board of Patent Control to enforce their pooled patents against other competitors. For example, when the Walker Electrical Manufacturing Company competed for powering the New York City Elevated Railroads it was sued for patent infringement by the Patent Control Board. Though Walker won a contract for the Brooklyn Elevated, it soon, under that legal pressure, gave up its independence and merged with Westinghouse. (154)

Similarly, a new company formed by AC pioneer William Stanley proved competitive for power transmission projects by offering higher voltages than either of the Patent Board companies. They responded with patent infringement suits that drove Stanley to merge with General Electric. In 1903 Stanley described how the "industrial trusts" regularly employ "bureaus known as boards of patent control" to operate "an offensive patent campaign" against a smaller competitor to "annul his usefulness, discourage his endeavors, disgust him with surrounding conditions, and finally drive him into line." Other victims driven into line by the GE Westinghouse Board of Patent Control included electric lighting inventor Peter Cooper Hewitt and street railway controller inventor Stephen Van Choate. (155)

Assessing the effects of this GE and Westinghouse market power in a 2023 book, economist Mordecai Kurz has described such efforts as "full monopoly power of GE and Westinghouse over the market for electrical supplies and equipment". He asserts that the GE-Westinghouse monopoly not only earned profits far above those of a competitive economy, but in the process delayed the electrification of the U.S. He estimates that because of that monopoly control, getting electricity of 75% of U.S. homes, a task that took the 30 years from 1899 to 1929, could, in the absence of monopoly, have been done in only 19 years. He reaches this conclusion using a mathematical model difficult for the mathematically uninitiated to assess. (For more about this important book, see Appendix 2).

Kurz's conclusions contrast with those of other energy experts, economic historians and historians of technology. They generally view the 30 year electrification of the U.S. as typical or even rapid for a society-wide change. Furthermore, it was paced not mainly by equipment costs, but also by by a complex of economic and political issues. For example, economist Arthur G. Woolf concluded by describing the electrificatnion of the U.S. as "rapid", and paced by such economic variables as "high income levels and industrialization", rather than by the price of electrical equipment. Further evaluation of Kurz's new and revisionist conclusion awaits scholarly reviews by his economically and mathematically literate peers. (156)

The aggressive use of pooled patents by that General Electric and Westinghouse virtual monopoly was attacked on antitrust grounds. They would discontinue the Board of Patent Control in 1911. Before they did, a curious and still mysterious episode suggests GE and Westinghouse may have considered an even closer partnership, perhaps even a merger. The minutes of the GE Board of Directors note that on 1 Mar 1900 "in response to a letter from Mr. George Westinghouse" the GE Board approved "a conference between individuals, members of the Boards of Directors of the two companies to consider "the general business relations of the two companies." Unfortunately, neither the Westinghouse letter, nor a previous one written in the preceding November, are includend in the minutes. Negotiations, in which GE President Coffin also participated,continued through June, 1900. At that point the GE negotiating committee made its final report to the Board, reporting that no agreement had been reached regarding Westinghouse's proposal. No further actions on the subject were recorded. In the absence of the Westinghouse letters or a GE summary of their contents, the subject of these high level negotiations remains a mysterious episode of the Universal Systems story. (157)

To sum up that Universal System story, it was an international, multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary combination of competition and cooperation. GE can be proud of its contribution. It should also, however, be modest. In the billing its name should appear below, such names as Maxwell, Tesla, Westinghouse, the Cataract Construction Company, Bradley, De Laval, Parsons, and Insull. That GE role included the major positive contributions of such leaders as Steinmetz, Emmett, Madigan, and Junggren. It also, however, included less admirable exploration of limits and loopholes of the antitrust and patents laws. These included the unfair marketing advantage of Electric Bond and Share, and the anti-competitive aggressions of the GE-Westinghouse Board of Patent Control.

Turn now to another example, improving the light bulb. Here GE deserves a higher billing. It played the starring role in changing electric lighting from a luxury to a necessity.

