General Electric
American multinational conglomerate (1892–2024)
General Electric Company (GE) was an American multinational conglomerate. It played a role in the development of electric power, electric light, home appliances, aviation, and medical imaging. GE was established in 1892 through the merger of Thomas Edison's Edison General Electric Company and the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, a consolidation conceived and orchestrated by financier J. P. Morgan.
Over its history, GE had multiple divisions, including aerospace, transportation, energy, healthcare, lighting, locomotives, appliances, and finance. In 2020, GE ranked among the Fortune 500 as the 33rd largest firm in the United States by gross revenue. In 2023, the company was ranked 64th in the Forbes Global 2000. In 2011, GE ranked among the Fortune 20 as the 14th most profitable company, but later very severely underperformed the market (by about 75%) as its profitability collapsed. Two employees of GE—Irving Langmuir (1932) and Ivar Giaever (1973)—have been awarded the Nobel Prize. From 1986 until 2013, GE was the owner of the NBC television network through its purchase of its former subsidiary RCA before its acquisition of NBC's parent company NBCUniversal by Comcast in 2011.
Following the Great Recession of the late 2000s, General Electric began selling off various divisions and assets, including its appliances and financial capital divisions, under Jeff Immelt's leadership as CEO. John Flannery, Immelt's replacement in 2017, further divested General Electric's assets in locomotives and lighting in order to focus the company more on aviation.
“General Electric” enters the record as american multinational conglomerate (1892–2024). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what General, Electric and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“General Electric” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, General, Electric and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q54173. VIAF identifies the subject as 143111218. The Library of Congress control number is n79078780. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1892, 2020, 2023 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “General Electric” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.