The Birth of RCA

I jump on a plane and head out to Las Vegas, Nevada. Well, I read a lot of emails from a lot of different companies, and they're all attempting to entice me to go to a particular part of ce S to see their booth or their presentation, or maybe even to a hotel suite off the exhibition floor, because you know, some companies will rent out a suite of rooms rather than secure exhibition space for lots of reasons. That's neither here

nor there anyway. One of these companies, the ones that sent me these emails, was our ci A. And the thing that really caught my eye is that in twenty nineteen, our CIA is celebrating it's one anniversary. Our c A has been a really important company in technology for lots of different reasons, not just consumer tech, and our c A is responsible directly for two of the big broadcast networks in the United States, and indirectly it's responsible for

the third. I thought I would explore the history of this company and what it's been through during the century of its existence. So this is the first episode where we're going to talk about the formation of our CIA. But of course this also means that I'm going to be doing a lot of backtracking because while our c A, which was an initialism originally for Radio Corporation of America, it would become an established company in nineteen nineteen, the

history actually dates further back. So we've got to talk about some other companies and some politics and some other big issues that would lead to the formation the founding of our c A. So let's go back to the eighteen hundreds. In the late nineteenth century, invention and innovation were rapidly changing the world. You had the Industrial Revolution, and it had altered the way we do work. It had impacted the price of goods. Things became cheaper because it was easier to make a heck a lot more

of just about everything. People had more time on their hands, and at the same time, you had engineers and inventors who were experimenting with stuff like electricity and magnetism and

radio waves. Entrepreneurs from around the world, some of them inventors, other just business not just but others of the business minded people who saw opportunity through the invention of others, began to form corporations that could exploit these discoveries for profit, and they included companies like the American Telephone and Telegraph Company also known as A T and T. Also General Electric which grew out of several companies, one of which

was founded by Thomas Edison himself, and many more. The discovery of radio waves and the technology that would allow humans to produce, transmit, and receive radio waves in a meaningful way is beyond the scope of these episodes. Besides, I've talked about that a lot in earlier episodes of Tech Stuff. You can search the archives. There tons of episodes where I talk about radio waves and the history

of radio. But by the early nineteen hundreds, there were a dozen or so radio operating stations in the United States. Several of these stations were owned by foreign companies, and almost all of them were dedicated to transmitting signals using Morse code. So this wasn't about radio stations playing the top forty or anything like that. At this stage, these were communication and stations. They were meant to transmit signals from one place to another, to send communications across the nation.

It was sort of analogous to the telephone infrastructure, so not meant as a entertainment or news source. The telephone companies had not yet entered into this business at this point. These were all individual enterprises, some of which were getting pretty large, and the biggest of all of them was the American Marconi Company, named after Marconi, the guy who gets the credit for inventing radio, that is, the transmission technology of radio, though that is of course a matter

of great dispute in certain academic circles. Nicola Tesla would be the other name that gets thrown around in that and for good reason. Tesla was awarded a patent early on, and that patent would eventually get overturned in favor of Marconi's under somewhat shady circumstan answers. Anyway, in the summer of nineteen fourteen, war broke out in Europe. Somewhat optimistically, people were calling it the War to end all wars, but now we call it World War One. Thus optimism

did not win out. Now, while the United States initially maintained a neutral status during the war, the US government was already making preparations in the event that the nation would be pulled into the conflict, and part of that was an executive order that was signed by Woodrow Wilson on August five, nineteen fourteen. That executive order authorized the United States Navy Department to censor international telegraph messages that were sent by radio firms, the largest of which was

the Marconi Company. Now, Marconi Company challenged the legality of this executive order, saying this censorship, you can't do it. Legal battles would follow, and the Navy would have ultimately shut down on Mark Cony radio transmission station for three months until the company agreed to follow regulations in January nineteen fifteen. Eventually, even this was thought to be too risky, and the United States government effectively took over the American