At the end of the 19th century, only about 1% of U.S. homes were wired for electricity. A light bulb was a luxury — and, for General Electric, by far its most profitable product. Unlike most other GE products, it was small, standardized, and produced on a low-tech assembly line by cheap labor. The labor cost per dollar of light bulb sales ca. 1900 was not GE's typical 40¢ per dollar of sales, but only 10¢. The 30¢ difference went mainly to profits, which reached as high as 40 cents per dollar of sales. For other electrical products, the profit per sales dollar was typically a dime or less. (158)

Light bulb makers had in the 1890s standardized production around some 35 processes. Only a few, such as glass blowing to make the bulbs, required skilled craftsmen. Simple machines amplified the labor of operatives. Some 80-90% of those operatives were women. They were typically immigrants under the age of 25. To earn her dollar a day, each one typically repeated a simple but physically wearing operation hundreds or even thousands of times each ten hour workday. Workplace hazards ranged from eyestrain to electric shocks to noxious vapors. (159)

GE's initial high profits proved precarious. Making light bulbs initially offered few economies of scale. Small rivals could jump in, undercut a giant company's price and profit margin, and still make money. If this free entry were to be carried far enough, nobody would end up making much money. The financier-founders of GE had initially thought they had this danger covered. In 1891, just as the merger was being negotiated, a legal decision confirmed the validity of Edison's most important light bulb patent. This appeared to suppress those pesky competitors for 17 more years. A legal technicality, however, knocked out that patent in just four years. GE's light bulb market share, after briefly rising above 80%, fell to about 40% by 1900. Much of the remaining 60% was produced in small factories across Western Pennsylvania and Northern Ohio.

GE's response initially took two forms. One was creating the economies of scale that are a giant's main competitive advantage. At GE's own light bulb factory in Harrison, NJ, engineers such as John Howell and William Burrows developed lamp making machinery more complicated and expensive than any then in use, but offering more than compensating cost-cutting. In addition, GE encouraged Corning Glass to develop automatic bulb making machinery, with GE getting advantageous access due to its size. Meanwhile, GE spent about a million dollars (in those days big money) between 1895 and 1905 buying up light bulb related patents, mainly in Europe. Enforcing its purchased patents, it formed an organization called the Incandescent Lamp Makers Association. By 1901 Westinghouse and 14 other lamp makers had joined, lamp prices had stabilized, and 90% of light bulb sales were done by association members. (160)

All, however, was not yet secure. The high reward for patents encouraged independent inventors to redouble their efforts. Some ca. 1895 inventions even threatened to make the incandescent lamp obsolete. For example, a ceramic lamp that did not need to be enclosed in a vacuum was invented by a prominent German chemist and later Nobel laureate, Walther Nernst. Two Americans, D. McFarland Moore and Peter Cooper Hewitt, invented precursors of the fluorescent lamp.

Meanwhile two salesmen with experience in the electrical industries had their own idea for reviving light bulb competition. Franklin Terry and Burton Tremaine in 1900 proposed combining the flexibility and fast response of those small lamp factories scattered from Pittsburgh to Chicago with the machinery-developing and inventive clout of a central jointly owned laboratory. Their National Electric Lamp Association would be a federation of those small companies, supported by centralized engineering and research facilities. This required capital. Terry and Tremaine got that capital from a surprising source. In 1900 they invited GE to become the leading stockholder in that National Electric Light Association (NELA). Charles Coffin agreed. Secretly, GE bought up 75% of NELA's stock.

This secret combination in restraint of trade violated Section 1 of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, which read:

Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal. (161)

An ongoing dispute over that Sherman Law's application to manufacturing delayed prosecution of this clear violation. Did GE's president Coffin think the combination was legal? The Department of Justice was later to answer that question with another question. If GE thought the deal was legal, why keep it secret?

