RCA and its 100th Year

go long. I'm just gonna have a light touch because we have to cover about fifty years of history in this episode, so I won't be going into so much technical detail for a lot of the stuff I'm talking about, besides which I've covered a lot of it already. However, I do need to start off with a description of how electron microscopes work, because I think I've mentioned it in at least two of the previous episodes and I haven't actually talked about it yet. So rather than put

it off again, let's talk about electron microscopes. Why do you need them? What do they do well? When you start getting small and we start working with small stuff, and I mean really really small stuff. You get to a point where you can no longer rely upon optical microscopes anymore, and that's because of a couple of big problems. One of them is that a microscope's ability to magnify is limited by two major factors. One of those would

be the quality of the lenses. Eventually you reach a point where you just can't make lenses of a high enough quality to get better magnification. But you also run into the physical limitation of light itself, visible light, because

it's dependent upon the wavelength of that visible light. The theoretical limit of resolution for a light based microscope, not the practical, but the theoretical limit is somewhere around two D two hundred fifty nanometers, because beyond that you it beyond the wavelength of natural light, and it literally cannot image things smaller than that. The wavelengths are bigger than the thing it's trying to you're trying to look at. However, two that's that's really small, I mean that is the

nano scale. That is tiny. But if you do need to look at stuff that's smaller than that, because there are things even smaller than that level, you've got to figure out some other way of doing it, because light waves can't do it, they're too big, so you've got to figure some other method out. Now, electrons have very

very short wavelengths, shorter than light. So if you had a way to beam electrons at a sample, you know, whatever is you're trying to look at, and then you had some means of detecting all of the different signals that would be produced as the electrons from the beam would interact with the sample, you could use the information

to construct images of the sample at that scale. So electrons you would use would be high energy beam electrons, and when they collide with a sample, the interactions would produce all sorts of stuff like secondary electrons, back scattered electrons, X rays, that kind of thing. You would have specific detectors to pick up these different signals and register them for processing to create the final image. And these microscopes have a much greater resolution than optical microscopes. But even

these have their limitations. A scanning electron microscope has a limit of around one nanometer or so you're not gonna get much smaller than a single nanometer. Now that is still incredibly small, but it's still too big to look at individual atoms. The atomic scale is smaller than the nanoscale, so if you wanted to get a look at atoms, you would have to use something else, like a scanning tunneling microscope. But those wouldn't come around until the nineteen eighties,

all right, So that's how electron microscopes work. Uh, are scanning electron mic scopes work? And our Cia had been in that business of making those, along with the consumer electronics they were making any other industries they were involved in. Now, let's get back to our CIA's history. In the last episode, we left off right around the early to mid fifties, and so we've got to cover all the time from

that point to present day in this episode. Fortunately, they are a large spans of time that we can kind of leap over. Now. One thing the company was gearing up to do was to introduce solid state electronics into its line of products. Bell Labs had developed the transistor in the nineteen forties. Although it was pretty primitive, it

wasn't ready to be incorporated into consumer electronics yet. They would take several years for that, so our c A got a relative late start in the field of transistors and solid state electronics and semiconductors because they had focused more on using vacuum tubes. In fact, in nineteen fifty our CIA was the largest manufacturer of vacuum tubes in

the world at that point. R c A even built an experimental television with transistors as early as nineteen fifty two, but this was again an experiment, not meant as a consumer product. In nineteen fifty three, an engineer named Cohen built a wrist radio that quickly got the nickname the Dick Tracy wrist Radio, after the comic strip character Dick Tracy, who has an iconic wrist radio device that allows him to speak with his supervisor. Now, our c A did

not build this device, Cohen wasn't working for our CIA. However, Cohen did use some of our Cier's transistors to help power and operate this device, So our CIA actually got a nice boost in publicity because everyone was really excited about this wrist radio. It seemed like the thing of the future, the gadget of the future. In the late nineteen fifties, r CIA began to design and manufacture components for satellites, so at this point it's all state is

ready to go and they're now looking at creating satellite technology. Specifically, they were looking at radio communications technology in satellites. R c A started doing some preliminary research and development in nineteen fifty seven, and they created a dedicated division for that purpose, and eventually they called it the r c A Astro Electronics Division. They actually got the official name

in March nineteen fifty eight. Now, in turn, this particular division was under a larger department called the r c A Defense Electronic Products, because our c A was still very much in the business of designing components for defense systems for the military. They had been doing that since World War Two. The company's first satellite to launch successfully was called the Signal Communications by Orbiting Relay Equipment or SCORE as the acronym for that, and that entered into

service on December eighteenth, nineteen fifty eight. Our c A was kind of exploring the possibility of establishing a network of satellites for the purposes of global communications, and that would really begin in earnest in nineteen sixty two with another communication satellite called Relay. Relay would relay communication signals between North America and Europe and between North America and

