Thousands of volunteers have fanned out this weekend across towns and neighborhoods still reeling from damage caused by Hurricane Sandy. In Brooklyn’s Red Hook, for example, New Yorkers and visitors hauled out debris from flooded basements and handed out blankets and warm clothes from church steps and garages. At shelters in Park Slope, locals were helping the ill and the elderly with basic human necessities such as using the bathroom and brushing the teeth. In Coney Island, teams of volunteers carried food and water to residents stranded in high rise buildings still without power. Sandy’s victims need all the help they can get. According to the latest estimates, more than 1.3 million homes and business along the East Coast are still without electricity.
GE and its employees have been helping out, too. GE Foundation gave $1 million to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund and another $100,000 to the United Way of America for local community needs. The company will also match in full employee donations to the American Red Cross and other disaster relief organizations. GE volunteers have also reached out to local non-profits to help on the ground.
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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Sandy-Brooklyn.jpg"]
Friends in Need: Hundreds of volunteers traveled to Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood to help clearing out flooded basements and handing out water, food, and warm clothing.
[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Sandy-Brooklyn2.jpg"]
Friends in Need: Hundreds of volunteers traveled to Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood to help clearing out flooded basements and handing out water, food, and warm clothing.
[/image]
[/slides]
“While state and local governments as well as relief organization are still in the middle of determining the exact needs as a result of Hurricane Sandy, we have employees, customers and neighbors who have lost or damaged homes, or who are still living without power,” said Bob Corcoran, vice president of GE Foundation. “Through our partner relief organizations, GE can help those in need in the aftermath and we will.”
In addition to the Sandy relief donations, the GE Foundation supports disaster relief through a $1 million grant to the American Red Cross Annual Disaster Giving Program. The money helps the Red Cross mount an immediate response to any disaster and help people who are affected by it. GE also helps local communities through more than $8 million in contributions to 500 United Way organizations throughout the United States and in other countries.
Showing posts with label GE Works. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GE Works. Show all posts
Monday, November 5, 2012
Monday, October 29, 2012
Eyes on the Nobel Prize: GE Has Employed 2 Nobel Winners, Opened Labs to Others
GE once hired St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Bob Gibson to throw a fastball through a piece high-tech glass. Gibson pitched six innings and failed. GE engineer Ivar Giaever tried something similar on the atomic scale and succeeded. He figured out how to pitch electrons through a thin layer of an insulating material, a technique called electron tunneling. The discovery helped GE build the world’s first full-body magnetic resonance machine (MRI) and earned Giaever a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973.
October is Nobel Prize season and GE researchers have scored two Nobels of their own. Besides Giaever, GE scientist Irving Langmuir won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932 for his research on lamp filaments. His work allowed GE to take the first images of blood vessels.
[slides image_align="left"]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/NobelPrize1.jpg"]
Ivar Giaever's 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics.
[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/NobelPrize2.jpg"]
Ivan Giaever in front of Irving Langmuir's portrait.
[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/NobelPrize3.jpg"]
Giaever at the Nobel awards ceremony in Stockholm with his prize.
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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/NobelPrize4.jpg"]
Giaever's Nobel acceptance telegram.
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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/NobelPrize5.jpg"]
Irving Langmuir received his Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932.
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[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/NobelPrize6.jpg"]
Langmuir's Nobel Prize replica.
[/image]
[/slides]
Nobel-winning physicists Richard Feynman, who coined the word nanotechnology, and Ernest O. Lawrence, who invented the cyclotron and whose name graces two U.S. national laboratories (Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley), spent time at GE as research fellows. Martin Perl, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for the discovery of the tau lepton elementary particle, worked at GE as a chemical engineer for two years.
The awards are no accident. GE spends annually $6 billion on R&D. The company develops innovative machines, technologies, and materials, but it also grows its own research talent. “In a company like GE, it was clear that an engineering degree gave you a vast opportunity,” Giaever said. “I got really fired up by that.” He joined an in-house training course for engineers and got his Nobel-winning “tunneling” idea while splitting time between GE’s research lab in Schenectady, New York, and classes at nearby Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute(RPI), where he was working on a PhD. in physics. "When I grew up in Norway, believe it or not, I knew the name Schenectady,” Giaever told a local paper. “I could even spell it."
Thomas Edison moved the company’s machine works to Schenectady in 1886, and GE opened its research labs close by in 1900. Early visitors to Edison’s labs included radio telegraph inventor Guglielmo Marconi, Niels Bohr, who cracked the structure of the atom, I.P. Pavlov famous for his conditioned dogs, and other Nobel winners.
GE research labs now employ 3,000 people, including 1,125 PhDs. The global research center is still in New York, but GE has labs also in San Ramon, California, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Bangalore, and Munich. Just in 2011, GE researchers received more than 3,600 patents. All this innovation is helping to create new jobs, and companies. GE’s newest business, GE Energy Storage, makes high-tech Durathon batteries in a new $170 million plant just outside Schenectady.
