Westinghouse and General Electric loom large in my book, simply because they engaged in cutthroat competition to build power reactors as soon as World War II concluded. I don’t really dwell on the distant past of these two firms but note the following as background, from a wonderful history:
Beginning with fifteen sizable companies in the early 1880s, they absorbed one another so rapidly that in 1893, only fourteen years after Edison’s invention of a practical electric light, General Electric and Westinghouse had swallowed all the other competitors to become a duopoly controlling the market for electrical generating equipment, transformers, meters, motors, and lighting apparatus.
Nye, David E. 1990. Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940. MIT Press, 170.