South America so quickly. It was theorized that with an appropriate number of satellites in orbit, you could have global communications and just use the satellites to relay signals until they got to wherever you needed them to go. The Relay Communication satellite also worked in conjunction with another satellite called the Sincom three, and the two satellites together were able to provide live television coverage of the nineteen sixty four Olympics, which were going on in Japan over to

North America. So that was an amazing development being able to watch stuff live with only a slight delay really as they were going on on the other side of the world. Our c A would partner with NASA to develop weather satellites and a ground based observation station, so they were really becoming an instrumental company in the space

race as well. Around the same time, our ci A contributed some of the equipment that would make up the United States Ballistic Missile Early Warning System or b MUSE b m e w S. It was a system of radar facilities and communications channels meant to detect and alert the United States to any sort of missile launch originating, particularly in the Soviet Union because this was taking place during the Cold War between the USSR and United States,

and it became particularly important in the wake of the Soviet Union's launch a Spootnik, which wasn't just a satellite, but also a demonstration that the Soviet Union was capable of launching a missile that had a long enough range to potentially strike the United States eights. So if the Soviet Union were to say, attached a payload of a nuclear warhead to such a missile, they could, in theory

have a nuclear strike against the US. So the United States wanted to have a system in place in order to detect any potential missile launches from the U s SR. R c A would produce a radar set and a

communications data processor for this system. It also relied the system that is relied on equipment from many other companies, not just our CI A. Companies like General Electric, Western Electric, and Sylvania also contributed components to this So while our CIA was prominent in the minds of consumers looking for television sets at home, the company was also working closely

with government and military organizations in the United States. In the nineteen sixties, r c A dominated in the television camera industry, the consumer television industry going out and buying a television set that was really competitive, but our CIA was pretty much the name in television cameras. For actual TV studios, the t K forty four had become the industry standard, and on the consumer front, color television sales were starting to pick up in the early to mid sixties.

By nineteen sixty six, the overall color television market was around three billion dollars a year. Now that's for all color TVs, not just the ones that are c A was making, So we're talking worldwide sales reaching three billion dollars. Hefty, but not anything close to what the television consumer market is today. Obviously now At the same time, the company was participating in larger efforts to develop new technologies, and one of those was the stereo eight format, also known

as the eight track tape. This was a form of magnetic tape storage specifically for audio and music. It was largely designed for in car audio systems, and honestly, it probably merits its own episode of tech Stuff. I should probably do a full episode of tech stuff about the development of the eight track format, particularly since some of

the people involved are real characters. One of those would have been the legendary Earl Madman Months, who was an important and eccentric figure in consumer electronics in the forties and fifties and and sixties as well. Anyway, prior to the eight track, gold Mark that was the brilliant engineer who had been a pain in the butt to our CISA David Sarnoff back when they were trying to race against CBS in developing color television and the thirty three

and a third RPM long playing record. Gold Mark was the guy at CBS who developed both of those well. He also developed a Hi Fi car system, a system that would allow you to play recorded music in your vehicle, not just rely upon the radio, something that is pretty standard in vehicles today, but it was brand new back then. Now. However, gold marks approach relied upon vinyl records. Yep, you would have a turntable in your car instead of a cassette

player or CD player or digital radio these days. So as you can imagine, this was not ideal because if you went down a bumpy road, it would start sending this needle skipping all over the record and so you would get terrible, uh experience that way. You know, the song would skip around, or you'd have this horrible scratching noise. There were other ways of getting around it. You could

weigh the needle down a little bit. That would discourage skipping. However, it would also cause more wear on the actual records, so you wouldn't be able to play them as many times. You would decrease the useful lifespan of the records. Months decided that to fix this he would change the method

