Founder Profile
Edwin Houston
Last reviewed: October 2026 · By Swet Parvadiya
Who is Edwin Houston?
Edwin Houston is a founder of General Electric Company, which was founded in 1892 with Thomas Alva Edison, Charles Albert Coffin and Elihu Thomson.
- Company founded
- General Electric Company
- Founded
- 1892
- Co-founders
- Thomas Alva Edison, Charles Albert Coffin and Elihu Thomson
Background
Edwin Houston possessed a deeply rigorous, highly academic background in advanced physics and complex theoretical science. Operating as a highly respected professor and researcher in Philadelphia, this incredibly intense intellectual foundation in early electrical mechanics provided the exact early theoretical leverage required to successfully co-found the foundational Thomson-Houston industrial empire.
Founding Story
Edwin J. Houston was an American academic and physics teacher in Philadelphia. He worked with his colleague Elihu Thomson on early electrical inventions, and together they developed a commercial arc-lighting system and formed the Thomson-Houston Electric Company. Houston later returned to academic work, but the patents from that collaboration were part of what the company brought to the 1892 merger that formed General Electric.
Edwin Houston was born in 1847 in Alexandria.