Dr. Paul Israel

The investors in Edison Electric, which had become Edison General Electric, and the Thompson-Houston Company decide to merge.

And what happens is that the people who are running Thompson-Houston take over the company, and this new company is called General Electric.

The Edison name disappears.

Edison is put on the board of directors, but really has nothing to do with the running of the company.

After that, he goes on to many other projects over the last 40 years of his life.

But what's significant is that this marks the transition to AC for central stations.

And in 1893, the Chicago-Columbian Exposition, both General Electric and Westinghouse compete.

Westinghouse wins the award.

And then two years later, Westinghouse uses Tesla's polyphase AC distribution system

to win the award for a new power station at Niagara Falls, where the electricity is sent down to Buffalo.

And suddenly, the potential of AC to create a much larger electrical grid

that can power a much bigger area becomes evident.

And this marks the transition from small central stations and individual plants for buildings to the growth of the grid that we all use today.

Well, he built West Orange in 1887 and opened it in 1888.

He was still in the electrical industry at the time.

And in fact, it was the R&D facility for the Edison General Electric Company.

But once GE is formed, Edison decides that he's going to move on to other projects.

He had some that he was already working on.

The biggest one for the period of the 1890s is an effort to...

use electromagnetic separation to be able to take low-grade iron ore from the played-out iron mines of the East Coast and produce iron for the steel mills.