Marconi Company. And the American Marconi Company was technically it was a subsidiary. It was a subsidiary of a company that had its headquarters in England. So the U. S Government says, we want to maintain neutrality. We cannot have stations that are located in the United States sending messages on behalf of one or another of the parties that are at war in Europe, because that would seem to suggest that we are on a particular side and we

want to stay out of this. So the US says, in order to do this, we're going to take over your assets. They're not yours anymore. There ares Boo who Now at the end of the war, the United States still had those assets of the American Marconi Company, and the government needed a way to offload them. They didn't want to keep them. They also wanted to ensure that

those assets would remain under American control. They didn't want foreign nations to have access to critical communications technologies with you on US soil. So the government approached a group of companies that included General Electric, which would become the dominant partner in this group, Westinghouse, A T and T, Western Electric, and the United Fruit Company. And if you're like me, your reaction to that last partner was probably hang on, did he say United Fruit Company? And indeed

I did. That company has a complex and controversial history. It was involved in various levels of government in many regions across the world, and particularly in Central and South America and the Caribbean, and and it was operating as an effective monopoly in a lot of places. Has a lot of uh, a lot of tie INDs with colonization, so there are a lot of negative things that kind

of tie into this company's history. But in nineteen thirteen, the United Fruit Company had established the Tropical Radio and Telegraph Company, which is kind of what brought it up as a potential partner for this enterprise. So anyway, these partners all got together and they formed the Radio Corporation of America or r c A in nineteen nine. It was essentially a government sanctioned monopoly in the radio industry

in the United States. The companies all pooled their patents together in a series of cross licensing agreements to avoid any conflicts of having one company attempt to leverage its essential patents over the other partners in the operation of r C as business. So essentially they were all saying, here are all the patented technologies that we have our disposal that relate to radio transmission technologies. We want to make sure that we're not creating impediments for our c

A to do business. To head up this company, the partners chose a guy named David Sarnoff. Sarnov himself had a really interesting history. He was born in Russia in eighteen ninety one, but his family immigrated to America in nineteen hundred. He had started working as a messenger boy for a telegraph company in nineteen o six, and he became a telegraph operator for the American Marconi Company a

couple of years later. Legend has it that he picked up the distress calls from the Titanic in nineteen twelve while working in the radio station that was owned by John Wannamaker, but the truth appears to be that Sarnov had instead picked up signals of rescue ships that were responding to the Titanics distress call, and then he relayed

that information to the local press in New York. He was promoted to chief inspector of American Marconi a few years later, and he wrote a memo in nineteen sixteen in which he proposed building radios for home consumers and he called it a radio music box. So this is before the days of commercial radio, but he had thought this technology has the potential to bring culture, entertainment, news, all sorts of stuff into the American home through transmission,

if we want to pursue that. This was in the days when only amateur radio enthusiasts had any access to radio equipment outside of the professional industry. Otherwise the only places you would find it are in these radio stations where they were acting almost like telegraph operators. So he would then become the commercial manager for our c A and eventually become the general manager, and then further down the line the CEO. Sarnov was a really ambitious man.

He was also really good at self promotion and who is also really good at sensing the potential impact of radio broadcast technology as well as related technologies like television broadcasts, which I'll talk more about in the next episode. Well, in the early days of our CIA's history, it mainly did two things. It operated the various radio stations which were still almost exclusively transmitting messages in morse code, and it sold radio equipment manufactured by the various companies that

had formed our CI. A. While this was intended to build out a communications infrastructure similar to the telephone system, something else was happening at the same time that changed the course of the industry, and that something was the

rise of amateur radio operators. The United States had banned amateur radio during World War One, saying that they needed to have those radio waves free for communications, but the the government lifted that ban on October first, and more people were interested in radio communication and setting up our own radio receivers at home. The rise in amateur radio encouraged Sarnoff and gave credence to that idea he had proposed a few years earlier about his radio music box. Well.

