GE opens 100-year-old time capsule at Nela Park

Employees at GE's NELA Park in East Cleveland, Ohio, opened a century-old time capsule on Monday that contained some fascinating company memorabilia of a bygone era, including five light bulbs. Three of them appeared to be in working condition, according ...
March 27, 2012
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Employees at GE's NELA Park in East Cleveland, Ohio, opened a century-old time capsule on Monday that contained some fascinating company memorabilia of a bygone era, including five light bulbs. Three of them appeared to be in working condition, according to this report at www.gereports.com. The time capsule had been buried in the cornerstone of a building on the Nela Park campus, where GE has held hundreds of lighting classes for lighting professionals over the years.

The posting said GE Lighting engineers cleaned one of the bulbs, screwed it into a socket, and powered it up to 60 volts. It started emitting a soft glow, a distant incandescent echo of Thomas Edison's ingenuity. “It's a remarkable testament to the craftsmanship and quality of GE products that one of the tungsten filament lamps buried for 100 years showed signs of life,” said Maryrose Sylvester, president and CEO of GE Lighting.

Click on the video below to see the lamp powering up.

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Jim Lucy Blog

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Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.