of storing music. He wanted to use magnetic storage on tape, and he created a four track magnetic tape system, which was later refined by a different crazy person in consumer technology, William Bill Lear sometimes referred to as King Lear, which I think is a cute nod to Shakespeare, and he

created the eight track system. Lear worked with numerous other companies to finalize the standard, which really helped its adoption, and one of those companies was our c A. One of the interesting things about eight track tapes is that some of the mechanics for playback are actually in the cartridges themselves, not in the playback devices. So some of the moving parts for an eight track player are not even in the player, they're inside the cartridge. Each cartridge

has those parts. The eight track had about a decade long run as an in car sound system component, but it was eventually displaced by cartridges. They were actually cartridges had come out a little bit before eight tracks, but it took some time before they reached a quality level where they were reliable and provided good enough sound quality for them to compete against eight tracks. Eight tracks had their own limitations. You couldn't fast forward and rewind an

eight track tape. You pretty much had to listen through it and then turn it over and listen through it again. Uh. And also because those were moving parts were inside the cartridges. Whenever a company would make cheaper eight tracks in an effort to try and build out a larger customer base, because they were kind of expensive when they first came out,

they would skimp on materials. But that meant that some of the moving parts that were you know, necessary for this to work were made of cheaper materials and they would break more readily, so the format eventually fizzled out. Also, in nineteen sixty four, R c A engineers would come up with an idea for a video playback device that would work kind of like a record player, except for video,

not for sound. And instead of transmitting vibrations through a stylus right, instead of having a groove with tiny vibrations that create a through the vibrations of the stylus create an electrical impulse that ends up being turned into uh into sound through an amplifier. This was a stylist that would measure differences and capacitance. Capacitance by the way, that refers to a ratio. It's the ratio of the change in an electric charge in the system compared to the

change in its electric potential. And to go into further detail would require a lot of talking. It would make this episode go way too long. But I will get back to this particular device later in the show, because the work began in the sixties, but it would take almost twenty years before our c A could actually do anything commercial with this technology, and as we'll see, by

that time it was a little too late. Now January one, Robert Sarnoff, David Sarnov's son becomes the president of the company, so his father steps back from being president although he was still chairman of the board of directors, and his son,

Robert becomes president. He was already a seasoned executive. He had been the president of NBC since nineteen fifty six, and during that time he had overseen some pretty big changes in television programming, one of those being that NBC began to include black entertainers on shows, and at the time integration was pretty progressive. Robert Sarnof would end up taking over our c A and trying to grow it.

Five years after he became the president of the r c A UH he would become the chairman of the board, but his role as leader of the company, as we will see, would not be permanent. In nineteen sixty five, r c A began producing a special machine called the Spectra seventy. This was a main frame style computer. So this was our c trying to get into the mainframe computer business, and this particular computer was semi compatible with

another mainframe computer, the IBM three sixty main frame. So our c A was trying to go into competition against IBM at the height of IBM s powers, which was probably not the best idea. Now. I called it semi compatible because the Spectra seventy could run some, but not all, of the code that was written for the IBM three sixty.

The hardware of the Spectra seventy was compatible with the IBM three sixty, but the operating systems, the firmware, and the OS were a little different between the two, so not every program was directly portable from IBM three sixty to the Spectra seventy. So it pursued the strategy of being in the main frame computer business for a few years. But as we will see in just a moment, that

was not to last either. Now I've got a lot more to say about what r c A has been up to over the last sixty years or so, but before I get into that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Now we're about to enter an odd era in our CIA's history, and it's one marked with tons of acquisitions and mergers. Instead of being innovative in the technology space, although our c A was continuing to try and do that, it was growing by buying

up other companies. So in nineteen sixty five, r c A purchases a book publisher, in fact, a very famous book publisher, Random House. This was an early attempt for our c A to try and diversify and and go beyond electronics and technology. R c A would hold onto Random House until nineteen eighty, at which point it would sell Random House to another company called Advanced Publications for

seventy million dollars. In nineteen sixty seven, just two years after buying Random House, the company would acquire another big company, Hurts Rental Car. So you can already see that things are a little strange here. Our c A buys a book publisher than a rental car company, neither of which seems to be remotely connected to its core businesses. Our C A would allow Hurts to operate as essentially an

