General Electric established the nation's first dedicated corporate research facility in Schenectady in 1900 after mathematician and electrical engineer Charles Steinmetz persuaded company leaders that a research laboratory was essential to competitiveness and offered his own carriage house as its first home. The laboratory later moved to the main General Electric plant in downtown Schenectady and, in 1950, to a new facility on a 500+ acre riverfront site in Niskayuna where Native American tribes had once farmed and fished. Since its founding, engineers and scientists there have produced major advances in fields ranging from medical imaging to jet engines and green energy, including the 1913 hot cathode X-ray tube invented by Dr. William Coolidge, the 1922 1,000 watt radio test and debut of WGY, the 1946 GE J-35 axial flow jet engine, the 1954 first laboratory-grown diamonds, Ivar Giaever's 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics for superconductive tunneling, the 1978 first total body computed tomography system, and a 1984 artificial intelligence application for diagnosing and repairing diesel-electric locomotives. Dr. Marshall Jones later developed a laser welding system that made it possible to weld different metals and a laser robot that brought laser technology to the assembly line.