For the next decade GE and National pretended to compete, each getting about 40% of the total lamp business. This enabled prices to fall more slowly, and profits to stay higher, than would have been the case if the two companies had been actually competing. The federal government would ignore this arrangement for a decade. In 1911, however, President William Howard Taft included GE among the trusts against whom antitrust prosecutions were launched. The main targets of this campaign were two companies that directly impacted the ordinary consumer, American Tobacco and Standard Oil. They were strongly prosecuted and broken up. For most of the other targets of Taft's campaign, including American Thread, Burroughs, and Otis Elevator, the government settled for consent decrees.

GE, at a time when light bulbs illuminated less than 10% of U.S. households, fell into that less urgent group of antitrust targets. Though the light bulb cartel clearly violated the Sherman Law, it got lower priority prosecution and the more lenient treatment. The GE-National cartel was dissolved by a 1911 consent decree. Far from reducing General Electric control of that industry, that decree allowed GE to buy the rest of NELA and tighten its dominance of the light bulb business. (162)

GE had by 1911 added another tactic for limiting light bulb competition. In its 1901 Annual Report, the company made public its creation of a research laboratory at its Schenectady Works. Engineering Vice President Wilbur Rice Jr. described the lab's purpose this way:

Although our engineers have always been liberally supplied with every facility for the development of new and original designs and improvement of existing standards, it has been deemed wise during the past year to establish a laboratory to be devoted exclusively to original research. It is hoped by this means that many profitable fields may be discovered. (163)

This was a bit misleading. The actual main purpose was not "original research" but protective patents. The idea of a scientific laboratory had been proposed by Steinmetz. He was no doubt familiar with industrial research laboratories in the chemical industry of his native Germany. He described his proposed General Electric Lab as an "electrochemical laboratory". The purpose of that electrochemistry was creating better light bulb filaments. Europeans, some using electrochemistry, were by 1900 making metal filaments that could far outperform and outlast the GE carbon filament.

The new GE Laboratory's first manager was Willis Whitney. After graduating from MIT, he had gone to Germany to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Leipzig. He returned to MIT to teach chemistry, as well as to carry out industrial consulting with that activity's pioneer, Arthur D. Little. At GE, he proved both an efficient manager and an inspiring mentor. He was likely to enter a researcher's lab asking "are you having fun today?" His door, always open, bore the sign "come in rain or shine." He would subsequently literally remove the doors from researchers' labs to encourage communication and discourage internal secrecy.

He was unbending, however, in his insistence that researchers pursue patents, all of which would become company property. As he put it, the General Electric Research Lab was not established as a charitable institution for indigent scientists, and must not become one, even accidentally. He also, however, established a university-like research seminar, held Saturday afternoon after the work week was over. He encouraged scientific publication as long as it revealed no proprietary information and was carried out in addition to, rather than instead of, invention. This new form of industrial research allowed sufficiently industrious scientists to become not only corporate inventors and innovators, but also professional scientific researchers. (164)

The laboratory was located in the middle of GE's Schenectady Works to emphasize the practical side of its responsibilities. In the years 1900-1905, however, few such practical results emerged. The one significant lighting innovation, achieved by Whitney himself, was a carbon filament made more efficient by applying a hard coating, a process called "metallizing". It would however quickly be made obsolete by European-invented filaments made of actual metals.

What brought the lab back to the forefront of the light bulb game was Whitney's almost accidental hiring of two young, talented, but so far unknown, scientists. Both had earned Ph.D.s from German universities. Neither had immediately turned that credential into either financial reward or research opportunity.

Physicist William Coolidge held in 1905 a temporary post-doc position at an MIT lab. A colleague at that lab bench, still jointly holding an MIT post while easing into industry, was Willis Whitney. Direct observation of Coolidge's exceptional experimental skills, a product as much of Coolidge's youth on a Massachusetts farm as his German training, led to a succession of GE job offers from Whitney, all refused. What earned Coolidge's ultimate acceptance was a 1905 promise by Whitney that Coolidge could spend half his time in pure research of his own choosing. Coolidge never exercised that option. Instead, on arrival in Schenectady, he was mysteriously overcome by a desire to improve the light bulb.

