Coffin

Thomas Alva Edison, intimate friend of Henry Ford and Harvey Samuel Firestone, spoke last week of another friend: "He was the most remarkable business man I have ever known. . . ."

The man Inventor Edison referred to was Charles Albert Coffin, who founded the General Electric Co. (1892), who sold new uses for electricity, who in less than half his own lifetime helped considerably to change the character of civilization. Last week, at the age of 81, he died of pneumonia, after four years of retirement from business. By 1883, the year Charles Albert Coffin turned from his profitable manufacturing of shoes at Lynn, Mass., to the manufacturing of electrical equipment, electricity was in little practical use. Samuel Finley Breese Morse (1791-1872) had shown in 1844 that it could be used for telegraphy. In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) applied it to telephony. Charles Francis Brush (1849--) invented the Brush electric arc light in 1878. Thomas Alva Edison (1847--) shortly was to develop a clanking generator and the incandescent lamp, and Elihu Thomson (1853--) his 500 and more industrial applications.

Electrician Thomson's industrial devices appealed to New Englander Coffin. He financed them, created the Thomson-Houston electric companies in this country and abroad. Nevertheless as late as 1892 electricity was little used industrially, although in telegraphy and telephony it had already become a necessity and in lighting an approved innovation.

In 1892 Mr. Coffin negotiated the merger of his Thomson-Houston Electric Co. of Lynn, Mass., with the Edison General Electric Co. of Schenectady, which J. P. Morgan had casually financed to manufacture power machinery. The new General Electric Co. which absorbed them (and, soon after, several other competitive and related firms) covered their entire field. Mr. Coffin, perspicacious of the industry's future, obtained control; made himself president. He was able to do this because he was in many respects as adroit a financier as Mr. Morgan and because Mr. Morgan never had a flair for young industries. Besides, in 1892, Mr. Morgan was busy with railroads.

Mr. Coffin had Edwin Wilbur Rice Jr. (1862--) and Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865-1923) as his technicians. (He could not keep Samuel Insull as sales agent.) Himself he devoted to inducing industry to use electricity for power.

His mediacy had created the comforts and thereby had induced the crowding of huge modern cities. This was essential, he once said, "to attain a high degree of human culture. But all the advantages of the city will soon be possible on the farm without having to put up with city life. . . . Heretofore we have been compelling electricity to take us to the city. Hereafter we shall simply touch a button and have it take the city out to us." He was the applier of electricity, but, when asked what it was, he said: "I can't tell you. I had to ask Mr. Edison, but he didn't know. He said there were only two things in the world and electricity was the other one. One is matter. The other is this unknown something which makes matter move."

General Electric commenced with a $37,000,000 capitalization. Now it has $26,706,675 of 6% special stock and $180,287,046 of common stock outstanding.

Last year its net sales were close to $290,000,000, its net earnings near $38,600,000. The year's surplus was $13,485,947; the total surplus on Dec. 31 was $85,848,171.

Equipment orders now average more than $1,000,000 daily, amounted to $165,405,720 last half year. Heretofore the company's part-year reports have been only on the unfilled orders, as the $78,972,062 unfilled at the end of June this year ($66,468,992 the same date last year). But this fall, Oct. 25, the company will begin to make regular quarterly reports of earnings to the stockholders.