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Leaders, Crotonville, inventions, factories and the people behind them — every story cited to its sources.
Vintage-style artistic recreation of GE's historic businesses.
November 2, 2026 · GE Power · Inventions
In 1957, the Vallecitos boiling water reactor began delivering electricity to a public utility grid while serving as a proving ground for reactor equipment and personnel. Its history connects GE’s early nuclear engineering with a wider boiling-water reactor business—and the long responsibilities that followed shutdown.
4 cited sources
Read the storyNovember 1, 2026 · Leadership · Pandemic · Crisis history
During 2020 and 2021, GE’s leaders faced sharply different pressures across the company: urgent demand for medical equipment, disrupted aviation markets, and the continuing need for reliable electricity. Corporate accounts describe a response combining emergency production, difficult workforce decisions, and changes in how GE managed its businesses.
4 cited sources
Read the storyNovember 1, 2026 · Leaders · GE Aircraft Engines · Pandemic
John Slattery became president and CEO of GE Aviation in September 2020, succeeding David Joyce through a planned handover. GE’s contemporary accounts emphasized customer relationships, commercial experience and innovation as the business looked toward recovery.
4 cited sources
Read the storyNovember 1, 2026 · Leaders · Engineering · GE Wind
Vic Abate’s historical GE career connected renewable energy, gas power and company-wide technology leadership. His return to wind leadership in 2022–2023 brought those responsibilities together while GE was preparing its energy businesses for separation.
5 cited sources
Read the storyNovember 1, 2026 · Leaders
Beth Comstock’s 2015 appointment as GE vice chair brought marketing, ventures, lighting and service development into her leadership portfolio. GE’s contemporary announcements trace her expanding responsibilities, while a 2016 interview reveals her emphasis on initiative and navigating change.
5 cited sources
Read the storyOctober 31, 2026 · Business leadership · Energy & Power
Jenbacher and Waukesha entered General Electric through separate acquisitions, bringing gas-engine businesses serving electricity generation and gas transport. Their GE ownership chapter ended on November 6, 2018, when Advent International completed its $3.25 billion purchase of GE’s Distributed Power business.
2 cited sources
Read the storyOctober 30, 2026 · Business leadership · Research & Technology
GE’s 2015 annual report placed software and analytics at the center of its industrial strategy, with Jeffrey R. Immelt as chairman and CEO and Bill Ruh as chief digital officer. Its historical reports trace that ambition through maintenance, factory productivity, and electrical-grid projects before the planned corporate separations.
3 cited sources
Read the storyOctober 29, 2026 · People · Research
At General Electric, Katharine Burr Blodgett learned to build coatings one molecular layer at a time—and used that precision to make glass nearly disappear. Her achievement linked surface chemistry with the practical challenge of reducing reflected light.
3 cited sources
Read the storyOctober 29, 2026 · Leaders
Gerard Swope expanded General Electric’s consumer business while introducing employee protections and proposing a national recovery plan. His career connected industrial management with public service, education, and debate over business responsibility.
3 cited sources
Read the storyOctober 29, 2026 · Leaders · GE Aircraft Engines
Gerhard Neumann brought a mechanic’s practical experience to jet-engine invention and aviation leadership. His GE career linked the variable-stator J79 with the expansion of the company’s military and commercial engine businesses.
3 cited sources
Read the storyOctober 29, 2026 · People · Research
At GE’s Schenectady laboratory, Irving Langmuir’s investigations of lamps opened paths into surface chemistry, atomic hydrogen and chemical bonding. His career brought practical invention together with fundamental research—and a lasting collaboration with Katharine Burr Blodgett.
4 cited sources
Read the storyOctober 29, 2026 · Leaders
Beth Comstock’s accounts of innovation connect imaginative thinking with practical decisions about people, resources, and organizational freedom. The supplied sources illuminate that approach, although they do not document a program called Imagination Breakthroughs.
3 cited sources
Read the storyOctober 29, 2026 · Global GE · GE Lighting
Founded in Hungary in 1896, Tungsram developed a history of lighting and electronics innovation before becoming part of General Electric. Its story connects patented bulbs, a major American manufacturing investment, renewed independence and experiments in growing food under LEDs.
3 cited sources
Read the storyOctober 29, 2026 · Leaders
Launched in 2005, ecomagination linked Jeff Immelt’s ambitions for GE’s growth with customers’ demand for cleaner, more efficient technologies. Its history combines measurable commitments and substantial reported revenues with persistent questions about the limits of corporate environmental change.
3 cited sources
Read the storyOctober 29, 2026 · Leaders · Crotonville
Jack Welch made Crotonville a testing ground for changing how GE managers thought, spoke, and acted. The exchanges in its celebrated classroom helped inspire Work-Out, an effort to carry candid discussion and faster decisions across the company.
2 cited sources
Read the storyOctober 29, 2026 · Crotonville · Leadership
Founded in 1956, Crotonville evolved from a training center for general managers into a meeting place for leadership development, cultural change and customer learning. Its history follows GE’s changing expectations of leaders—and the challenge of renewing a successful institution.
3 cited sources
Read the storyOctober 29, 2026 · Leaders
Charles A. Coffin entered the electrical business after two decades in shoe manufacturing and became General Electric’s first president. His career brought together business negotiation, support for engineering, and leadership through an early financial crisis.
3 cited sources
Read the storyOctober 29, 2026 · Leaders
Owen D. Young’s career carried him from a New York farm to GE’s boardroom and international negotiations over war reparations. His work in industry, communications, and education also raised a lasting question: whom should a great business serve?
4 cited sources
Read the storyOctober 29, 2026 · People · Inventions
Charles Proteus Steinmetz helped engineers turn alternating current into practical power, bringing mathematical insight to General Electric’s technical challenges. His story also reaches beyond the laboratory—to a family he helped create and a community whose schools he helped improve.
4 cited sources
Read the storyOctober 29, 2026 · People · Inventions
Ernst Alexanderson brought electrical engineering into the emerging worlds of radio and television. His career at General Electric connected generators, long-distance communication, and experiments that brought moving pictures into the home.
4 cited sources
Read the storyGE Heritage Village is an independent volunteer heritage project, not affiliated with or endorsed by GE, its successor companies or Crotonville. Stories are written with AI help from the public sources cited on each page and checked against them automatically; please follow the source links to confirm details.
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