RCA During World War II

our ci A and its history. It's celebrating one hundred years in two thousand nineteen, so we're looking at how this company came to be, and we left off in the last episode talking about how our ci A formed r k O Pictures, largely in an effort to establish its sound on film technology called r C A photophone. That effort began in nineteen twenty nine, just as the world was hurtling toward the Great Depression, which wasn't that

great if you ask me. But in October of that year, of the stock market crashed and a panic ensued, ultimately wiping out the fortunes of millions of investors large and small. The effect on numerous industries was devastating. Millions of people were out of work. Businesses like theaters and restaurants were closing,

but one industry remained strong, and that was radio. Radios were seen as an important element in the home because they provided a means of escape through entertainment programming, they allowed families to keep up with the news of the world.

The radio would even play an important part in economic recovery when on March twelve, nineteen thirty three, which is still in the middle of the Great Depression, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt FDR and O the Words, addressed the country in a broadcast fireside chat to talk about the bank crisis. Roosevelt urged Americans to be patient and to trust the government as it worked to stabilize the banks.

That helped reverse a trend in which people had been participating in numerous runs on banks uh and they were in fear of losing their savings, so they were withdrawing all their money from the banks, and it helped make stabilization a reality and helped set the ground for recovery now. In the mid nineteen thirties, FDR started the Rural Electrification Administration, which was tasked with extending electric utilities to rural areas,

particularly farms. The national estimate for rural farms with electricity was just at ten percent in the mid nineteen thirties. Some areas like Texas were even lower, with only two point three percent of farms having electricity. But as more communities were getting access to electricity, more people began to invest in radios, and so the industry continued to do well even through the depression, and the depression wouldn't end until nineteen thirty nine. That put our c A in

a particularly strong position. It had the National Broadcast Company or NBC, and it's Blue and Red Networks. That was a network of radio stations to networks of radio stations technically stretching across the country that would broadcast material that had been created in our CIA's New York and New

Jersey studios. This was the golden age of radio. Popular formats included music, such as live performances from famous concert halls and opera houses, but there was also a boom in radio drama and radio comedy, as well as news and game shows. All of those formats were debuting around this time. These were programs that would precede the era of television, and we're sort of experiencing these are new

today in the form of podcasts. We're getting a lot of those sort of things like the various radio programs and radio dramas. You can find lots of examples of that on podcast today, and they kind of have their history back in these old radio programs. Some of the more notable programs that played on NBC included the Jack Benny Program, Dick Tracy, The Spike Jones Show, Dragnet, Burns and Allen and dozens more. Tons of programs came out around this time. Now, one thing I find really interesting

is that NBC sort of created its own rivals. It was an effective monopoly heading into the late twenties. In fact, it really was a monopoly. It owned a huge network of radio stations. There were still some independent radio stations, but there were no competing networks. There was, however, a talent agent named Arthur Judson, and he was getting really fed up WITHINBC. He was frustrated. He kept meeting with resistance when he was trying to get his clients onto

radio programs that were carried by NBC. And so Judson did what any reasonable person would do. He created his own network of radio stations, and originally it was called the United Independent Broadcasters. But shortly after Judson founded this effort in n he agreed to a merger with the column be a phonograph and records company, and this new company became known as the Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting Company. The company, however,

didn't do so well. It was up against NBC, which was a giant in radio, and so they weren't really able to mount a strong offense while they were starting to accrue a whole lot of debt and they came up with a big loss of money, uh, and that led to an acquisition. In nine a rich dude named william S. Paley, who had come into a lot of money due to his father's successful businesses, bought the struggling concern and he renamed it the Columbia Broadcasting System or CBS.