independent subsidiary. Hurts still had its own executive leadership and had its own board of directors, and ultimately our c would hold onto Hurts until five and then they sold the company for five eighty seven point five million dollars, a princely sum. However, this was not as much as what r C A was hoping to get for Hurts. In fact, r c had already tried to sell Hurts two years earlier, in Night three, but they were soliciting bids for the company, and they were hoping to get

a bid of around seven hundred million dollars. But no one was by eating at that that price, so they held onto the company for a couple more years. In eighty five they finally sold it. The company that bought Hurts was U A l which was a holding company for United Airlines. Probably have to do a full episode about that company. At some point. In ninety our c A would introduce another really cool technology, one that we depend heavily upon UH these days in various formats, and

that would be the liquid crystal display. R c A displayed it publicly in nineteen sixty eight. They had a big press event. Engineers led by a guy named Richard Williams, had been working on this l c D technology for years now. Essentially, a liquid crystal display consists of a couple of sheets of polarizing material and between those sheets, sandwiched if you like, is a liquid crystal solution. So what's a liquid crystal Well, it's a substance. It's kind

of in between being a solid and liquid. Molecules in a solid material all all maintain the same orientation and the same position with respect to one another. So in other words, all all the molecules are stuck where they are with respect to each other in a solid, but in a liquid it's different molecules and a liquid are free to change their orientation and position with respect to each other. They float all over the place, and they

twist and turn freely. Liquid crystals tend to maintain their orientation, so they all tend to continue pointing in whatever direction they're pointing in when it starts. But the molecules are able to change their positions with respect to each other, so they all point in the same direction as they had started, but they can move around each other. They can be in one of several distinct phases, but the important phase for liquid crystal displays is a phase called

the neeumatic phase. One type of liquid crystal is called a twisted pneumatic liquid crystal, and twisted tematics are very important for l c d s. They are, as the name suggests, twisted. But if you apply an electric current to a twisted pneumatic liquid crystal, it untwists. If you vary the voltage of this electric current, you change the degree to which it untwists, so you can make it untwist more or less by varying the voltage. This behavior

is replicable, it's predictable. It's always going to happen exactly the same way, assuming you vary the voltage in exactly the same way. So you can use these crystals to do very specific stuff. For example, you can use them to block light from passing through a surface, and then you could use it to allow light to pass through other parts of this surface. And this is how we

use liquid crystals and an electronic display. The crystals block light that's trying to come through or allow light to come through, and uh, l c D t v s

work this way. It's why you would often hear people talk about how l c D television's had a problem whenever there was a very dark scene on screen because there's always a backlight in an l c D display and the liquid crystals are blocking the light, but some of that light kind of bleeds through, So you couldn't get these very dark black colors in l c D displays because there was always this light behind that screen

of liquid crystals. You would have to get something like a plasma display, which actually wouldn't backlight the screen, so you could get those more deep, dark black colors on that kind of television. Anyway, I'll have to do a full episode about l c D s to describe their history and how they work in a future episode. Richard Williams was instrumental in finding the practical application for liquid crystals in electronics and our He held this big public

demonstration in nineteen sixty eight. It was also one of the last big company events that David Sarnoff would attend. His health was deteriorating at this point, and remember he had been in charge of our CIA since nineteen nineteen and had only stepped back in nineteen sixty five for his son takeover as president, and he had remained as chairman of the board. Nineteen sixty eight, r c A

finally updates its logo. Our c A. Victor would become our c A Records, and Victor is now just a brand name that shows up on stuff like album covers. And it seems a little haphazard the way Victor shows up on albums. I'm not entirely certain that there's a particular rhyme or reason to it. But our CIA's logo would be turned into what was considered at the time

to be a futuristic logo. These days we would look at and think, oh, that's a quaint retro like nineteen eighties style logo, almost And that was in nineteen sixty eight. Also in sixty eight, a miniature r c A television camera was used on Apollo seven to provide the first live television pictures captured from outer space and beamed back to Earth. R c A also built the radio backpack that Neil Armstrong war when he set foot on the Moon and delivered the famous one small step for a

man line in nineteen sixty nine. The company was also responsible for designing components for multiple space probes like the Viking Mars probes and much later. They were also responsible for some of the subsystems on the space shuttles. In nineteen sixty nine, r c A would change its name officially from the Radio Corporation of America that was the official name of the company, to our CI A Corporation. Also in sixty nine, r c A and CBS would

