RADIO CORPORATION OF AMERICA

Definition:

RCA Corporation, founded as Radio Corporation of America, was an electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. Currently, the RCA trademark is owned by the French conglomerate Thomson SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Thomson. The trademark is used by Sony Music Entertainment and Thomson SA, which licenses the name to other companies like Audiovox and TCL Corporation for products descended from that common ancestor.

Function:

Establishment

The incorporation of the assets of Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America (including David Sarnoff), the Pan-American Telegraph Company and those already controlled by the United States Navy led to a new publicly-held company formed by General Electric (which owned a controlling interest) in 1919. The subsequent cooperation among RCA, General Electric, United Fruit, Westinghouse Electric Corporation, and AT&T laid the groundwork for significant developments in point-to-point and broadcast radio, including the new National Broadcasting Company. The Navy turned over to RCA the former American Marconi radio stations appropriated during the war. Admiral Bullard received a seat on the RCA Board of Directors for his efforts in establishing RCA. The end result was government-created monopolies in radio for GE and Westinghouse and in telephone for AT&T.

The Navy's rationale that radio frequencies were limited and needed to be appropriated and put in use before other countries, primarily Great Britain, monopolized them first soon collapsed with the discovery in the mid-1920s of the practicality of the shortwave band for long-distance transmissions. The first head was Owen D. Young. At this time, David Sarnoff became general manager. RCA's charter required it be mostly American owned. The company became responsible for marketing GE and Westinghouse's radio equipment, and in a subsequent deal it also acquired the patents of United Fruit and Westinghouse in exchange for ownership stakes in those companies. As time passed, the company secured a large number of patents, including the superheterodyne concept. Some of RCA's early radios were designed so as to prevent the internals from being reverse-engineered.

Over the years it continued to operate international telecommunications services, under the subsidiary RCA Communications, Inc. and later RCA Global Communications.

Broadcast expansion

By 1926, the market for commercial radio had expanded significantly, and RCA purchased the WEAF and WCAP radio stations and networks from AT&T, merged them with the already-owned WJZ (the predecessor of WABC) New York to WRC (presently WTEM) Washington chain, and formed the National Broadcasting Company (NBC).

Phonograph

In 1929, RCA purchased the Victor Talking Machine Company, then the world's largest manufacturer of phonographs (including the famous "Victrola") and phonograph records. This included a majority ownership of the Victor Company of Japan, or JVC. The new subsidiary then became RCA-Victor. With Victor, RCA acquired New World rights to the Nipper trademark. RCA Victor produced many radio-phonographs and also created RCA Photophone, a sound-on-film system for sound films that competed with William Fox's sound-on-film Movietone and Warner Bros. sound-on-disc Vitaphone.

RCA began selling the first electronic turntable in 1930. In 1931, RCA Victor developed and released the first 33⅓ rpm records to the public. These had the standard groove size identical to the contemporary 78 rpm records, rather than the "microgroove" used in post-World War II 33⅓ "Long Play" records. The format was a commercial failure at the height of the Great Depression, partially because the records and playback equipment were expensive, and partially because the audio performance was poor (tracking ability depends upon, among other things, the stylus's radius of curvature, and it would require the smaller-radius stylus of the microgroove system to make slower-speed records track acceptably). The system was withdrawn from the market after about a year. (This was not the first attempt at a commercial long play record format, as Edison Records had marketed a microgroove vertically recorded disc with 20 minutes playing time per side the previous decade; the Edison long playing records were also a commercial failure.)

In 1930, RCA became a crucial and key tenant in the yet to be constructed landmark building of the Rockefeller Center complex, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, which from 1933 became known as the RCA building, now the GE Building. This critical lease in the massive project enabled it to proceed as a commercially viable venture.