Irving Langmuir was a chemistry professor at Stevens Tech in 1908. A heavy teaching load, and the lack of technician support or apparatus funding led to a slow start in research and publication. Applying for a summer job at the GE Research Lab, he lost out to an applicant from Harvard. Then, however, the Harvard man cancelled. Langmuir was called to Schenectady. Whitney was sufficiently impressed by Langmuir's summer efforts to hire him full time.

Joining GE unsurprisingly increased Coolidge's and Langmuir's incomes. More surprisingly, it also increased their opportunities to exercise fully their talents, and to ascend to the highest levels of both science and invention.

The GE lab team, stung by its failure to anticipate European patents on metal light bulb filaments, had after 1905 focused on leapfrogging those European leaders. Tungsten and similarly high atomic weight metals were being tried out as light bulb filaments, one metal per researcher. The most valuable, and costly, of GE's purchased European patents covered the invention made in 1904 by two young Austrian physicists, Alexander Just and Fritz Hanaman, of the tungsten filament. GE would downplay this patent in later publicity, and exaggerate GE's own contributions. It was, however, the upholding of that Just and Hanaman patent in U.S. court in 1916 that laid the foundation for GE's subsequent light bulb dominance.

Just and Hanaman had taken a powdered form of normally brittle tungsten and mixed it with other materials to make a sort of paste. The filaments were then squirted out one at the time. The materials other than tungsten were then driven off by heat, leaving a sufficiently strong, all-tungsten filament. (165)

What if pure tungsten, without the additives, could be continually processed into a wire, then chopped up into filament lengths? This might result in far more economical production of better filaments. The GE team pursued this idea, on that one metal per researcher basis. Working on the metal molybdenum, team member Colin Fink got the first hint. He showed, by drawing through a die a clump of the metal molybdenum and making a wire, that this approach might be possible.

Coolidge, taking on tungsten in 1906, took the hint. He combined his skills as an experimenter with craft techniques he mastered visiting the wire mills of the Schenectady Works and the copper and brass factories of Connecticut. He spent five years putting conventional methods, such as heating, hammering, swaging (hitting repeatedly with small mechanical hammers), rolling and pulling through diamond dies, into the right order under the right conditions. By 1908 he could start with a block of brittle tungsten, and, using a precisely ordered and timed sequence of those processes, produce a continuous thin flexible tungsten wire. It took two more years to turn his method into a manufacturing process. In 1910, the first GE "drawn tungsten" lamps went on the market. Within a decade they would make lamps with other filament types obsolete. (166)

It was a manufacturing tour de force, the kind of unglamorous but highly productive process improvement that goes a long way toward justifying the existence of Giant Corporations. Whether it was, in legal terms, an invention that entitled GE to monopolize tungsten filament light bulbs was, however, more questionable. For one thing, later testimony suggests that the process was more a collective effort than a purely individual inspiration. For example, lab scientist Truman Fuller recalled later that Coolidge was sent on a trip to Europe before the project was completed. Colin Fink, the chemist who had provided the initial hint, took over and adopted Coolidge's method. It was Fink who made the first samples of tungsten wire. GE knew that that the U.S. patent office frowned on rewarding collective industrial effort. So it downplayed the contributions of Fink and others, and emphasized Coolidge's role. Unhappy that his name did not appear on a patent, Fink left GE for a distinguished career as inventor and Columbia University chemistry professor.

A more serious issue concerned whether Coolidge's effort had resulted in an invention, defined by the patent office as something new, unobvious and useful, or merely a better way of manufactuiring the tungsten filament invention of Just and Hanaman. (167)

Could GE depict this process improvement as an invention, and one achieved by Coolidge alone? GE's patent attorneys proved up to the challenge. They proclaimed that it was no mere process improvement. Coolidge had met the patent system definition of invention by creating something not only potentially useful, but also non-obvious and new. Tungsten, the GE lawyers said, was inherently brittle. Coolidge, they declared, had invented "an entirely new product known in this Record as 'Coolidge Metal.'" (168)