ignite a new feud. If you listen to the previous episodes, you know that our c A and CBS fought several times in the forties they were battling to define the standard for color television. Now in sixty nine, just at the dawn of the nineteen seventies, they were competing to try and create a new technology for home video playback. This would be a device capable of playing back video media on demand at home, sort of a precursor to the VCR and then later still to technology like DVD

players and Blu Ray players. The CBS version debuted first actually debuted in sixty seven, I think, and it was called the Electronic Video Recording Device or e v R for short. Our CIA's approach was originally called the s V Hollow Tape. Later the company would dub it the select a Vision, which gets really confusing because our cier has used selective vision for a few different products over its history. But CBSS version was further along than our

CIA's when our Cia debut. There's um In fact, when our Cia showed off this technology, it was not yet able to play sound. It was showing video, but it was all silent. There was no soundtrack to go along with it. The process of mastering a tape for this system was actually really cool for for our Ci, as it actually involved lasers and holograms, but our Cia would experience some financial difficulties as it was trying to develop

this technology further. Those those financial difficulties were largely due to our Cia trying to extricate itself from the computer mainframe business had gotten into in the sixties. And meanwhile, while our CIA was trying to weather that storm, another video technology, the VCR, came out and pretty much made both the e VR from CBS and r C as

select a vision moot. They just couldn't compete against the VCR, and it would ultimately mean that our CI a would abandon its attempts to market the hollow tape as a consumer product, so it never really launched as an actual thing you could go out and buy. In nineteen seventy, David Starna would retire as chairman of the board, although to be more accurate, he was really in the late stages of a long term illness and so he was

effectively removed as chairman. I don't get the sense that he chose to step down so much as he was forced to. Also, in nineteen seventy, r C announced another plan for another acquisition. Uh, and you remember they had already talked about They already bought the Hurts, rent a Car and and Random House Publishing. So what was it this time? Well, it hits close to home for me. Actually, they bought Coronet Industries. What was Coronet Industries or what

is it. It's a carpeting company, a flooring company. So again, this was another effort for our c A to diversify its holdings, and this acquisition would officially complete in nineteen seventy one. Now I said it hits close to home. What I mean by that, Well, the headquarters for Coronet Industries was or is in Dalton, Georgia. Dalton, Georgia is in the northwest part of Georgia. If you ever drive through that part of Georgia, you will see numerous billboards

for rug and carpeting wholesalers. And uh yeah, so I actually was surprised to hear that our c A at one point owned that company. Our c A would eventually sell this off in nineteen eight six to see I Holdings Incorporated. But we'll get into that because when I say our ci A sold it off, I don't really mean our CIA. That's a that's a hint for things to come. In nineteen seventy as well, our c would also buy another company that made people scratch their heads.

This would be Banquet Foods, the company that the time was most known for its TV dinners and frozen foods. Our ci A would hold onto this for a decade, but sell it in nineteen eighty and due to the efforts to diversify and the fact that there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for the types of companies that our CIA was going after, some people inside the company felt like our CIA was losing focus. I mean,

what did our CIA even do anymore? It's core businesses used to be electronics, both for consumers and for business to business, as well as for government and military uses. But now now it had a rental car company, and had a carpeting company and a frozen food company. Some people began to joke that our ci A really stood for rugs, chickens and automobiles. In nineteen seventy one, David Sarnoff passes away, So this was the man who had

largely been associated with our CIA. In fact, a lot of our CIA's history tends to get tied directly to David Sarnoff and his personality. He was a force to be reckoned with, and his passing was probably one of the more remarkable things to happen to our c A during its full history. It seems to me like this was a case of another leader of a company having

an extreme influence on how that company did business. You know some leaders, you would think they would have an extreme influence, but they may just help keep the company going while other people handle stuff. They might be more decentralized. Sarnov did not come across to me as that kind of person. Also, in nineteen seventy one, our c A

would get out of the mainframe computer business. They sell it off to another company called Universal Automatic Computer better known as UNIVAC, and ultimately this computer business was unprofitable for our c A. The sale represented a huge loss for the company. According to some sources I read, mostly the New York Times, it amounted to essentially a two hundred fifty million dollar rite off, which wasn't great news. And in nineteen seventy five, the board of directors decided