So you could argue that our c A created NBC directly and CBS indirectly. And we're not done with all of that yet. But first let's get back to our c A. In the time around nineteen thirty and nineteen thirty one, R. C. A. Victor would create the first record albums to be played back at the speed of thirty three and a third revolutions per minute. Now, this isn't what we would call a long play or LP record today, even though it was at thirty three and

a third revolutions. Now, I kind of covered all of this in the history of turntables, so I'm just going to give a relatively brief overview. In the early days of flat disc records, most records were made out of a shell ick compound material because it could hold up to multiple playbacks. They needed something that was going to maintain its shape as you played it over and over again. However,

shellec was not ideal. It was an abrasive material. It had bumps on it, and that meant that a needle going through the groove would occasionally hit these bumps and it would cause the needles to move around a bit and create noise in the process, So it wasn't ideal. Standard playback speed at the time was seventy eight revolutions per minute for a couple of big reasons. One was

technical limitations. The motors manufactured at that time were largely in the thirty six hundred rpm range, so that was readily available. They were inexpensive, so that's what these these various companies were going after. They went with these motors that would turn at three thousand six centered revolutions per minute, and then they would use a gear ratio to uh

change that revolutions per minute for the actual platter. So the motors turning at three thousand six center revolutions per minute, and the gear ratio that was most frequently used, the one that was again easy to get therefore cheap, was a forty six to one ratio gear. So if you do that math, you say, like, all right, for every forty six times this thing turns, this other thing turns one time, you end up with the seventy eight revolutions

per minute. The higher speed had a secondary function. It helped smooth out some of that noise that would otherwise be present when you're playing back one of these seventy eight RPM records. It wasn't a perfect solution, but it was better than playing them back slower, because if you played them back more slowly, the noise was amplified. You

you just heard it more. But when Warner Brothers started its vitaphone system for films, which I talked about in the last episode, the company realized that it would need a more efficient system than one that played back at r p M. So, if you remember, the vitaphone system was where you would record the audio for a film onto a disk, and then you would synchronize the playback of the disc with the playback of the film, and that's how you got a talking picture like the Jazz Singer.

But using a seventy eight RPM disc was not a great idea for that because at that speed it only takes about five minutes for a a back device like a turntable to play through one side of a twelve inch disk. Slowing down the RPMs. Reducing the number of RPMs would increase the playback time. It would take longer for the needle to travel through the groove, and so Warner Brothers used a gear ratio that had a hundred eight to one and that created the thirty three and

a third revolutions per minute speed. R c A decided to embrace that approach and introduced new thirty three and a third rpm turntables in nineteen thirty one that would playback discs that were recorded at that speed. These turntables still use the larger groove that the seventy rb M records had. However, this is before the micro groove invention. Now, if you know your history of turntables, you've heard that the company that introduced the long play album, the LP.

The vinyl LP was Columbia Records, and that this didn't

happen until the nineteen forty these And that's true. When Columbia Records would bring this innovation forward, it did so on a new material that was called vinyl, made from PVC plastic, and it introduced the micro groove technology that brought the width of the groove to the records down to about a millimeter wide, and that meant you could fit way more grooves on each side of a record, and you could extend playtime to about twenty two minutes

for a twelve inch disc. But if our Cia introduced a thirty three and a third format in nineteen thirty one, why does Columbia Records get the credit for a thirty three and a third album in the nineteen forties. Well,

it's because our Cier's efforts were a total failure. The company had tried to introduce a brand new format and technology right at the beginning of the Great Depression, and while families were willing to make payments on their radio sets, because a lot of families were buying these things on credit, they would end up paying for their radio, say they were leaves that would get rid of other luxuries, but they would keep that radio because it was such an

important element of home life. They were not ready to dip in and buy a whole new piece of electronic equipment. They didn't have the money for it, they didn't have the interest in it. They would rather just stick with the thing they already had. So the economics just weren't there for our Cia, so the company ultimately abandoned the

thirty three and a third format. When Columbia Records was ready to debut its technology more than a decade later, executives reached out to our Cia to see if the company would want to license the technology and build its own thirty three and a third turntables. But David Sarnoff, who you'll remember from the last episode was the very strong willed guy who was in charge of our Cia, refused.

