Rittner’s Top Ten List

By Don Rittner

Schenectady County & City Historian

David Letterman may have started it but everyone loves a top ten list. So here is my own top ten of Schenectady’s Firsts. These are inventions or events that happened here first in America or the world:

10. First light bulb in the world with tungsten filament (the kind used today worldwide) was invented here. In 1906, GE was the first to patent a method of making tungsten filaments for use in incandescent bulbs, but the filaments were costly. Four years later, in 1910, GE’s William David Coolidge (1873-1975) invented an improved method of making tungsten filaments making the costs more practical and they also outlasted all other types of filaments (including bamboo).

9. The first known artificial refrigeration was demonstrated by William Cullen at the University of Glasgow in 1748, but did nothing with it. In 1805, an American inventor, Oliver Evans, designed the first refrigeration machine. Two of the first home refrigerators appeared in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where, in 1911, GE unveiled a unit invented by a French monk. Frigidaire was the leader in the industry until GE decided to enter the electric refrigerator arena and, after the engineering research led by Alexander Stevenson, leapfrogged everyone else with its Monitor Top refrigerator in 1927. It featured a compact, totally sealed system that was quieter, more energy-efficient, and less expensive than everyone else. These refrigerators were designed with such reliability that most surviving working antique refrigerators today are Monitor Tops. Incidentally, the round “monitor” top was named for Schenectady’s contribution to the ironclad battleship the USS Monitor in 1862. The Clute Brothers Foundry on Erie and Liberty had made the gears and engine to turn the rotating turret of the Monitor and it was this contribution that help win the war for the North.

8. In 1910, GE produced the first electric range, the GE Hotpoint electric.

7. On May 11, 1928, the first television station in the world (WRGB) was born and continues to this day broadcasting on Balltown Road, but did you know one of their earliest homes is now called the Center for Science and Technology (CST) building. That’s right, SCCC’s science building is WRGB’s former Washington Avenue studios that went into operation on December 19, 1941 and was heralded as the most modern television production facility in the country and the first building created solely for the purpose of television.

6. The first college radio station in America is WRUC from Union College in 1920. Their first experimental broadcasts under the call sign 2ADD.

5. The first all electric house in the world was built at 1145 Avon Road. This bungalow-style house was built in 1905 for G.E. employee Harry W. Hillman, who changed the way we use electricity. A century ago, his house had a single outlet—primarily for light bulbs, which had to be removed to use a heater, oven or iron. So he installed a second outlet, and soon G.E. was developing appliances to plug into them.

4. The first dramatic program was broadcast on TV in 1928. “The Queen’s Messenger” by W. Somerset Maugham, was broadcast to the four TV sets in existence in the Capital District by WRGB.

3. In 1912, a truck made by American Locomotive (ALCO) with a crew of five made the first transcontinental truck delivery carrying three tons of Parrot Brand Olive Silk Soap. The cross-country trip (4,145 miles) was made in 91 days, arriving at City Hall in San Francisco on Sept. 20, 1912. There were 509 commercial cars of 71 separate makes, ranging in size from mammoth trucks with 13,000-pound capacity down to light delivery of 500-pound capacity.

2. In 1927, the home of renowned G.E. inventor Ernst Alexanderson at 1132 Adams Road was one of three sites to receive the first home reception of a TV program. They saw images and heard voices of two people who were in a G.E. research lab several miles away.

1. The first municipal trash collection in America was inaugurated by Mayor George Lunn, Schenectady’s first and only Socialist Mayor (1912).