Then there is the flip side. “Unfortunately, most people take Nobel Prize winner seriously, and that includes some of the Nobel winners themselves,” Giaever told a GE newsletter. “Because I’m a winner, people tend to think that I should have some unique insights into everything, from the Middle East crisis to every conceivable scientific field. Of course, I don’t know any more about them than anyone else, so I’ve got to watch what I say – which I’m not very good at.”
October is Nobel Prize season and GE researchers have scored two Nobels of their own. Besides Giaever, GE scientist Irving Langmuir won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932 for his research on lamp filaments. His work allowed GE to take the first images of blood vessels.
[slides image_align="left"]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/NobelPrize1.jpg"]
Ivar Giaever's 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics.
[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/NobelPrize2.jpg"]
Ivan Giaever in front of Irving Langmuir's portrait.
[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/NobelPrize3.jpg"]
Giaever at the Nobel awards ceremony in Stockholm with his prize.
[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/NobelPrize4.jpg"]
Giaever's Nobel acceptance telegram.
[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/NobelPrize5.jpg"]
Irving Langmuir received his Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932.
[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/NobelPrize6.jpg"]
Langmuir's Nobel Prize replica.
[/image]
[/slides]
Nobel-winning physicists Richard Feynman, who coined the word nanotechnology, and Ernest O. Lawrence, who invented the cyclotron and whose name graces two U.S. national laboratories (Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley), spent time at GE as research fellows. Martin Perl, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for the discovery of the tau lepton elementary particle, worked at GE as a chemical engineer for two years.
The awards are no accident. GE spends annually $6 billion on R&D. The company develops innovative machines, technologies, and materials, but it also grows its own research talent. “In a company like GE, it was clear that an engineering degree gave you a vast opportunity,” Giaever said. “I got really fired up by that.” He joined an in-house training course for engineers and got his Nobel-winning “tunneling” idea while splitting time between GE’s research lab in Schenectady, New York, and classes at nearby Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute(RPI), where he was working on a PhD. in physics. "When I grew up in Norway, believe it or not, I knew the name Schenectady,” Giaever told a local paper. “I could even spell it."
Thomas Edison moved the company’s machine works to Schenectady in 1886, and GE opened its research labs close by in 1900. Early visitors to Edison’s labs included radio telegraph inventor Guglielmo Marconi, Niels Bohr, who cracked the structure of the atom, I.P. Pavlov famous for his conditioned dogs, and other Nobel winners.
GE research labs now employ 3,000 people, including 1,125 PhDs. The global research center is still in New York, but GE has labs also in San Ramon, California, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Bangalore, and Munich. Just in 2011, GE researchers received more than 3,600 patents. All this innovation is helping to create new jobs, and companies. GE’s newest business, GE Energy Storage, makes high-tech Durathon batteries in a new $170 million plant just outside Schenectady.
Then there is the flip side. “Unfortunately, most people take Nobel Prize winner seriously, and that includes some of the Nobel winners themselves,” Giaever told a GE newsletter. “Because I’m a winner, people tend to think that I should have some unique insights into everything, from the Middle East crisis to every conceivable scientific field. Of course, I don’t know any more about them than anyone else, so I’ve got to watch what I say – which I’m not very good at.”
Monday, June 18, 2012
Ken and the Art of Jet Engine Maintenance: How Father-Daughter Team Learned to Fix Jet Engines on the Kansas Prairie
Kenny Glasgow has never set foot in an executive suite but that didn’t stop him from flying to work. In the 1960s, Glasgow was fixing jet engines at GE’s Strother Field plant in Kansas, and saved up wages for a small Cessna 150 two-seater plane. “One fall the Arkansas River flooded and the road to Strother was closed for a several days,” Glasgow says. “I had about a quarter of a mile of alfalfa just east of the house. You could land down there when it wasn’t too tall. So I just flew to work.”
Glasgow gets things done. He spent almost four decades at GE, getting in on the ground level as a “heavy helper” in the maintenance department, and soaring to a leadership job on GE’s classified work for the B-2 stealth bomber. “The company raised my family,” he says. “It turned out to be heaven sent.”
Glasgow, now 75, grew up on a farm six miles from Strother that his grandfather settled in 1871. “Wrench turning was not all that unfamiliar,” he says. “On the farm, you kept most of your things running yourself.”
[slides image_align="left"]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/KennyGlasgow1.jpg"]
Radioman: Kenny Glasgow sporting a flight jacket outside his barracks in Argentia, Newfoundland. Glasgow served in the U.S. Navy as a radioman on surveillance planes flying over the north Atlantic from 1954 until 1958. He joined GE in 1961.
[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/KennyGlasgow2.jpg"]
Kenny Glasgow with his daughter Kathryn. “My father swears that aviation is in our blood,” Kathryn says.
[/image]
[/slides]
He joined the NAVY from high school, and after active duty as a radioman on the Warning Star surveillance planes he found work on an oil rig. When the rig shut down, “my brother and I were looking in the paper for something to do to get groceries,” Glasgow says.