He did not like the idea of conforming to someone else's standards, particularly since our Cia had tried to do it earlier. Instead, he would push our Cier to market its own disc format, which would play back at forty five revolutions per minute, and thus another format war began. The speed wars. Our Cer would sell seven inch discs that would play back at forty five rpm, and Columbia focused on twelve inch discs at thirty three and a

third rpm. This took place in the late nineteen forties, and by nineteen fifty, after seeing several artists leave our c A to join Columbia, the company finally gave up and began to create its own thirty three and a third rpm long playing records. The forty five RBM disc would become the favorite format for singles and juke boxes, so it wasn't a total loss. R c A still made money off of its format, it just did not

become the standard. I have a lot more to say about our ci A and its innovations, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, we gotta jump back to the nineteen thirties. Now, we went ahead a little bit to talk about the thirty three and a third versus forty five rpm speed wars that stretched all the way into the late nineteen forties back

to the nineteen thirties. In nineteen thirty two, under pressure from the United States federal government, the partners that formed our ci A all jumped ship at issue was the monopoly like status that our CIA enjoyed as both an operator of radio stations and as an arm for these

various companies to develop and sell technologies. So, in other words, the government that had created this monopoly now felt that maybe things have gone a bit too far, because remember, the United States made this monopoly, they encouraged it, and now they were saying, well, this is getting a bit uncomfortable. So General Electric, Westinghouse and A. T and T All sold their interest in our Cia to the new company. It became an independent company called the r C A Corporation.

David Sarnov would remain in charge of this new independent company. Our CIA was a pioneer and another big consumer electronic category, which would be television. Our Cia had employed Vladimir's Warkin, the television developer who had fought for the title of inventor of television, a title that most people would give to his rival Filo Farnsworth. Farnsworth first demonstrate electronic television

back in nine seven. Zorekin, however, had worked with a guy named Boris Rosing in Russia who had been working on a similar experiment more than a decade before. Farnsworth's demonstration, but Rossing's work had not really reached a level of sophistication interesting enough for big business at the time, and it was crewed by comparison to Farnsworth's invention. Sarnov would hires Warrikin to head up a division in our c A to develop electronic television technology with the goal of

creating a consumer product in the future. Now as a whole, our c A would invest around fifty million dollars into this project, which is a princely sum today, but remember this was back in the late twenties and into the third season forties. That was a truly gargantuan sum of money back then, and it shows how Sarnoff, the man who had proposed the radio music box before becoming the head of our CIA, could see how the future of

an entertainment might unfold. He was convinced that television would be the next big thing after radio, and you certainly could say he was absolutely right. Now, all of that work that this investment would bring about would gets shown off on a very large stage the nineteen nine World's Fair in New York City. R c A demonstrated the electronic television system there and broadcast the first televised address

by a US president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That same year, our CI A would pay Farnsworth some licensing fees to use some of his patents, and our CIA began selling television sets. They were pretty darn small. The picture tubes measured five by twelve inches or twelve point seven by twenty five point four centimeters. So you might wonder how do these electronic television's work. The heart of the technology

is the CRT, or a cathode ray tube. This is not just how the images get generated, it's also what serves as the screen that you look at in these old televisions. I'm talking about the old big TVs, the wide deep TVs, not flat screen or anything like that. That's a different method to produce the same sort of result. So the CRT is essentially an electron generator. A CRT is kind of like a giant lightbulb, a more sophisticated lightbulb.

Inside the CRT is a filament, a small piece of material that's meant to heat up and then shed electrons. If you run current through the filament, it causes it to heat up and as the atoms in the filament gain energy they begin to shed these electrons. The elect trons pop off of the atoms. Positively charged elements called anodes, attract the electrons. Because opposite charges attract right electrons have a negative charge, they get attracted to things that have

a positive charge. The old CRT sets had essentially a focusing anode which would pull the stream of electrons into a very tight beam, and an accelerating anode, which would you know, accelerate the stream of electrons. The destination for this stream of electrons is the backside of the television screen itself. So you're looking at a screen on a TV. On the reverse side of that screen, that's the backside