This scientifically dubious distinction succeeded in convincing a judge that Coolidge 's patent was valid, and could be enforced against competitors. It was enforced, until 1925. Then, in another patent case, the same judge had second thoughts. He declared, sensibly, that drawing tungsten wire did not create a new metal. By then, however, the Coolidge patent had done its competition-suppressing work. (169)

Irving Langmuir had more theoretical interests than did gifted experimenter Coolidge. So Research Director Whitney managed him differently. Rather than assigning Langmuir to a particular metal, Whitney gave him a freer hand to explore general light bulb issues of his own choice. Whitney also supplied Langmuir with a pair of experimentally capable hands, those of Karl Sweetser, a veteran technician and equipment builder. Sweetser built Langmuir an apparatus for studying specific light bulb problems, such as why they turn black with use. With it, Langmuir explored not only light bulb problems, but also the physics and chemistry of atoms, molecules and ions. In 1910 this was unconventional. Many scientists, including most chemists, did not then believe in the physical reality of distinct and observable atoms, molecules and ions.

By a combination of theoretical modeling and experiment, Langmuir reached a counterintuitive and remarkably useful conclusion. The way to further improve those tungsten filament light bulbs was not, as expected, to create an ever more perfect vacuum inside the bulb. It was to fill the bulb with an inert gas at atmospheric pressure. While reaching this conclusion, Langmuir simultaneously pioneered new ways to study the chemistry of those individual atoms, molecules and ions. He would build on those efforts and win the 1932 Nobel Prize for chemistry.

If the scientific value of his work was unquestioned, the patentable aspects were less clear. Predecessors had already invented gas filled incandescent lamps. Those early inventions were indeed novel, non-obvious, and potentially useful. They did not, however, become actually useful. Before Langmuir, gas filling was guesswork, not science. Langmuir's work, by contrast, provided an accurate theoretical model of the atomic-level chemistry and physics that was going on inside those light bulbs. Using that model, he was able to identify and quantify the various bad and good effects of gas filling, such as its carrying of heat away from the filament by convection (bad) and the suppressing of evaporation of those blackening agents from the filament (good). He then applied that model to devise modifications to lamp components (such as not merely coiling the filament, but then coiling again that first coiled filament) that accentuated the good effects while suppressing the bad ones. Details are here left to the reader with an appetite for a remarkable scientific detective story.

For GE, the result was another challenge to patent attorneys. They had to convince the U.S. Patent Office, and later the courts, that this remarkable addition to knowledge constituted an invention. This despite the facts that knowledge is not patentable, and gas filled incandescent lamps had already been patented. The GE attorneys, defying these facts, succeeded in getting the patent.

Coolidge's patent on ductile tungsten and Langmuir's on the gas filled lamp proved two of the most valuable patents in GE's history. After the breaking up of the GE-NELA light bulb cartel in 1911, they became the main means by which GE suppressed competition and locked in a 20%-plus ratio of profits to sales for decades to come. In 1920, for example, GE sold $57 million worth of incandescent lamps, about 20% of the company's total sales. It made from light bulbs a profit of $13 million, about 40% of its total profit. George Morrison, Vice President of GE Lighting, was not yet satisfied. In 1921 he told Coffin how he was using patent law to further increase GE Lighting's dominance. The Langmuir and Coolidge patents would enable GE to buy out, at bargain prices, several competitors. "It is not our intention" said Morrison, "to take over these assets at a figure that would result in a profit [for the competitors] or even let these companies out flat". GE intended to pay no more than 75% of value for those companies.

The next step was global. In 1924, the patents served as a basis for a cartel, an arrangement then legal in Europe, to control the light bulb industry there. Meanwhile, back in the U.S. GE extended its control of light bulb prices by such methods as an "agency method" of price control that enabled GE to dictate the price all the way to the consumer. All this led to persistent complaints, such as those of the Lockwood Committee of New York State Legislature in 1922. There witnesses testified to GE "legal harassment" and "exorbitant profits." In response to such accusations, in 1924, GE asked U.S. Department of Justice to investigate its light bulb business. This led to an indictment of GE for antitrust violations. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. There GE was totally vindicated. In the 1926 legal decision sustaining that GE policy the U.S. Supreme Court declared that it was the ownership of those Coolidge and Lagmuir patents that entitled it to use of that competition suppressing agency method. (170)

So, to sum up the two examples described in this chapter — the Universal System and the better light bulb, what conclusion might one reach from those examples about the early 20th century GE. Was it the innovating and improving Generally Electric? Or was it the limits-of-the-law exploring, competition suppressing Specifically Electric?

