Building the Future: Inside General Electric, 1937

As American corporations go, few have a history that runs as deep as General Electric. Its roots trace back to Thomas Edison; GE was formed in 1892 when a conglomerate built around Edison’s inventions merged with another conglomerate. GE was one of the original 12 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average back in 1896.

The company has had its hand in many technological advances over its storied history. General Electric was behind the first television broadcast in 1928. The first night baseball game, in Cincinnati in 1935, was played under GE lights. During World War II the company made the turbojets for America’s first jet aircraft. Aerospace, health care and information systems are part of a long list of fields in which the company has made a mark.

The breadth of the GE operations underlines the great variety of activity that legendary LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt documented when he gained access to the General Electric operations back in 1937. What he captured is visually amazing, and also obscure in its details; these photos were for a story that never ran in the magazine, so we don’t know precisely what is happening in every picture. But we do know what was happening in a broad sense: these workers were shaping the future.

Looking back from the vantage point of the 21st century, what stands out about this GE manufacturing operation is how physical it was. This was 1937, and there is not a computer in sight. It was at the forefront of technology, but people were doing everything with their hands.

Some of the coolest photos are the ones that Eisenstadt took of a man handling a light bulb. It’s fitting. Not only was the light bulb one of the company’s foundational products, but those bulbs are a place where consumers today can still see the General Electric logo. Billions of lighting products carrying the GE brand are still bought every year—even if GE actually sold its light bulb business to a smart home company called Savant in 2020.

That General Electric name still means a lot—as you would expect, given its long history.