"A Light Bulb in Every House": The Istanbul General Electric Factory and American Technology Transfer to Turkey (July 2022)
Tunc, Tanfer Emin (Author)
Gokhan Tunc (Author)
Technology and Culture
Volume: 63
Issue: 3
Pages: 749-774
In 1946, Turkish entrepreneur Vehbi Koç signed an agreement with the U.S. firm General Electric to build and operate its first light bulb factory in the Near/Middle East, in Istanbul. This private joint venture introduced new manufacturing techniques, business practices, and consumer habits to Turkey, opening channels of postwar technological exchange. Closer examination of the GE-Koç partnership reveals that during the early Cold War, the transfer and embedding of American technologies in Turkey was a politically complicated process of innovation that required constant adaptation. Fraught with unforeseeable obstacles, it also required cautious negotiation with multiple transnational actors. The story of the GE-Koç partnership thus adds a new dimension to historical understandings of the Turkish Cold War experience and the Americanization of the region. It illustrates how transferring a nonmilitary, soft-power, domestic technology—the light bulb—played a significant role in Turkish-American relations and therefore contributes to studies of U.S. Cold War diplomacy through transnational investment in innovation.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Jan Zofka;
(2018)
China as a role model? The ‘Economic Leap’ campaign in Bulgaria (1958-1960)
(/isis/citation/CBB698728570/)
Book
Ali Erken;
(2018)
America and the Making of Modern Turkey: Science, Culture and Political Alliances
(/isis/citation/CBB795421873/)
Book
Siegfried S. Hecker;
(2016)
Doomed to Cooperate: How American and Russian Scientists Joined Forces to Avert Some of the Greatest Post-Cold War Nuclear Dangers
(/isis/citation/CBB152427066/)
Article
Honghong Tinn;
(October 2018)
Modeling Computers and Computer Models: Manufacturing Economic-Planning Projects in Cold War Taiwan, 1959–1968
(/isis/citation/CBB062296277/)
Article
O'Reagan, Douglas Michael;
(2014)
Science, Technology, and Know-How: Exploitation of German Science and the Challenges of Technology Transfer in the Postwar World
(/isis/citation/CBB001560375/)
Thesis
O'Reagan, Douglas Michael;
(2014)
Science, Technology, and Know-How: Exploitation of German Science and the Challenges of Technology Transfer in the Postwar World
(/isis/citation/CBB001567544/)
Article
Forsberg, Carl;
(2019)
Iraq, the United States, and the long shadow of the Cold War
(/isis/citation/CBB479739334/)
Article
Pablo León-Aguinaga;
Lorenzo Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla;
(2021)
The deployment of US military assistance to Spain in the 1950s: Limited modernisation and strategic dependence
(/isis/citation/CBB252299706/)
Article
David Scott Foglesong;
(2020)
When the Russians really were coming: Citizen diplomacy and the end of Cold War enmity in America
(/isis/citation/CBB144952700/)
Article
Herrala, Meri Elisabet;
(2019)
Challenges for Soviet-American collaboration in the Cold War: The capitalisation of pianist Sviatoslav Richter for American musical markets
(/isis/citation/CBB707486248/)
Article
Claudia Kedar;
(2018)
Economic neutrality during the Cold War: The World Bank, the United States, and Pinochet’s Chile, 1973–1977
(/isis/citation/CBB194990246/)
Book
Jeffrey P. Stone;
(2019)
British and American News Maps in the Early Cold War Period, 1945–1955: Mapping the "Red Menace"
(/isis/citation/CBB115554224/)
Article
Doel, Ronald E.;
Friedman, Robert Marc;
Lajus, Julia;
Sörline, Sverker;
Wråkberg, Urban;
(2014)
Strategic Arctic Science: National Interests in Building Natural Knowledge---Interwar Era through the Cold War
(/isis/citation/CBB001450344/)
Article
Melanie Brand;
(2021)
Intelligence, warning, and policy: The Johnson administration and the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia
(/isis/citation/CBB778819202/)
Book
Jeroen van Dongen;
(2016)
Cold War Science and the Transatlantic Circulation of Knowledge
(/isis/citation/CBB575528493/)
Book
Christopher Hollings;
(2016)
Scientific Communication Across the Iron Curtain
(/isis/citation/CBB669539792/)
Article
Nicholas Amthony Autiello;
(2021)
Taming the Wild Dragon: John F. Kennedy and the Republic of China, 1961–63
(/isis/citation/CBB626916216/)
Book
Heidi Tinsman;
(2014)
Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB383615341/)
Book
Junker, Detlef;
Gassert, Philipp;
Mausbach, Wilfried;
Morris, David B.;
(2004)
The United States and Germany in the era of the Cold War, 1945-1990: A handbook
(/isis/citation/CBB001180295/)
Article
Howkins, Adrian;
(2008)
Political Meteorology: Weather, Climate and the Contest for Antarctic Sovereignty, 1939--1959
(/isis/citation/CBB000931788/)
Be the first to comment!