It was both. In its more constructive "Generally Electric" identity GE was a strong supporting actor in the development of the Universal System. It pioneered major applications, such as powering cotton mills. It helped turn Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism into a useful tool for designing electrical equipment. It played a major role in turning the steam turbine inventions of De Laval, Parsons, and Curtis into a steam turbine generator industry. In light bulbs, in that constructive Generally Electric identity, GE developed machinery to make light bulbs faster, more uniformly and at lower cost. It developed the best process for making the tungsten filaments that would go on to emit most of the twentieth century's electric light. It took an earlier but useless invention, the gas filled lamp, and provided the scientific knowledge and engineering design to turn it into a practical light bulb that both improved efficiency and lengthened life.

In its other identity, however,as "Specifically Electric", GE focused on stabilizing prices and limiting competition. This led GE to explore, and sometimes cross, the boundaries of the law — particularly the Sherman Antitrust Law, and the laws governing the U.S. Patent System. GE used its 1890s Patent Pool with Westinghouse to set up a Patent Board that harassed competitors into selling out to the giants. Later, GE used the dominant role of its financial arm Electric Bond and Share, to influence utility companies to buy GE equipment, likely in violation of antitrust law. In the case of light bulbs, GE's secret cartel with National Electric light was a violation of the Sherman Act. Regarding patents, GE followed the letter of patent law, but not its spirit. The spirit of patent law depended on a particular definition of invention. That definition combined the properties of novelty, non-obviousness, and utility. The efforts of GE's ingenious patent attorneys helped a giant company crush smaller competitors using patents that sometimes only dubiously met that definition of invention.

The light bulb industry was exceptional in GE for the use of patents for competitive advantage. Though GE employees got several thousand patents in other areas than light bulbs in the first half of the twentieth century, most of those others had much less impact. As GE president Charles E. Wilson put it in a 1949 congressional hearing: In only one area of the industry have patents have been of major importance: lamps. But in other sectors their importance has been small. (171)

That GE effort in electric lighting much later got another evaluation, by a more neutral observer than GE President Wilson. Electric lighting technology, despite its monopolization and competition suppression, was chosen by economist William Nordhaus, later a Nobel Prize winner, to exemplify the way returns to society from new technology far outweigh the returns to the Giant Corporations that dominate the industry. He calculated the number of hours an ordinary 20th century worker needed to labor to be able to afford the light emitted by a typical 20th century 100 watt light bulb for one hour. He found that, in the Old GE century of 1886 to 1986, that labor cost of light fell by a factor of more than a thousand. More generally, he concluded that most of the social benefits of new 20th century electrical technologies far surpassed the private benefits. (172)

So, in conclusion, on one side, arrogant and sometimes illegal efforts to suppress competition. On the other, a lead role in improving the light bulb to the status of not a luxury but a necessity, and a key supporting role in the Universal system, the key to the 1890-1920 takeoff of the electrification of the world. Which was more important? Readers are invited to weigh constructive Generally Electric against destructive Specifically Electric, and reach their own conclusions. As you do, this book turns from GE technology to GE labor relations and politics.

