History of RCA (1901) 

I was always afraid of things that worked the first time," declared an astonished Thomas Edison after hearing his voice reproduced by his own 1877 phonograph. Editors at Scientific American, among the first to hear the inventor's latest creation, were equally startled. "The machine began by politely inquiring as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night."

Edison's inspiration for the recorded sound device came from his brief work as a telegraph operator at the Western Union office in Indianapolis. He discovered during a night shift that he could couple together two old Morse registers to capture incoming dots and dashes for later playback. He could sleep during his shift and catch up on messages later. Conceived as a labor saving device for business, it would take later entrepreneurs to turn the cylinder phonograph into the more practical disk gramophone. In 1901, the Victor Talking Machine Company was established, using the now famous Nipper on its phonographs and records.

Two years after inventing the phonograph, Edison brought the world the incandescent light bulb. Thirteen years later, his start-up electric company would merge with the Thomson-Houston Electric Company and be renamed General Electric.

Prior to 1920, most Americans couldn't even fathom the idea of voices and music coming into their homes over the air. The industry would grow rapidly from 5,000 in-home radio sets in 1920 to more than 2.5 million in 1924. The "wireless" had become radio.

Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian electrical engineer, transmitted the first wireless signal in 1895. By the turn of the century he had formed telegraph companies in England and opened the first wireless office in New York City. In 1901, Marconi telegraphed the letter "S" across the Atlantic Ocean. The U.S. Navy was so impressed that it replaced a flock of carrier pigeons with the "wireless" for ship-to-shore communications.

By this time, radio pioneer Lee de Forest was lauding his new, three-element electron "audion" tube as a "new receiver for wireless telegraphy." Edwin Armstrong's development of practical regenerative and super-heterodyne circuits led to modern radio reception and transmission as we know them today. On Good Friday, 1917, the U.S. declared war on Germany after German U-boats torpedoed and sank four American ships without warning. President Wilson directed the Navy to take over all wireless stations during the emergency, including Marconi's ship-to-shore operations.

The federal government's takeover of the wireless industry during the war accomplished two things: it focused efforts and funds on further technological improvements and it sorted out the tangle of patent infringements that had crippled industry development. Wartime experience convinced Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt that radio patents should be kept under American control. General Electric, which was planning a major sale of broadcasting equipment to the British Marconi company, was asked instead to take the lead in organizing an American radio concern. GE agreed, and the Radio Corporation of America was formed in October 1919. RCA took over the assets of American Marconi and responsibility for marketing the radio equipment produced by GE and Westinghouse. Conceived as a "marriage of convenience" between private corporations and the government for the development of wireless communication, RCA soon grew in a different direction.

Just six years later, RCA's revenues from "wireless" came to $4 million. Revenue from the sale of consumer Radiolas and related equipment had grown to $46 million and the gap was widening. Westinghouse, one of RCA's manufacturers, received the first commercial broadcasting license in 1920. A few days later, station KDKA went on the air with the returns of the Harding-Cox presidential election. RCA was on the air with the world heavyweight boxing championship by the next summer, a marketing brainstorm of RCA General Manager David Sarnoff.

Radio's popularity in the U.S. market created new opportunities for RCA, which had been marketing radios built by GE and Westinghouse. In 1929, the three partners consolidated their research and development, manufacturing and marketing. RCA purchased Victor Talking Machine Company for $154 million and began manufacturing radios and phonographs in Camden, New Jersey.

The newly-formed RCA Victor created the RCA Radiotron Company to manufacture radio tubes, and a Westinghouse tube factory at LaSalle and Michigan Streets in Indianapolis (which already was producing 20,000 tubes a day) became a key supplier of RCA Radiotron tubes. Concerned about monopoly in the industry, the federal government moved against the fragile radio combine in 1931. GE and Westinghouse withdrew in 1932. Sarnoff moved quickly to capitalize on new opportunities. Within a few months after Al Jolson's voice was heard by moviegoers, RCA had dusted off an old sound-on-film technique and introduced it as RCA Photophone.

The mighty Radio Corporation, with its new manufacturing base and existing talent pool at NBC, was moving to Hollywood. The Radio Corporation of America joined with a chain of vaudeville theaters to open RKO movie studios, which had a successful string of Fred Astaire movies before faltering. In the depths of the Great Depression, construction began with the huge "city within a city" named Rockefeller Center. The jewel in the Rockefeller crown would be Radio City, anchored by the new headquarters for RCA and the network studios of NBC. The radio network, actually split between the NBC "Red Network" and the NBC "Blue Network," made stars out of crooner Rudy Vallee and humorist Will Rogers. Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had urged the creation of RCA as assistant Navy secretary after World War I, put the medium to work during his "fireside chats."

In the early 1920s, David Sarnoff publicly speculated on the possibility of "every farmhouse equipped not only with a sound-receiving device but with a screen that would mirror the sights of life." The idea of television was not new, and mechanical systems had demonstrated crude pictures. But it was Sarnoff's historic meeting with engineer Vladimir Zworykin that set the stage for RCA's success at electronic television transmission and reception. The engineer had already successfully demonstrated his "iconoscope" camera and "kinescope" receiver. Sarnoff sought out the inventor to learn more about his work and ask what it would cost to continue his experiments and develop a marketable system. Zworykin replied "$100,000 and a year and a half."

Ten years and $50 million later, Sarnoff introduced television at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. Visitors during the fair not only got to see television, they actually brought home wallet cards to prove they'd been "televised." President Franklin D. Roosevelt, present at the creation of RCA and a frequent speaker on radio, became the first president to be seen on television when the fair's opening ceremonies were telecast ten days later.

Before long, consumer television development was halted as the country entered World War II. By late 1939, pioneering tests had proved that television could be used aboard aircraft. RCA was ready. For months, the Radio Corporation had been planning for the eventual involvement of U.S. forces in the growing conflict. Manufacturing plants were converted for war production in order to fill orders for sound equipment, mine detectors, sonar equipment, bomb fuses, radio tubes, and even phonograph records to entertain the troops. On December 7, 1941, Sarnoff sent an RCA Radiogram to President Roosevelt after learning about the attack at Pearl Harbor. "All our facilities and personnel are ready and at your instant service," Sarnoff wrote. "We await your commands."

Although RCA was not the first on the market with color television, it was the eventual winner in the color TV standards race. CBS had developed an awkward mechanical system for color TV reproduction, but Sarnoff's all-electronic, black-and-white compatible color TV system was declared the U.S. standard in December 1953. Promotion of color television broadcasts began within a few weeks. The Rose Bowl Parade was shown in color on January 1, 1954, although few people had access to color receivers.

The first RCA consumer color televisions were produced in March 1954. The Bloomington-made set with a 12-inch screen cost $1,000, and there were 31 stations around the country equipped for color TV broadcasting. By 1960, there were half a million color TV sets in use, and more than two-thirds of NBC's prime-time nightly broadcasts were "colorcast" during the 1962-63 season.

A big boost to sales, of course, was color programming. The most popular show during most of the 1960s, and the first western televised in color, was NBC's "Bonanza." For three years it reigned as king of prime time.

Source: RCA website

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