General Electric’s (NYSE: GE) planned split into three different companies focusing on aviation, health care and energy caught many investors by surprise. While the company’s stock has been underperforming for years, few expected a trinitarian division of its primary businesses.
But, then again, GE has a history of unexpected happenings. If you're not familiar with the company’s long and often bizarre history, here are five unusual things that you probably didn’t know about GE.
1. How GE Unplugged Edison From His Own Company. GE began in 1889 through the consolidation of several companies owned by master inventor Thomas A. Edison into a single entity called the Edison General Electric Company, headquartered in Schenectady, New York.
In 1892, Edison General Electric Company merged with Thomson-Houston Electric Company of Lynn, Massachusetts. Edison’s name was dropped from the corporate banner.
Unfortunately for Edison, his often-strident advocacy of the direct current (DC) power delivery system instead of the more popular alternating current (AC) systems was a relatively rare instance when he overplayed his hand. The directors of Edison General Electric Company maneuvered him out of controlling his namesake company ahead of the merger with Thomson-Houston and he would have no role (or profit) in GE’s future endeavors.
2. How GE Missed The Personal Computing Revolution. Many people don't realize GE was a pioneer in the computer hardware field. It began manufacturing computers in the 1950s and was among the nation’s leading computer companies during the 1960s, when mainframe computers dominated the sector.
In 1970, GE discontinued its computer manufacturing operations with the sale of its computer division to Honeywell. One decade later, the high-tech world expanded with the rise of personal computing boom, but GE had no role in the hardware aspect of that environment and failed to get a foothold in the online computing realm with its ill-fated GEnie service.
When Honeywell’s executives were looking to sell their company in 2000, GE made an offer but the European Union kiboshed the acquisition. United Technologies Corp. (NYSE: UTX) bought Honeywell instead.
3. GE’s Role In The Clean Water Act’s Passage. Beginning in 1947, GE’s factories along New York’s Hudson River began to discharge of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the waterway, damaging the river’s wildlife. GE was not the only factory-owning polluter of the river, and by the mid-1960s the ecosystem became so greatly impacted that an unlikely figure decided to take a stand against the corporate defilers of the Hudson.
Folk singer Pete Seeger was still being blacklisted by the nation’s major commercial broadcasters in 1966, but he nonetheless was able to draw public attention to the Hudson’s pollution with the launch of the environmental nonprofit Hudson River Sloop Clearwater Inc. and premiere staging of the Clearwater Festival in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.
Seeger’s efforts came as Americans began to embrace the goals of the then-nascent environmental movement, which culminated in the 1972 passage of the Clean Water Act.
GE’s punishment for its pollution took a long time to enact, but by 2002 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered the company clean approximately 40 miles of the Hudson where its factories discharged PCBs, a project that cost more than $700 million.
4. How An Oscar-Winning Film Impacted GE Operations. During the 1980s and 1990s, a consumer boycott was organized against GE to protest its involvement in the development of nuclear weapons. The company’s connection to the nuclear arsenal caught the attention of filmmaker and activist Debra Chasnoff, who created the 1991 documentary “Deadly Deception: General Electric, Nuclear Weapons and Our Environment.”
“Deadly Deception” offered a counterbalance between GE’s commercials about its commitment to high-tech progress and improved standards of living with interviews involving people who said their lives were destroyed by the company’s testing and manufacturing of bombs used in the nuclear arms race. A year and a half after the film was released, GE ceased its involvement in nuclear weapons by selling its aerospace division.
Chasnoff’s film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject and the filmmaker made further history in thanking her then-partner Kim Klausner, making her the first openly LGBTQ creative artist to acknowledge their same-sex relationship in an Oscar acceptance speech.
5. How GE Broke An IRS Record. In 2006, GE made history when the time came to file its federal taxes. The company decided to go the electronic tax return route, but this proved to be more elephantine than expected because GE’s tax return encompassed 24,000 pages of paper, a record-breaking amount.
The filing encompassed 240 megabytes of information and it took GE 30 minutes to send the document to the Internal Revenue Service, which transmitted its verification of receipt nearly an hour later.
GE needed seven full-time employees and a budget between $500,000 and $1 million for the preparation of its electronic filing. Nonetheless, John Samuels, GE’s vice president and senior tax counsel for tax policy and planning, stated the company expected the savings from the electronic filing to be “many millions of dollars in out-of-pocket costs.”
