Charles Albert Coffin (Fairfield, Maine, December 31, 1844 - July 14, 1926) was an American businessman and General Electric Corporation's first CEO (CEO). biography
Charles Coffin was the son of Albert Coffin and Anstrus Varney. At his eighteenth he moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, where he employed his uncle Charles E. Coffin, who had a shoe store. Here he would stay for twenty years to finally start his own shoe factory under the name of Coffin and Clough.
In 1882, he was approached by another Lynn businessman, Silas Barton, to finance, finance and manage the company Elihu Thomson and Edwin Houston, the American Electric Company from New Britain. Under his leadership, the Coffin managed to grow the company, now renamed the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, to become a solid competitor of Thomas Edison's companies.
After both companies were merged into General Electric (GE) in 1892, Coffin was appointed as the first chairman of the group, a position that he would perform until 1912. Soon he came to be his biggest trial when the company came without money during the financial crisis in 1893. Coffin rescued the company by agreeing with J. P. Morgan a deal whereby New York banks gave money in exchange for the shares in utilities GE owned.
In addition, he concluded with GE's largest competitor, Westinghouse Electric Company, to conclude an agreement on the sharing of each other's major electrical patents at the end of 1890. On the recommendation of Charles Proteus Steinmetz and Thomson, he founded a research laboratory for the group in 1901, the first industrial R & D center in the United States.
From 1913 until retirement in 1922 he was Chairman of General Electric's Board of Directors. Coffin was married to Caroline Russell from Holbrook, and had three children. He passed away at the age of 81.
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