General Electric

General Electric was assembled out of the businesses of America's most famous inventor. In 1892 the financier J.P. Morgan engineered the merger of Thomas Edison's electrical companies with a rival firm to create GE, a giant built to electrify a nation just beginning to string wires across its cities. From the start it sold the whole apparatus of the electrical age — the generators that made power, the lines that carried it, and the light bulbs that consumed it.

GE turned invention itself into a business. In 1900 it opened one of the first industrial research laboratories in the United States, institutionalizing the kind of tinkering Edison had done alone and producing a steady stream of improvements in lighting, power generation, and electrical machinery. As electricity spread into every home and factory, GE grew with it, manufacturing the appliances, motors, and turbines that ran the modern world.

Over the twentieth century the company sprawled far beyond electricity. It built jet engines and plastics, owned the NBC television network, and through GE Capital became one of the largest financial firms in the country, a conglomerate so diversified it was hard to say what business it was really in. For a time it was among the most valuable companies on earth, and under the celebrated and controversial chief executive Jack Welch it became a symbol of hard-driving corporate management.

The empire proved too sprawling to last. Battered by the 2008 financial crisis and years of strategic missteps, GE shed its finance arm and its other divisions, and in 2018 it was dropped from the Dow Jones Industrial Average — the last of the index's original members to go. Broken into separate companies, the firm that Edison and Morgan built stands as a lesson in both the reach and the limits of the American industrial conglomerate.