for you. That is where the electrons are making impact. Uh. It's like looking at the fat end of a light bulb if you think about it. That's what the television screen is. So on the back side of this TV screen is a coding a phosphor, which is a material that will give off light when it's sighted by energy, in this case, when it's struck by electrons. And coding the rest of the inside of the tube is a conductive material that's meant to soak up electrons as they

build up on the screen side of the tube. Wrapped around the base of the CRT are two sets of steering coils. One set runs parallel to the base of the CRT and one set wraps across the base of the CRT. These are copper windings, the kind you would find in an electromagnet. In fact, they are essentially electromagnets, and when you run electricity through the coils, you create magnetic fields. These sets of windings are at perpendicular angles to each other. Right, you've got the parallel kind and

the perpendicular kind. And one set is used to steer the beam of electrons vertically and the other one steers the beam of electrons horizontally. And if you change the voltage in the coils, that directs the electron beam to specific points on the screen. Now, when you turn on this electron beam, it starts to paint the back side of the screen. That is, it's shooting electrons at the phosphors on the back side of the screen, causing those

phosphors to glow. The beam scans across the screen one line at the time, from the top to the bottom. So the beam first moves left or right across the top of the screen. When it reaches the right side, the beam turns off the electron flow and then rapidly redirects back to the left and down one line, so it goes down a notch, and then it does it again.

When it gets all the way down to the bottom right side of the screen, the beam turns off and it returns back to the upper left position and starts over. It would take a while before broadcast standards would really define how all televisions would work in the United States, but eventually it evolved into this approach where a CRT

television would paint a screen sixty times per second. However, it would only paint half the lines per for frame, so in the first frame it might paint all the odd lines so one, three, five, seven, and so on, and the second frame would have the electron beam paint all the even lines. So while the electron beam would be moving across the screen sixty times per second the entire frame of odd and even lines, the total screen

would be painted thirty times per second. Eventually, TVs had a standard of five twenty five lines, so every second the electron beam would paint a total of fifteen thousand, seven hundred fifty lines. So our c shows off this technology in nine. The company also broadcast the first televised baseball game on May sevent ninety nine. It was between

Columbia University and Princeton. I don't know who won. I didn't look it up, but it was all done on a single camera, which I imagine created a somewhat limited effect for watching on TV, especially considering that at the time you needed a whole lot of light to get a good picture on these on these televisions because the cameras were limited, early television broadcasts were tricky in general.

The camera technology, like I said, required a whole lot of light to create a strong enough signal to send out to t VS, and a lot of light meant that television personalities, you know, actors, newscasters, that sort of thing. They were all pretty much exclusively white people at that time. They would appear washed out on screen because they had so much light on them. To deal with that, the actors would often have to wear dark makeup, frequently green makeup.

It would show up better. And remember all TVs at this point are black and white sets, so no one knew that the people were all green because they're seeing a black and white image. The actors, newscasters, etcetera. Would often also wear black lipsticks so that their lips would actually be visible on screen. Early TV sales were a little slow. The nation was still climbing out of the

Great Depression, and it was an expensive new technology. And another event meant that the entire industry would be put on pause for several years. And that little event would be World War Two. Now, if you listen to my last episode, if you haven't, you should, you know that the First World War was what led to the formation of our CIER in the first place. World War two would slow down the consumer electronics business, but our ci

A wasn't put into moth balls and storage. They weren't struggling. Instead, the company opened up the r c A Research Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, and for years the company had relied upon its close association with General Electric for R and D. But now it could pursue its own research with its own facility with I think a hundred scientists when they first opened up, and much of that early research would be dedicated to the war effort on the

part of the United States. Our c A would develop a smaller version of its Icono scope for the military. The iconoscope was uh the television camera tube that Zorakin had developed. So I described how the cathode ray tube worked in a effort to display images. The econoscope was how these images were initially captured to be transmitted to a television And it's an element that has a particularly

peculiar shape. It would be inside the television camera. I've seen the shape referred to as a barrel shaped bulb and an angled neck. And there were a couple of different versions of the econoscope that did not take that particular shape, but most of them did. I do not think I can adequately describe what this looks like. I don't.