During World War One, there were some hints at what would become the standard for commercial radio in use by the military. In a publication called The Wireless Age featured a short range system that could broadcast news and music to hospitals to entertain convalescing soldiers. For example, on the technology front, companies were exploring ways to make radio receivers

more compact and less expensive. To make radio signals loud enough for commercial radio to be practical, those radios would have to have amplification, and so companies began investing in research and development to improve vacuum to manufacturing processes to make radio as a practical consumer item. Before the transistor, the vacuum tube was your primary way of taking in an incoming week signal and boosting it to a stronger

outgoing signal and amplifier. In other words, I have more to say about the early days of our CIA, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. And so is our CI A oversaw radio stations transmitting communications across vast distances, and various companies began to work toward a goal of building consumer radios. The race was on for the first true commercial radio station, and it wouldn't be our CIA to launch it. Instead, Westinghouse applied

for a license to operate such a transmission station. They applied to the US government and received permission in nineteen twenty. Westinghouse was in the business of manufacturing radios, but demand for radios was lagging behind, and so leaders at the company reasoned that one way to increase demand would be to create programming. Now today that seems pretty clear that if you want to sell a technology to someone, a technology that allows people to access content, you need to

create content for people to access. Otherwise they just have a useless tool. But this was a big step in nineteen twenty. Radio had mainly been used as point to point communication at that At that stage, it's just that the points were undefined because there were no wires, So you know, you had a receiver that could pick up a signal that would be a point. So this would open up the possible uses for radio and allow them

to become entertainment devices. It was precisely the stuff Sarnoff had been saying in his memo back in nineteen sixteen. Westinghouse approached a ham radio operator named Dr Frank Conrad, who had already been playing records over the radio for some of his other amateur radio operator friends, and on November two, nineteen twenty, Westinghouse launched k d k A out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Yeah, it was the first commercial

radio station. Saranov had been working on his own approach, receiving the blessing of the companies that founded our ci A to do so. They gave him some funds so that he could pursue this, and on July two, nine Sarnof showed off the market potential for radio by broadcasting a boxing match between Jack Dempsey and George Carpentier. Dempsey

was a celebrated US champion. Carpentier was a boxing hero in France and he had a reputation for knocking out British champions, so this was a super hyped event back in n Dempsey would win by knockout in the fourth round and the broadcast was a sensational hit. Our CIA began to sell more radio receivers to customers, and radio

stations began popping up all over the United States. The first radio commercial on record happened in August nineteen twenty two, and a New York real estate developer aired an ad in New York City. Two years later, in nineteen there were more than six hundred commercial radio stations in the United States. These were mostly independent stations, and that's when r c A made a really big move in the industry.

Partnering with Westinghouse and A T and T, r ci A formed a new company called the National Broadcasting Company, or INBC, which had its first broadcast on November nineteen twenty six. The concept was that NBC would produce material for broadcast, which would then be sent out over different radio stations in different regions, with the stations being part of the overall network. Which was a new idea at

the time. You know, creates your your content in a central location and then distribute it using these various radio stations. That was revolutionary. NBC had two semi independent networks under its governance shortly after it was formed, so it split off its its operations into two networks. One was called the Blue Network and one was called the Red Network,

So you had NBC Blue and NBC Red. The center of the Blue Network was a radio station called w jay Z, which had been founded by Westinghouse in nineteen twenty one. The center for the Red Network was a station called w e a F, which was founded by A. T and T in nineteen twenty three. While all this was going on, Sarnov was already looking at the potential future of television. In nineteen twenty four, r C A transmitted the first transatlantic radio photo from New York to London.

This was before the invention of electronic television's, when the early prototype TVs were largely mechanical in nature, and I talked about that in the History of Television episodes on Tech Stuff. So there was a limited market for mechanical television's. They really didn't make a lot of progress in the consumer market. They were very expensive, they were very complicated,

and they had limited success full results, let's say. But the real boon would come when inventors began to create electronic televisions, and that wouldn't begin until the late nineteen twenties. And when we talk about commercial TVs, you're talking about two more decades on top of that. Now, this is not entirely a happy story. In nineteen twenty nine, Sarnoff

met with an engineer at Westinghouse named Vladimir Zwarakin. And if you've listened to my episodes about the origins of television, you know Zarakin is one of two inventors who typically get the title of inventor of television. The other would be Philo Farnsworth. Saranoff convinced Westinghouse to fund Zarakin's work, and in nineteen thirty r c A would take over the research as Warakin would actually go over to our

