The Birth of RCA

RCA is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2019. How did this company get started and how did it dominate radio for years?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
How Stuff Works, and I heart radio and I love
all things tech. And while I was preparing for c

(00:24):
e S, which I am getting ready to travel to,
as I'm recording this, I'm recording this the Friday before
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

(00:44):
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,

(01:07):
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

(01:28):
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,

(01:49):
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

(02:12):
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,

(02:34):
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,

(02:55):
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

(03:17):
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

(03:39):
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

(04:03):
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

(04:26):
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

(04:48):
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,

(05:08):
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

(05:30):
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

(05:51):
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

(06:13):
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

(06:35):
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

(06:55):
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

(07:19):
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

(07:43):
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

(08:05):
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

(08:27):
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

(08:50):
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

(09:12):
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

(09:34):
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

(09:54):
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

(10:16):
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

(10:39):
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

(11:00):
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

(11:23):
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

(11:45):
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

(12:06):
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

(12:30):
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,

(12:53):
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.

(13:18):
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

(13:40):
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

(14:04):
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

(14:27):
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

(14:49):
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

(15:11):
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

(15:32):
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,

(15:55):
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

(16:17):
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

(16:38):
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

(17:01):
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

(17:24):
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

(17:46):
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.

(18:09):
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,

(18:30):
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,

(18:52):
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

(19:12):
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

(19:33):
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

(19:56):
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,

(20:16):
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,

(20:40):
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

(21:03):
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

(21:27):
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

(21:50):
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

(22:13):
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

(22:34):
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

(22:55):
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

(23:18):
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

(23:40):
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

(24:04):
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

(24:25):
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,

(24:46):
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

(25:10):
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

(25:31):
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

(25:53):
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

(26:14):
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

(26:37):
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

(27:01):
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

(27:24):
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

(27:48):
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

(28:11):
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

(28:31):
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

(28:52):
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

(29:16):
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

(29:41):
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

(30:03):
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.

(30:25):
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

(30:48):
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.

(31:10):
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

(31:32):
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

(31:53):
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

(32:16):
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

(32:36):
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.

(32:56):
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.

(33:20):
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

(33:43):
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

(34:04):
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.

(34:25):
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

(34:50):
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

(35:12):
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

(35:34):
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(35:55):
really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics.
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