George J. Baldwin

George J. Baldwin was an out-of-town member of the Century, but closely identified with many large enterprises originating in New York. The diversity of his earlier activities was illustrated by the fact that, having graduated in the mining engineering course from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he should have occupied important posts successively in an iron company, a gold mine, a cotton-trade partnership and a fertilizer-distributing house. His bent soon showed itself, however, when nation-wide expansion of the electric industry began with the country’s trade revival after the panic of 1893, and the term “public utilities” first came into general use. Baldwin devoted his scientific and executive energies chiefly to organizing electric enterprises in the South. He had a hand in the tense constructive activity through which, on our own entry into the Great War, ocean-going iron ships came to be turned out at Hog Island Works as if they had been only a larger-sized type of pins or buttons. This was an interesting picture of the characteristic high industrial career of the present era in America.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1928 Century Association Yearbook