MADE IN THE USA

摘要

ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF NAIROBI, THERE'S A bright red cell-phone tower that delivers coverage to thousands of the city's 3 million people. Inside the tower sit batteries with a high-tech design and a simple purpose: to provide backup power to keep calls connected even when the electrical grid goes down. The surprising thing is where these batteries are made. Not China, Japan or one of the other big Asian manufacturing powers. Instead they come from a plant in Schenectady, N.Y., a Rust Belt city once seen as a relic of an earlier industrial age. Now a General Electric factory on the site of a former turbine plant is churning out the batteries 24 hours a day. "People can't get enough," says Randy Rausch, a manager at the plant. "We're shipping all over the world."