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In 1876, Thomas Alva Edison opened a new laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Out of the laboratory was to come perhaps the most famous invention of all—a successful development of the incandescent electric lamp. By 1890, Edison had organized his various businesses into the Edison General Electric Company.
In 1879, Elihu Thomson and E. J. Houston formed the rival Thomson-Houston Company. It merged with various companies and was later led by Charles A. Coffin, a former shoe manufacturer from Lynn, Massachusetts. Mergers with competitors and the patent rights owned by each company put them into dominant positions in the electrical industry. As businesses expanded, it became increasingly difficult for either company to produce complete electrical installations relying solely on their own technology. In 1892, these two major companies combined, in a merger arranged by financier J. P. Morgan, to form the General Electric Company, with its headquarters in Schenectady, New York.
In 1896, General Electric was one of the original 12 companies listed on the newly-formed Dow Jones Industrial Average. GE is the only one that remains today.
The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was founded by GE and American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) in 1919 to further international radio. General Electric was one of the eight major computer companies (with IBM - the largest, Burroughs, Scientific Data Systems, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, RCA and UNIVAC) through most of the 1960s. GE had an extensive line of general purpose and special purpose computers. Among them were the GE 200, GE 400, and GE 600 series general purpose computers, the GE 4010, GE 4020, and GE 4060 real time process control computers, and the Datanet 30 message switching computer. A Datanet 600 computer was designed, but never sold. It has been said that GE got into the computer manufacturing business because in the 1950's they were the largest user of computers outside of the United States federal government. In 1970 GE sold its computer division to Honeywell.
In 1986, GE re-acquired RCA, primarily for the NBC television network. The rest was sold to various companies, including Bertelsmann and Thomson.
In 2004, GE bought the television and movie assets of Vivendi Universal and became the third largest media conglomerate in the world. The new company was named NBC Universal. Also in 2004, GE completed the spinoff of most of its life and mortgage insurance assets into an independent company, Genworth Financial, based in Richmond, Virginia. In that same year, GE also acquired the credit card unit of the department store Dillard's for $1.25 billion.
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