I don't think it's within my powers of description. So I suggest if you are interested in seeing what these things look like, because they're kind of funky looking, you go onto an image search and look for icona scope I C O IN O S c O p E because they do look pretty unusual. So they consisted of a few parts. One part was called the target. This was the area of the icono scope that would receive the focused light coming from the camera's lens. All right,

So you've got a scene in front of you. Let's say that it's a news scene. There's a desk, a news anchor. You have very bright lights shining on that scene, and that light is some of that light anyway, is traveling through the camera's lens and it gets focused onto this target. The target itself has an array of photo sensitive dots on it, or pixels if you like, and they would end up generating a different voltage based upon how much light was hitting them. An electron beam would

sweep across the target. The electron beam is generated by an electron gun that's in that angled neck I had explained about just a minute ago. So you get this proportional current flow from the dots based upon how much light is hitting them, and the electron beams sweeps across this and then it would send this signal out through to an amplifier for transmission to television receivers that would then reverse this process. Our ci A developed a lightweight

version of this for the United States military. By the time the war would end, the company and the rest of the industry would move toward alternative camera designs that didn't rely so heavily on brightly lit environments, which, as it turns out, are a difficult thing to insist upon during wartime operations, so a lot of the television based technologies that are c A developed for the military were

of limited use. I'll explain more in just a second, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. One of the things the modified iconoscope would be used for was in a very early attempt to create unmanned drones. In nineteen forty one, the United States military converted some

manned aircraft so that they could be controlled remotely. The camera would mount on top of the drone and beam back a signal to the operator, which meant there didn't need to be visual contact between the remote pilot and the actual aircraft. In ninety two, the military was able to pilot such a drone on a test flight to land on a target ship, and it was controlled from a control aircraft at a distance of thirty miles or

fifty kilometers from that target ship. Pretty incredible now. One of the projects that used this technology was called Operation Afrodite, in which old B seventeen and B twenty four bombers were loaded up with explosives and launched under human control. You would have a tailing aircraft following behind and at a certain distance from the intended target. The human pilot of that B seventeen or B twenty four would bail then parachute out of the bomber. The trailing aircraft would

have two pilots aboard it. One of them would be controlling the actual trailing aircraft and the other one would be manning the remote controls for the bomber. Actually, in several cases it would require two pilots to control the the remote controlled aircraft. Joe Kennedy, brother to John Kennedy, a former US President, actually died while serving as a

volunteer pilot for this operation. Our c A also developed technologies that would be used in glider bombs, and also a program called the t d r drone, but the technical limitations of camera and television technologies meant these were

of limited use. The tdr drone was probably the most successful of all the different experiments, but at that stage uh the United States had entered a part of the war where it was more about brute force and less about precision strikes, and so the tdr drone only had limited use during the war, but the military contracts really helped justify Starnov's massive investment in developing television technology and admit that our CI a had the money to build

out its manufacturing facilities. So on top of those projects, are Cia engineers at the R and D facility also worked on radar antenna phosphors for radar screens, They worked on acoustic fuses for various types of munitions, and they also helped develop things like infrared cameras and navigation equipment. It became one of the indispensable companies that the United States would rely upon to develop wartime technologies that weren't,

you know, weapons and of themselves. Meanwhile, as the war raged in Europe, our Cia would make another big move back at home. In ninety three, the company was forced to sell off its NBC Blue network and sold it to a guy named Edward J. Noble. Now, if you remember from our last episode, NBC was originally two different networks. You had a Blue network and you had a Red network.

The heart of the Blue network was a radio station that had originally been established by Westinghouse, and the heart of the Red network was a radio station originally created by A. T and T. The Blue network was mostly known for non sponsored content like news reports and culture broadcasts, and the Red network was the one known for commercially sponsored entertainment and was the more popular and more profitable

of the two networks. Well. A few years earlier, in ninety four, the Mutual Broadcasting System filed a complaint to the FCC and said that NBC and CBS had a d woppoli over the national radio market, that those two companies had pretty much come completely dominated the industry, and this case made its way through the court system because the FCC agreed and ordered NBC to divest itself of either the NBC Blue Network or the NBC Red Network.