CIA as well and become an r c A employee. Sarnoff, seeing the power of patents, wanted to run out of business any person or a company he felt was horning in on his action, and so in ninety two our CI A would file a patent suit against Philo Farnsworth. The case would last seven years. Ultimately Farnsworth would win that case and our c would have to pay fines and royalties to him. But by that time his health was in shambles. He had had a nervous breakdown from

all the stress. And I'm going to get back to Starnoff's lutitious ways throughout these episodes, but bouncing back to for a moment. So this is before all of the legality issues with Farnsworth, I need to talk about another company that would play a very important part in our Cier's early history. Now, if you've heard my episodes about the history of turntables, you'll remember the early days of

the phonograph and the graphophone and the gramophone. I covered a little bit of the turbulent patent battles and the cutthroat business strategies that were all part of the early days of home audio, and I'll have to do a more in depth series in the few sure to really focus on it, because it gets nasty, y'all. But the Victor Talking Machine Company was born directly out of all that strife. Now, since this is not an episode about Victor, I'm just going to give you the super short version, which,

let's face it, I'm Jonathan Strickland of tech Stuff. Super short for me is a lecture for anybody else, but let's go with it. The Berliner Gramophone Company of Philadelphia, founded by Emil Berliner, was the company that really was the focus of this this strife. Berlinard gets the credit for inventing the first flat disc record. Before his invention,

engineers would press recordings onto cylinders. So you had these cylinders that you would put on a spool essentially that would then rotate and you could play it back on various devices. The discs were much easier to store, right, you didn't have as much space and as much bulk as a cylinder did. They were easier to ship, and once the manufacturing process was refined, they lasted a lot longer than cylinders did as well. It took a while to get the right materials, but once they did, those

discs just seemed more practical. Berliner made a deal with an enterprising manufacturer and machinist named Eldredge R. Johnson. Johnson developed a wind up spring motor for Berliner's gramophones. Now previously those gramophones had relied on hand cranks, so you would literally turn a crank which would then turn the gears inside the device and turn the platter so that you could listen to the disc being played back on

the gramophone. Johnson did good work. He created a spring motor that worked reliably, but Berliner would enter into a sales agreement with a man named frank Cman, and this would lead to massive trouble. Frankie wanted more money for himself and eventually began to sell knockoffs of Berliner's works while simultaneously bringing legal action, much of its spurious in nature,

against both Berliner and Johnson. The process eventually prevented Berliner from selling gramophones in the United States and nearly bankrupted both Berliner and Johnson in the process. And this was infuriating to them. I mean, they were the ones who had created this technology, and now this salesman Day had worked with was claiming that they were the ones infringing

on his patents, his ideas, and his trade secrets. But in nineteen o one, Johnson, Berliner, and some other entrepreneurs got together and founded a new consolidated company that took Berliner's facilities and Johnson's manufacturing plants as the basis for the new organization. And this was the Victor Talking Machine Company,

which incorporated on October third, nineteen o one. So the Victor Talking Machine Company was older than the Radio Corporation of America that would not be born until nine But Saranov looked at the Victor Talking Machine Company and thought, this is a way I could sell more radios. I could take this company and take their product, the the gramophones essentially, although they didn't call it that in the

United States, they couldn't. They started calling it things like the Victrola that was one that the Victor Company made. I can take that. I can incorporate a radio into the design of those machines, sell it as a new product, and sell more radios this way. Also, just as a quick aside, the Victor trademark is one of the more famous ones in business history. It shows a dog, specifically a fox terrier, sitting in front of a gramophone horn

and the dog's head is tilted slightly. It's from a painting titled His Master's Voice, and the artist was Francis Borrowed and it was made in The dog was named Nipper and once belonged to Burrowed's nephew Mark mark Ark had tragically passed away. And then Francis saw a Nipper one day sitting near a gramophone with his head cocked, and that led Francis to wonder what the dog's reaction would be if they had happened to be playing a recording of his old master Mark speaking. That was the