Notes

  1. Schenectady Daily Union 1 July 1895.
  2. Carlson, W. Bernard. 2013. Tesla. Princeton. Recognizing Tesla's major contributions, while providing an essential correction to accounts giving Tesla exclusive credit for the entire Universal System is Kline, Ronald. 1987. Science and Engineering Theory in the Development of the Induction Motor. [free PDF viewer required] Technology and Culture. 28. 283-313.
  3. Hughes, Thomas. 1983. Networks of Power. Johns Hopkins, pp. 130-135.
  4. Adams, Edward Dean. 1932. Niagara Power. Bartlett. 2 Vol. Belfield, Robert. 1976. The Niagara System. Proceedings of the IEEE. 64. 1344-1350.
  5. Adams, Edward. 1927. Niagara Power, vol. 2. Privately printed. p. 182.
  6. Burgess, Ronald. 2007. Redlands Powers the World. Fortnightly Club of Redlands, CA (on line).
  7. Kline, Ronald. 1992. Steinmetz. Johns Hopkins. pp. 86-87. Schenectady Daily Union 10 May 1893.
  8. Recollections of Charles S. Bradley. Hammond File L 2939. MiSci.
  9. Steinmetz to Hinz. 25 Oct 1893. In Turner, Justin G. 1963. Steinmetz. Manuscripts (an archivists' journal). Fall 1963.
  10. Kline, Ronald. 1992. Steinmetz. Johns Hopkins. pp. 159-173.
  11. Works News 19 Jan 1923 p. 7.
  12. Paine, Sidney B. 1895. Electrical Driving of Textile Establishments. Boston, MA. Paine, Sidney B. 1900. Development of the Electric Drive. GE Publication 9080. 2 July 1900. Havens, F. S. The Columbia Mills. Hammond File L 571. MiSci.
  13. GE Corporate Administrative Collection Box 1. Series 1. Minutes Executive Committee 16 Aug 1892. MiSci.
  14. Wengenroth, Ulrich. 1993. How they Won the Market. Electric Motors in Competition With Steam Engines, 1890-1925. [free PDF viewer required] In IEEE History Center, ed. 1993. Technological Competitiveness. Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Electrical, Electronic and Computer Industries. IEEE Press.
  15. For a more general treatment of the entry of electricity into manufacturing, see Devine, Warren D. 1982. From Shafts to Wires. Journal of Economic History. 43. 347-372 and DuBoff, Richard. 1967. The Introduction of Electric Power in American Manufacturing. Economic History Review. 20. 509-518.
  16. GE Reporter. 1917. 1. 5. Works News. #1. Jan 1920 p. 12.
  17. The above account of GE steam turbine origins relies on E. W. Rice Papers, Box 5. Development of the Curtis Steam Turbine. MiSci. Other sources for the turbine story that follows include Hammond File HF 725. Recollections of W. L. R. Emmet, L 272. Recollections of Oscar Junggren L 773. Recollections of Henry Geisenhoner, L 775 and Recollections of Billy Madigan. All at MiSci.
  18. Emmet, W. L. R. 1903. The Curtis Steam Turbine. Proc. Amer. Philosophical Society. 42. 68-84.
  19. Emmet, W. L. R. 1930. Autobiography of an Engineer. Ft. Orange.
  20. Jesse R. Lovejoy Reminiscences, ca. 1925. Hammond File L3440 MiSci.
  21. Works News 4 July 1924 p. 12-13.
  22. Warren, Glenn B. Speech to 1954 Meeting of Managers of Installation and Field Service. Turbine Dept. 24 Oct 1954. Glenn Warren Papers.
  23. GE Large Steam Turbine Department. 1976. A Legacy of Leadership.
  24. Junggren, Oscar. Recollections. ca. 1925. Hammond File L 772. MiSci. ASME. 1975. The 5000 KW Vertical Curtis Steam Turbine-Generator. Printed in occasion of its dedication as a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark.
  25. E. S. Gilbert to G. Swope, 29 April 1925. Swope Papers, MiSci.
  26. Warren, Glenn B. Speech to 1954 Meeting of Managers of Installation and Field Service. Turbine Dept. Schenectady. 24 Oct 1954. Glenn Warren Papers. MiSci.
  27. Schenectady Evening Star 26 Jan and 10 Feb 1898. Schenectady Daily Union 19 and 28 Sept 1898.
  28. Stanley, William. The Inventor and the Trust. Electrical World and Engineer. 28 May 1903 p. 514. Bright, Arthur Aaron. 1949. The Electric-Lamp Industry. MacMillan. pp. 221-225.
