A Triumph of Kindness: Remembering MiSci President and GE Archivist Chris Hunter

GE Aerospace joins New York’s Capital Region in mourning the loss of Chris Hunter, a true friend of countless past and present employees who appreciated his passion and pride in the company’s history. 

As director of GE’s archives and most recently as president of the Museum of Innovation and Science (MiSci) in the company’s birthplace of Schenectady, New York, Chris became the foremost historian on GE. For 25 years, he was a devoted and faithful steward of the company’s collection of more than 2 million historical photographs, documents, and artifacts. More than that, he was one of the biggest champions and ambassadors of the company’s innovation heritage. 

Innovation giants like Thomas Edison, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, and William Coolidge, as well as the generations of GE employees who followed in their footsteps, brought the world modern lighting, appliances, electricity, flight, and healthcare. And all of them have had Chris Hunter to keep their memories, discoveries, and wisdom alive to both inspire and guide current and future generations of inventive minds. 

Like all great historians, Chris knew that to progress as a society, it’s important to remember your roots.

Chris interacted with and met countless employees over the years, and he was a part of the company’s extended family. Those of us who worked closely with him marveled at the depth of his knowledge and learned much from him. Chris always knew how to make important company milestones come alive by supplying remarkable artifacts and photos from the GE collection.

Of all these, one big moment stands out. When GE was preparing to take the unprecedented step of separating into three independent companies, Chris was enlisted to make sure we marked the moment in the right way. Working with the GE Reports team, he helped to produce this article, which celebrates and pays homage to GE’s long legacy of innovation. 

One fascinating fact we learned from Chris was that the new and improved stock ticker that Edison designed and patented in 1873 was really the spark that led to GE’s formation. His invention, which found a way to synchronize multiple stock tickers from different locations, gave Edison his first big infusion of capital — equal to about $1 million today — which enabled him to start his lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey. It was there that he demonstrated the incandescent light bulb in 1879, and the rest, as they say, is history.

How fitting it was, then, that Edison’s stock ticker was on hand on April 2, 2024, when GE rang the bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to inaugurate the final spin of GE Aerospace and GE Vernova as standalone public companies. (GE HealthCare had been spun off earlier, on January 1, 2023.)  Working with Chris, we brought the stock ticker — one of the most treasured artifacts in the company’s collection — down to Wall Street to mark the occasion. 

Chris was there for the ringing of the bell and the launch events around it, so that he could witness a new piece of company history being made. But as a historian, he also recognized that Edison’s stock ticker served as a tangible reminder to the world (not to mention Wall Street) that the “Innovation DNA” that built the company was alive and thriving within these three newly independent companies. 

Among the many tributes that major public officials, business leaders, and friends have written and posted recently, all have attested to what is perhaps Chris’s greatest trait of all — his genuine kindness. In today’s world, it’s not easy to succeed, lead, and be kind. Chris was the exception. 

It was Chris’s leadership, decency, and kindness that made him such a trusted steward of the GE collection all these years. And it is why GE Aerospace was so proud to have MiSci as one of the primary community partners in the Capital Region, along with the University at Albany, to support the GE Aerospace Foundation’s Next Engineers Initiative, which will reach 4,000 local students through classroom and hands-on learning experiences in science and engineering over the next four years.

We join the Capital Region in remembering Chris, and will honor his legacy by continuing  to partner with MiSci, inspiring the next generation of engineering minds and supporting the stewardship of the GE collection. Together with MiSci’s many supporters, we can fulfill Chris’s highest aspirations for the museum and make this a triumph of kindness.