R c A appealed to the Supreme Court but lost, which led to the sale of the less popular Blue network to Edward J. Noble, who had made his fortune in life savers the candy not the emergency flotation device anyway. Noble paid eight million dollars for NBC Blue A Prince Lisa, and on June NBC Blue would officially be renamed the American Broadcasting Company, or ABC, and so our c A had a hand in creating all three of the original

major broadcasters in the United States. Radio and television broadcast companies. The company directly created NBC, it inadvertently created CBS, and then created the network that would become ABC. At the end of World War Two, our c A was in a strong position to build out the consumer television market. The company had used its military contract money to build out manufacturing facilities, and it can now rededicate those facilities

to making consumer goods instead of military equipment. Our c A started selling black and white television sets in nineteen forty six, so remember they had demonstrated it in nineteen thirty nine, but World War two pretty much put a complete stop to that effort. So in forty six they start selling these sets and to create content, our c A would rely upon NBC, which would not just make

radio content, but now television content as well. Many of the popular radio series would be converted into TV series, and this created a new challenge because now personalities couldn't just sound great, they needed to look great too. This was kind of the opposite of how things changed when sound came to motion pictures, because before sound, it was important that you look really good for the camera. After sound,

you also had to sound good for the microphones. Now this leads us up to nineteen and what I call the Great Talent Raid. CBS, which was also getting into television production, needed some good looking stars and NBC had a lot of them. So William S. Paley, the guy who had purchased CBS, who had formed it out of the company that Judson had tried to create years earlier, ordered a talent raid on NBC. This involved CBS executives

offering lucrative contracts to many of NBC's big stars. And previous to this there had been sort of an understanding, a gentleman's agreement, if you will, that the two networks would not dare raid each other for talent. And now Paley says, you know what, Yeah, So they ended up luring people like George Burns and Gracie Allen and Jack

Benny to jump ship from NBC to CBS. So our c A and NBC built the network and a lot of the technologies that led to the rise of television, and CBS was able to pull a fast one and make the transition from radio to television smoothly by hiring away some of NBC's talent. Saranov had been a little slow to adapt to the world that Paley had been forging.

Sarnov was really good at leading his company to sell radio sets and televisions, and Paley had been more effective at designing programming so as to say that the stuff that it would actually air on those radio sets and television's. Paley had embraced advertising as a source of revenue. He was also wholeheartedly into creating sponsored content, in which a company would pay for the production costs of a show in return ver receiving heavy promotion, sometimes in ad breaks,

sometimes even within a show itself. Sarnov wasn't really crazy about that type of business. He thought of it as being distasteful, and reportedly he wouldn't meet with ad executives at all. He delegated all of that to his direct reports. Paley, on the other hand, would seek out those ad executives, and so while NBC had a huge headstart on CBS, Paley was able to catch up pretty quickly, even before

the TV era had begun. Sarnof did rise to meet Paley's challenge and had the benefit of our c A backing NBC up, whereas Paley was running CBS without a larger corporation behind it. In nineteen fifty Just four years after our CIA had introduced a consumer television black and white set, the company showed off a new innovation. It

was one that would change television dramatically. This would be color television, and it would take some time for the format to become the standard and American households, but it was another big innovation from our CI, a that had a major impact on technology and culture. In our next episode,

I will explain how color television works. I'll explain how our CIA's version of color television became the standard for broadcast in America, and we'll also talk about some of the other businesses that our CIA got involved in, including things like semiconductors, electron microscopes VCRs, and how the fifties through the seventies would be a boon time for the company, but it would lead to some troubled times a little

later on, and what would happen in the eighties. So we'll be following all of that in our next episode. I hope you enjoyed this one. If you have any suggestions for future topics I should cover on tech Stuff, send me a message. You can email me the address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can visit our website that's tech Stuff podcast dot com. You'll find other ways to contact me and the archive

of all of our episodes on there. Don't forget to visit our merchandise store over at t public dot com slash tech stuff. Every purchase you make goes to help the show, and we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.