RCA

» see rca.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

General Electric completed its purchase of RCA on 9 June 1986, for $6.28 billion, or $66.50 a share. It was the largest merger outside the oil industry that anyone had done to that point. GE wanted NBC and it took the whole company to get it. Then it spent two years selling the rest off in pieces. The record label went to Bertelsmann and the consumer electronics business to Thomson of France; the semiconductor operation went to Harris and the Princeton laboratories to SRI. By 1988 RCA was a trademark on other people's products.

For most of the twentieth century it had been something else entirely. RCA founded NBC in 1926 and ran the first nationwide radio network in America. It bought the Victor Talking Machine Company in January 1929 and with it the phonograph business in Camden along with the terrier listening to a gramophone horn. It put the 45 rpm record on the market in 1949 and got its all-electronic color television system adopted as the American standard in 1953, beating a rival CBS design that was incompatible with every black and white set already sold. If you grew up anywhere that American consumer electronics reached, you grew up inside decisions this company made.

Which is how the name got to Turkey, on a plug. The phono connector RCA designed in the 1930s to wire a radio to a turntable inside one cabinet escaped the cabinet and became the universal audio and video jack, and by the 1990s every television and video recorder in the country had a row of colored sockets on the back, one for the picture and a pair for the sound. In Turkish they are just RCA, said as a word. i have plugged hundreds of them in. The company had been dead for years before i ever touched one, and nobody who handed me a cable had any idea the letters stood for anything.

~ the record ~

~ the corporation the navy wanted ~

The founding is a nationalization that went through a corporate lawyer instead of a legislature. After the First World War the strongest long-range wireless transmitter in existence was General Electric's Alexanderson alternator, and the Marconi companies wanted to buy the rights. The Navy objected to American transatlantic communication running through a British firm. Owen D. Young at GE brokered the alternative: on 17 October 1919 the Radio Corporation of America was incorporated, and on 20 November it took over the assets of American Marconi along with a cross-licensing agreement that pooled the radio patents held by GE and Westinghouse together with AT&T's.

That pool was the point. RCA began life holding the patents everyone needed, which is a fine business and also an obvious antitrust target. The Justice Department sued, and a 1932 consent decree forced GE and Westinghouse to divest their stakes. RCA came out of it independent at thirteen years old, still owning the American radio industry.

~ sarnoff's century ~

David Sarnoff arrived with the Marconi assets as a commercial manager and became president on 3 January 1930. He stayed at the top until the end of 1969 and died in December 1971. Nobody else ran a company that size for that long in that industry, and the continuity shows in the strategy. RCA always bet on the next broadcast medium before there was an audience for it, then built the transmitters and the receivers at once so that an audience would appear.

It worked for television. RCA demonstrated it at the 1939 World's Fair in New York and came out of the war years with a set to sell and a network to fill it. It worked less well for the people the company ran over on the way. Edwin Armstrong invented FM radio and then fought Sarnoff over it through the courts for the rest of his life, and he killed himself in 1954 with the litigation unfinished. His widow won the case.

~ the dismemberment ~

The decline was a diversification. Through the 1960s and 1970s RCA bought a car rental firm in Hertz and a book publisher in Random House, then frozen dinners and carpet. It also ran a computer division against IBM and abandoned it in 1971 at a loss reported near half a billion dollars. Each purchase was defensible on its own and the pile was not. A company built on holding the patents for the next medium had turned into a conglomerate that also rented cars.

Then came the videodisc. RCA spent the better part of two decades and something over half a billion dollars developing the CED SelectaVision player. It launched in 1981 into a market that already had videocassette recorders in it, and RCA withdrew from manufacturing the thing in 1984. That story has its own stone on this site under SelectaVision and belongs there rather than here. What matters for the corporation is the timing: the loss landed in the same years as the takeover market, and in December 1985 GE agreed to buy the company its own predecessor had incorporated sixty-six years earlier.

~ the mark after the company ~

The letters kept working after the thing behind them stopped. Thomson got the consumer electronics trademark in 1988 and put it on televisions for two decades. Technicolor inherited it after that, and since 2022 it has sat with Talisman Brands, a licensing house. rca.com today sells flat panels and tablets built by manufacturers with no descent from Camden or Princeton. RCA Records is a Sony label. The dog is still on it.

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