General Electric Company Plc - Developer
The General Electric Company, PLC (GEC) is entirely separate from the General Electric Company in the United States, although the companies do share several European joint ventures. Both companies, however, have played similar roles in the development of their respective countries’ electrical production and consumption. In fact, both were central to electrification programs and were ideally placed to supply the consumer electrical appliances that increased demand for their machines for generating electricity. GEC’s stature today as an industrial giant is due in large part to that ability to both create and supply a tremendous demand for electricity over the past 100 years.
GEC was formed in 1886, when two enterprising young men, Hugo Hirst and Gustav Byng, teamed up in London to form a company. They originally acted as wholesalers of electrical products made by other companies. GEC’s first catalog was issued that year and became a guide to popular uses of electricity. However, both men were so enamored of electricity’s potential that they yearned to expand its applications beyond its early use as an alternative to gas illumination. (The lighting system in the House of Commons had been electrified in the early 1880s and the electrification of several other prominent London buildings soon followed.) Hirst had had experience with several other applications of electrical power—he had driven an electrically powered boat on the River Thames, ridden on an electric cycle, and even developed an electric-powered dog cart for an Indian rajah. His ambition was to become a manufacturer of electric products, and so within three years of the founding of their company Hirst and Byng opened a factory in Manchester.