to oust Roberts Sarnoff as chairman and CEO. They felt that the attempts to diversify our CIER had weakened the company. This uh this decide, This exit from mainframe computer business also hurt the company. So this was essentially what some people referred to as a palace coup. It came from within the company itself and our c A president and

chief operating officer, Anthony Conrad, led this coup attempt. Anthony Conrad had first joined our c A way back in ninety six after being discharged from the army after World War Two, and had worked there ever since. He had made his way up the corporate ladder, and in the nineteen fifties he was the executive in charge of overseeing our Cier's missile and space tracking operations, and now he

was the head of the company. He became the new CEO, and in June nineteen seventy six he was elected chairman. Our CIA's performance was starting to turn around. The company was beginning to make money. Things seemed to be on the mend. However, Conrad turned out to have some skeletons

in his closet. In September nineteen seventy six, just ten months after he had taken control of the company, Conrad announced he was resigning his position, and it turned out he had kind of sort of failed to file any income taxes for five years and the I r S kind of wanted to talk to him about it because the agency had held a routine inquiry and saw some regularities.

So Conrad would end up settling up with the I R S. He was essentially a fugitive in New York State for two years until he was able to reach a LEA deal in which he paid a one tho dollar fine but also an undisclosed but presumably sizeable amount

of money in back taxes, interests, and penalties. So after he resigned, a guy named Edgar H. Griffith's took control of our c A. Griffith's was concerned with getting our c A back on track from a numbers perspective, so he wasn't so much of leader as far as strategy

and long term plans goes. He was trying to get the numbers to line up, so he began to divest the company of many of the subsidiaries that had been accumulating throughout its history since Robert Sarnoff had taken control the stuff like Banquet foods and Hurts rental cars, so he was kind of trying to undo what Robert Sarnoff had done. In Griffith's directed our ci A to purchase another company. So he sells off a lot of companies, but then he directs r c A to acquire a

different company. This would be commercial Investment Trust or c I T, and the deal was for one point three billion dollars or thereabouts, a huge sum. C I T is an investment company and as the name suggests, it

provides financing to other companies. After acquiring c I T, r c A would sell off several subsidiary companies that had belonged to c I T, including an office furniture manufacturing company and a greeting card company, which just tells me corporate politics are weird and complicated and I don't

understand diversification very well. Anyway, this acquisition caused our CIA's credit rating to drop, and that made the board of directors very upset, so they demanded that Griffith's resign and he did, and in ninety one a new leader was brought on or pushed to the to the front of the company. This would be Thornton F. Bradshaw. He was a member of the board of our CIA when they made this decision to get rid of Griffith's and he was also the president of the Atlantic Richfield Company, which

was an oil company. So he became the new leader of our ci A and then he made Robert R. Frederick, who had previously worked at General Electric the new president of our CIA. Eventually Bradshaw becomes the chairman of the board and Frederick would become the CEO. But they continued to sell off the diversified subsidiary, and by all of those companies that had been acquired, including c I T, had been sold off except for the carpeting company Coronet Industries.

That one would stick around till jumping back to r c A finally released that video disc technology I talked about earlier in this episode. It was called a c e D or capacitance electronic disc player. The tech for the video playback device only allowed you to play video. You could not record to it, but you could grab a plastic caddy kind of looked almost like a vinyl record album cover, and you would insert it into a

player and you could watch a video. Each side of the disc could hold about sixty minutes of in t SC video. That's the television standard in the United States, or it was the television stenter in the United States, So movies would typically require you to take the disc out halfway through the film, flip it over, and then put it back in to continue watching the move The discs themselves were inside these protective plastic caddies, so you

wouldn't handle the disks. You would handle the plastic sleeves essentially, and you they were hard plastic or semi hard plastic sleeves. At least they weren't like super floppy or anything. So you'd slide these suckers in and watch a movie. And I actually had one of these. My family had one of these when I was growing up. In fact, I now own it. My parents gave it to me, so it's at my house and I even have a few movies for it, like Raiders, Lost Arc and Singing in