GE’s Strother engine repair and assembly plant was a decade old when the Glasgow brothers started, earning $1.78 ½ per hour. “That was a pretty good wage at the time,” Glasgow says.
He started by working nightshifts, drilling holes in concrete hangar floors to install machinery. But he soon advanced and started servicing and testing GE’s J73 and J85 jet engines. He learned on the job, from technical manuals and from other workers. “The foremen knew because most of them had done the job before,” Glasgow says. “They came through the ranks.”
He also learned from engineers at the plant. “It took me quite a while to be able to listen at the level they were talking, but once I caught on, they were like a walking book of knowledge,” Glasgow says.
In the late 1960s, Glasgow bought the Cessna and took his family on flying expeditions. One of his daughters, Kathryn, was smitten. “I remember spending weekends polishing that thing,” she says. “It was our family time. My father swears that aviation is in our blood.”
Kathryn got introduced to GE and Strother as a girl. “We’d bring dad dinner and get to spend a little more time with him,” she says. When it was her turn to graduate from high school, she went straight to the plant. “I don’t know how to explain it, but I always knew that I wanted to work here,” Kathryn says.
Like her father, Kathryn started at the bottom and now leads a team that repairs engines for Apache and Black Hawk helicopters. “There weren’t many women here when I was hired,” she says. “My dad was a protector, he was not afraid to say something to somebody.”
Glasgow taught her how to fix airplanes, shape tools, and find new solutions to problems. “He expected a lot, he wanted you to know a lot,” she says. When Kathryn decided to apply for an inspector job, she says, her father challenged her to read a measuring tool, the C – micrometer. “She could not do it, but by golly she learned quickly,” Glasgow laughs.
Glasgow retired from Strother in 1998, when the B-2 work was over. With more than 800 employees, the plant is one of the largest employers on Cowley County, Kansas. “This is a small community,” Glasgow says. “It’s like a family operation.”
Glasgow gets things done. He spent almost four decades at GE, getting in on the ground level as a “heavy helper” in the maintenance department, and soaring to a leadership job on GE’s classified work for the B-2 stealth bomber. “The company raised my family,” he says. “It turned out to be heaven sent.”
Glasgow, now 75, grew up on a farm six miles from Strother that his grandfather settled in 1871. “Wrench turning was not all that unfamiliar,” he says. “On the farm, you kept most of your things running yourself.”
[slides image_align="left"]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/KennyGlasgow1.jpg"]
Radioman: Kenny Glasgow sporting a flight jacket outside his barracks in Argentia, Newfoundland. Glasgow served in the U.S. Navy as a radioman on surveillance planes flying over the north Atlantic from 1954 until 1958. He joined GE in 1961.
[/image]
[image src="http://files.gereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/KennyGlasgow2.jpg"]
Kenny Glasgow with his daughter Kathryn. “My father swears that aviation is in our blood,” Kathryn says.
[/image]
[/slides]
He joined the NAVY from high school, and after active duty as a radioman on the Warning Star surveillance planes he found work on an oil rig. When the rig shut down, “my brother and I were looking in the paper for something to do to get groceries,” Glasgow says.
GE’s Strother engine repair and assembly plant was a decade old when the Glasgow brothers started, earning $1.78 ½ per hour. “That was a pretty good wage at the time,” Glasgow says.
He started by working nightshifts, drilling holes in concrete hangar floors to install machinery. But he soon advanced and started servicing and testing GE’s J73 and J85 jet engines. He learned on the job, from technical manuals and from other workers. “The foremen knew because most of them had done the job before,” Glasgow says. “They came through the ranks.”
He also learned from engineers at the plant. “It took me quite a while to be able to listen at the level they were talking, but once I caught on, they were like a walking book of knowledge,” Glasgow says.
In the late 1960s, Glasgow bought the Cessna and took his family on flying expeditions. One of his daughters, Kathryn, was smitten. “I remember spending weekends polishing that thing,” she says. “It was our family time. My father swears that aviation is in our blood.”
Kathryn got introduced to GE and Strother as a girl. “We’d bring dad dinner and get to spend a little more time with him,” she says. When it was her turn to graduate from high school, she went straight to the plant. “I don’t know how to explain it, but I always knew that I wanted to work here,” Kathryn says.
Like her father, Kathryn started at the bottom and now leads a team that repairs engines for Apache and Black Hawk helicopters. “There weren’t many women here when I was hired,” she says. “My dad was a protector, he was not afraid to say something to somebody.”
Glasgow taught her how to fix airplanes, shape tools, and find new solutions to problems. “He expected a lot, he wanted you to know a lot,” she says. When Kathryn decided to apply for an inspector job, she says, her father challenged her to read a measuring tool, the C – micrometer. “She could not do it, but by golly she learned quickly,” Glasgow laughs.
Glasgow retired from Strother in 1998, when the B-2 work was over. With more than 800 employees, the plant is one of the largest employers on Cowley County, Kansas. “This is a small community,” Glasgow says. “It’s like a family operation.”
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