inspiration for the painting. He tried selling the painting as a magazine illustration to no avail, and ultimately sold it to the Gramophone Company for the princely sum of one hundred pounds. Sterling Johnson got permission from the Gramophone Company to use it for his products under the Victor Company, and berlinerd had trademarked the design and at some point

transferred that trademark over to the Victor Company. The whole story is super fascinating, and I'm sure I'll devote a future episode to the Victor Talking Machine Company, but for now, let's remember that it started in nineteen one, and even though it grew out of an older company and then would eventually get incorporated into our c A. I'll explain more in just a moment, but first let's take another

quick break to thank our sponsor. The acquisition of the Victor Talking Machine Company meant that our C A was now getting into the consumer electronics business. Keep in mind, up until nine nine, r c A was primarily in the business of operating radio broadcast stations and selling what was effectively industrial equipment. But now our c A owned the company that had created the iconic Victrola machine, and they created a subsidiary company called r c A Victor.

That company also took a majority ownership in the Japan Victor Company, which is also known as j v C. Also in ninety nine, r k O Radio Pictures released a film called Synco Patient, which relied upon a new technique called r c A photophone, which is not to be confused with the technology developed by Alexander Graham Bell that was also called photophone. Now, this was a technique of recording audio onto film for the purposes of synchronized visuals and audio, in other words, a way of making

talking pictures. And the formation of r k O Pictures itself is a great story that ties directly into our history of our CI A. So the development of the r C A photophone technology would date back to the early nineteen twenties, there was a man named Charles A. Haxie who was working on recording audio to photographic film as a project for General Electric, which you'll remember was one of the founding partners that created our c A. Now.

Hawxy's work at that time was more about preserving audio recordings for playback, not necessarily as a way of creating talking pictures, but just recording audio in itself. But by the mid twenties, General Electric was thinking about applying Hawxy's work in the direction of talking pictures. Now, the desire to match sound to moving images dated back to the earliest moving pictures. Edison himself worked on this challenge, and a lot of different companies were taking various approaches to

this problem. So, for example, Warner Brothers had created a system called Vitaphone. Vitaphone, you would record a soundtrack onto a disk similar to an LP record, and when you were ready to play the film, you would synchronize the film playback with the audio from the disk. So that was a pretty primitive approach, but it was how some early talking pictures were made, including the first one, The Jazz Singer, which debuted in ninete r C. A photophone

used a totally different approach. The sound was recorded in a narrow band on the side of the frame of film some actual photoreactive film. Uh, the band would be out of you when the film was put through a projector. There was a frame on a projector that covers up the edges of the film, and the audio track is on one of those edges. The width of this strip on the side of the film varies with the frequency of the sound that was recorded onto the film. So essentially,

you have sound that's transmitted into a microphone. It is turned into an electric signal, which in turn is used to treat this this photoreactive film, so that it has this record of the frequency. It's almost like a wave form. If you were to think of that, uh, you know, in a modern sense, if you were to look at

an audio file on a audio editing software. So then when you're playing it back, you have a bright lamp that shines light through this narrow strip, and you have a photo cell that picks up the light that's coming through, and it generates an electric current that matches the amount of light that's hitting the photo cell, and that signal goes to a pre amplifier, which can then boost the signal strength so it can go to an amplifier and

then ultimately speakers. The lamp for reading this optical sound and the photo cell are not in the same position as the projection lamp that would just get in the way. So this is actually it creates something of a challenge. It means that the soundtrack is offset from the actual frames of the film itself. The soundtrack is either running a little ahead or a little behind the action of the film, depending upon the method that was actually used.

So in playback it's all synchronized because if you as long as you put the film through the right type of projector, the audio track gets read through the audio system at the same time as the video or the film. Rather the images are being projected through the projection lamp and it all gets synchronized together. So in playback gets synchronized.