  29. Kurz, Mordecai. 2023. The Market Power of Technology. Columbia U. pp. 246-256. For previous views, see Hughes, Thomas. 1983. Networks of Power. Johns Hopkins, Woolf, Arthur. 1987. The Residential Adoption of Electricity in Early Twentieth Century America. Energy Journal. 8. 19-30, and Smil, Vaclav. 2003. Energy at the Crossroads. MIT. pp. 32, 38.
  30. Minutes 82nd GE Board of Directors Meeting. 1 Mar 1900-9 June 1900. GE Corporate Administrative Collection. Box 1. Series 1. MiSci.
  31. The light bulb story that follows draws heavily on Bright, Arthur Aaron. 1949. The Electric-Lamp Industry. MacMillan, an excellent industry history. Also highly useful are the works of Leonard Reich, including Reich, Leonard. 1985, The Making of American Industrial Research. Cambridge, and 1992. Lighting the Path to Profit. Business History Review. 66. 305-344. The author of this book here also gratefully acknowledges the historical assistance and encouragement Leonard Reich personally provided nearly half a century ago.
  32. A detailed description of the difficult working conditions in light bulb factories, drawn from government reports, is Montgomery, David. 1987. Fall of the House of Labor. [free PDF viewer required] Cambridge. pp. 112-114.
  33. Bright, Arthur Aaron. 1949. The Electric-Lamp Industry. MacMillan, pp. 104, 144
  34. Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. 26 Stat. 209, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1-7.
  35. Langlois, Richard. 2023. The Corporation and the 20th Century. Princeton. p. 83.
  36. Report of Vice President of Engineering and Manufacturing E. W. Rice, Jr., GE Annual Report, 1901.
  37. Wise, George, 1986. Willis R. Whitney. Columbia U.
  38. Bright, Arthur Aaron. 1949. The Electric-Lamp Industry. MacMillan p. 239.
  39. Brief for Plaintiff. The Wrought Tungsten Case. GE Company vs. Independent Lamp and Wire on Coolidge Patent #1,082,332. 30 Dec 1913 C. A. Hollenbeck.
  40. Truman S. Fuller, interview, General Electric Hall of Electrical History Collection, MiSci, 22 Mar 1978.
  41. Brief for Plaintiff. The Wrought Tungsten Case. GE Company vs. Independent Lamp and Wire on Coolidge Patent #1,082,332. 30 Dec 1913 C. A. Hollenbeck, p. 3.
  42. The overturning of the new metal claim of the Coolidge patent is G.E. Company vs. De Forest Radio Company. 17 Fed. 2d. District. Delaware. 1927. A detailed description of the judge's decision reversal can be found in Liebhafsky, Herman. 1974. William David Coolidge. pp. 70-73. Dr. Liebhafsky was an eminent chemist (and also a colleague and friend of the author of this book). Though a fervent GE loyalist, he recognized the legal correctness of the judge's second decision.
  43. Bright, Arthur Aaron. 1949. The Electric-Lamp Industry. MacMillan. p. 253. George Morrison to Charles A. Coffin, 5 Feb 1921. Edwin W. Rice Jr. Papers. Schenectady Archives of Science and Technology. Union College. Schenectady, NY; United States v. General Electric Co., 272 U.S. 476 (1926). United States v. General Electric Company. No. 113. Argued October 13, 1926; Krajewski, Marcus. 2014. The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy. IEEE Spectrum 24 Sep 2014 (on line).
  44. Testimony of Charles E. Wilson to the Hearings on the Study of Monopoly Power. House Committee on the Judiciary. 81st Congress. 1st Session. Washington, DC. 30 Nov 1949 p. 107.
  45. Nordhaus, William D. 1988. Do Real Output and Real Wage Measurements Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not. [free PDF viewer required] Cowles Foundation Paper No. 957. Nordhaus, William D. 2004. Schumpeterian Profits in the American Economy. [free PDF viewer required] NBER Working Paper No. 10433.

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