the Rain. The technology worked just fine. You got picture, you got audio, but by the time of debuted in nine one, it was already obsolete because you already had other video standards. You had the the VHS, you had Beta Max, you had Laser disc, and even though laser disc didn't last super long, it was definitely superior to ce ED quality and you didn't have to UH. You could have extra stuff on laser discs, stuff that would

carry over into UH the DVD era. So our CIA's technology was interesting, but it never took off, and by Night four, just three years after they debuted, the tech. They discontinued manufacturing the playback machines, so I guess I've got a collectors addition thing kind of. Anyway, this is a big important year because it's the year when General Electric announced its intent to acquire our c A a huge deal, and it did so in nineteen eighty six

for six point four billion dollars. Alright, we're coming up to the most important year in recent history for our CIA. In fact, some would argue that we're talking about the final year of our ci A. I'll explain more in just a minute, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All Right, we're up to night.

This is a monumental year because it was the year when g E would make the decision to acquire our c A, although that acquisition wouldn't be complete until nineteen and the deal was for six point four billion dollars. Now this this meant that this was the largest ever acquisition or merger business deal that didn't involve an oil

company in the history of business. At this point. It has since been eclipsed, obviously, but in nine a six point four billion dollar merger between two companies that were not oil companies That was a record breaking moment, and it came in a time when our c A Chairman Thornton Bradshaw and our c A CEO Robert R. Frederick had managed to get our c A on a profitable track. They had managed to sell off these businesses, most of them anyway that didn't make any sense to our CI

as core business. They were able to refocus our ci A. They were able to make it profitable. NBC was doing incredibly well toward UH five. It had started to win awards for its programming and starting to to get more viewership. Things were really looking great. And on November six, nineteen eighty five, after having a meeting with the Board of directors, Bradshaw would go off and meet with a guy named John F. Welch Jr. Who was the chairman and CEO

of g E at that time. Now, if you've been listening to all of these episodes, you might remember g E was one of the founding partners for our c A. In fact, it was the principal partner way back in nineteen nineteen. G E owned most of our CIA for many of the early years, until it was forced to divest itself because the US government said, you can't do

that anymore. However, now we're in the eighties. This is the Reagan era, when the US government was less concerned about things like monopolies and there was a very lasse fair approach to corporate politics and corporate quisitions. This was the era of hostile takeovers. But you might wonder, if r C was doing so well, why was Bradshaw willing to entertain this deal. If our CIA is actually on the right track, why go with an acquisition deal in

the first place. Well, part of the problem that Bradshaw saw was the culture at the time, because, like I said, this was the era of hostile takeovers, so there was always a fear that someone would end up creating an environment where they would approach shareholders with a deal that was too good to refuse and then take over the company.

Not only that, but our ci A had two billion dollars in cash because it had divested itself of all these other companies and also found that it had been over paying the pension fund, so there was actually extra cash left over because the pension fund had more money in it than it needed. It also meant that if ay came in or some investors came in and they spent a huge amount of money to acquire our c A. They could then leverage that two billion dollars in cash

to pay off any debts. And more problematic than that, parts of our CIA were really, really valuable. In fact, it was thought that if you were to divide up our c A into different pieces, you can make more money selling those individual pieces off to different companies than you would if you just operated our CIA as a

full company in itself. In fact, Bradshaw had even looked at offloading some more of our c A. At one point, he had looked at the possibility of selling NBC to Disney, but eventually Bradshaw realized that our c A really needed NBC. The revenue NBC was bringing in was too important to our CIA's business, so he couldn't really afford to divest itself. So the two companies g E and our ci A happened to have some divisions and departments that clearly complemented

one another. Our CIA had done a lot of work for the Navy and g had done a lot of work for the army, so bringing the two comedies together would create a more unified approach for military contracts that kind of thing. So after some debate, our CIA's board met and agreed to GES terms. And at that point, once g E takes over, you could argue thats the end of our c A. R c A is no longer an independent company, is now part of GE. And more than that, GE starts to make some pretty big

changes over the next few years. They began to merge departments. So they began to take our ci A departments and merge them into existing GE divisions, or they liquefy parts of our CIA and sell it off U. And one of those divisions that did this with was Astro elect Electronics department. That was the the company or the part of our ci A that was specifically focused on space technology.