But if you were to look at the film itself, like if you took the film out of the projector then you held it up to the light and you saw where the audio track is, the audio you were looking at would not be the audio that occurs in synchronization with the image you're looking at the advantage of that approach was that all the synchronization would be done beforehand. You didn't have to set up a disc and a film in separate chambers to try and match up to

each other. It was all in one piece of film. But the format itself changed several times, sometimes with the optical soundtrack running ahead of the action, sometimes behind the action.

This meant the movie theaters had to invest in different equipment to play back those films properly, because if you put in a film where the soundtrack ran a little ahead of the action, but you put it in a projector that was designed to run a film that had the audio a little behind the action, you would have terrible experiences because the audio would not be at all synchronized with what was happening on screen. It would just

be a total mess. This ended up creating kind of a format war that waged in the late twenties after our CIA's approach debut. It is not the only audio on film format, and it also did battle with the vitaphone approach, where it was the recorded to disc version. Now on the production side, if you were making films, it also changed how movies were made because If you watch some of the early films with sound, like some of the first films that had sound in it, you

might notice people don't move very much. Shots are pretty static. Actors tend to remain in place well. This was largely because the limitations of the sound recording equipment at the time. Microphones were large and bulky and typically omnidirectional. Actors needed to be close to the microphones so that they could be heard clearly, but they also couldn't move around very much because the microphones would pick up everything, so you

just have a lot of noise. The cameras themselves, which had been motorized in the late nineteen twenties to create a standard frame rate of twenty four frames per second that was necessary in order to have reliable sound playback, those cameras made a lot of noise too in those early days, and that could get picked up by the microphones. So as a result, the common practice was to put

the cameras in enclosed, somewhat sound proved chambers. The cameraman camera operator, if you prefer, would be inside that chamber with the camera and they would be isolated from the rest of the set, so that the sound wouldn't leak through. They were jokingly referred to as ice boxes. I say jokingly because it would actually get scorchingly hot inside those as the cameras were running, and it limited what you could do with a camera. You could pan the camera

a little bit on its tripod. That that was about it. And so early talkies typically don't have very much movement or action in them, which was a big change from the early days of silent films because in those days actors would make these really big dramatic movements in an effort to tell a story because they could not be heard.

Another thing that would change was that in the early days, film crews captured audio and images on the same film at the same time, so, in other words, the audio and images were both being directly recorded to the same strip of photographic film. This made editing really tricky because again, the audio track wasn't in direct line with the images.

It was running a little ahead or a little behind, so you couldn't just snip film to create a transition or cut out a mistake because the audio wasn't lined up directly with whatever was happening in the image. And that would eventually change when the industry began to capture images and audio separately and would only combine them after

the editing process to create a master print. The audio track and the images were still offset, but you could at least make edits to the film without messing up the soundtrack, and you could do the same to the audio track without messing up the film. R c A's photophone would go up against not only the vitaphone system from Warner Brothers, but another sound on film system called

movie Tone. Movie Tone came from a Western electric subsidiary called Electrical Research Products Incorporated or e r p I. That system was the dominant one when our c a was ready to debut photophone. So again the company goes out and says, what can we do to really compete in this market? Ah, again, idea, let's make a new company. So they go out. They purchased the Keith Albi or Feum chain of theaters. That was a chain of theaters that wasn't it wasn't just motion picture theaters but also

vaudeville theaters as well. So our CIO goes out and buys this company that owns these multiple theaters, and then they merged that company with another company they buy called Film Booking Offices of America or FBO, and the merger of these two acquisitions becomes the Radio Keith Orpheum or RKO Pictures Company. So our CIA created an entirely new corporation in order to put its motion picture audio format onto the market, and it worked. Photophone would eventually evolve

into the industry standard. Pretty audacious move and not the last one from our CIA. In our next episode, we will continue this story to talk about how our ce A weathered the Great Depression and what it was doing during World War Two. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, let me know. Send me an email. The address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or head over to our website that's tech Stuff podcast dot com. You'll see the archive of

older episodes. There in different ways to contact us, including on social media. Don't forget to visit our merchandise store that's over at t public dot com slash tech Stuff. Remember, 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. Is that how stuff works dot com,