Charles A. Coffin

Charles Albert Coffin (31 December 1844 - 14 July 1926) was the cofounder and first President of General Electric corporation.

Early life

He was born in Fairfield, Maine to Albert Coffin and his wife Anstrus Varney. He married Caroline Russell of Holbrook, Massachusetts and had three children.

Career

He moved to join his uncle Charles E. Coffin at his shoe company in Lynn, Massachusetts at the age 18, where he spent the next twenty years. Eventually he established his own shoe factory named Coffin and Clough in Lynn.

In 1883, he was approached by another Lynn businessman, Silas A. Barton, to bring to town a struggling electric company from New Britain, Connecticut, finance it and to lead it. With the engineering work of Elihu Thomson, Coffin was able to build the company, renamed Thomson-Houston up to be an equal to Thomas Edison's companies. During this time they deployed power plants in the South, including two in Atlanta, Georgia to run the electric lighting and in 1889, Joel Hurt's electric streetcar line.