G E would merge that department with its own Space Systems division and thus created the GE Astro Space Division. But this was not meant to stay on as a GE property forever. In ninete, GE would sell off this entire division to Martin Marietta, which turned around and merged with Lockheed and that's where we get Lockheed Martin in n Lockeed. Martin announced it would close the Astro Electronics division facility and that finally happened in so that part

of our c A is no more. Uh. It ended years, forty years of research and development in space and communications tech out of that facility, So that was just part of it. You would get to a lot of other spinoffs here. GE would sell off a lot of what made our CIER the company that it was, and it would also spin off other divisions, like nb C became its own sort of autonomous unit instead of being connected

to what our CIA used to be. In night six, GE would sell off r c A Records to Bertlesman, so that company would become the steward of our CIA Records, which was formerly our CI A Victor, and remember Victor was a company that even was older than our c A. In seven, g E would sell NBC Radio to Westwood One, and it would hold on to the NBC television networks, so the radio network would be sold by the TV

networks stayed behind. Selling off the radio networks was one of the conditions that GE was forced to meet in order to get approval from the United States government for the acquisition. Then g would also sell the r c A name, the consumer electronics brand, essentially to a French company called Thompson Brandt. We'll get back to that in

just a second. In night, Sarnoff Labs that was the R and D arm of our c A was funded for GE for several years, but then GE would transfer Sarnoff Labs to the nonprofit organization s r I International. It's another organization I should probably cover in a future tech stuff is s r I International. It's a scientific research institute. It's based in Menlo Park, California. Originally it was founded by trustees from Stanford University in the nineteen forties.

In fact, s r I stood for Stanford Research Institute, but the organization formally parted ways with the university back in nineteen seventy. Anyway, by two thousand eleven, Sarnoff Labs had become fully integrated as part of s r I International, so it does not exist as its own independent thing anymore. Uh. In two thousand four, GE would merge NBC with Vivendi Universal Entertainment, and that created NBC Entertainment, but GE would

remain the majority owner at that point. Also in two thousand four, Sony M Music and the Berlman Music Group or BMG would merge together, and that brought our CIA Records under the umbrella of Sony. Interesting side note, Sony is also the parent company of Columbia Records. And if you remember from my earlier episode, Columbia Records and our CI A were fierce competitors in the early days of records. Uh now they're both part of the same overall company.

As for g VC, as the Japanese Victor Company that was part of our CIA for a while, that actually had split off decades earlier. It split off from our CIA during World War Two for obvious reasons, it was operating in Japan and we were at war with Japan. J VC has a record company called Victor Entertainment. This one still uses the logo of the dog looking at the gramophone, the one that's titled his Master's Voice. In two thousand eleven, Comcast would buy controlling interest in n

B see, so it's no longer part of GE. Comcast has it as an enormous conglomerate. So a big question you might have is, you know, I started this all off by saying our CIA is celebrating its one hundredth year, So what is it? What what is actually left? What is what is celebrating its one hundred year. The company, which had ballooned into an enormous and troubled conglomerate in the sixties and seventies, has been through so many different sales and spinoffs and mergers that there's no longer an

r ci A company. There's no longer an independent company called our ci A. The name our Cia still exists, the brand still exists. It is a trademarked brand today. The owner of that trademark is the French company Technic Color Essay that was the one that used to be known as Thompson. The company licensed the name r c A to other companies that wish to use it on various products. So that includes our Cia records, which I mentioned as part of Sony Music, our ci A telephones,

and our Cia projectors. A company called Telefield uses those. R c A Audio and video and r CEO r c A accessories are both licensed by Vox International, that's v o x X. Our c A Television is licensed by ON Corporation. UM you have our c A computers, which is licensed to American Future Technology Corporation. You get the idea like there's there's the brand. The name still exists,

but the company doesn't. So to say that our c A is celebrating it's one year is I think a little misleading, maybe more than a little misleading, because the company itself hasn't really existed since n uh. It's interesting to see how a company that was so instrumental in very important moments in consumer electronic history, like the development of color television, could ultimately whittle get whittled or way

down to nothing. Really, but I thought I would cover this as it was a fascinating story and it has had such an important impact on various parts of technology. Our next episode will not be so deep and and grave a subject as the one year history of a company. We're instead going to look at a popular video game and how it got so popular and its story. I'm talking about Fortnite. That will be the next episode. I

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