September 11, 2019 • 50 mins
RCA was once a brand in every American household; it's leaders exalted, it's contributions lauded. But ask a anyone under the age of 40 if they've heard of RCA and they'll look at you like a deer in headlights. In fact, RCA was more than just a brand here and gone, it was the linchpin for many of the icons of today. In this episode of Bizography we dig into the history of a company that gave us modern radio and television, and is directly connected to everyone from GE, NBC, ABC, and BMG to Rockefeller Center, Lifesavers, and Hertz.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you eliminated dinosaurs from the history of the Earth,
you'd be missing an important piece of why things are
the way they are today. Dinosaurs were here, they were huge,
and without them we wouldn't have birds, and without studying dinosaurs,
we wouldn't truly understand our planet. So today we're gonna
be the paleontologist of the business world. Our c A
(00:21):
was here, it was huge, and then it vanished, just
like that. This is bisiography, the show where we dive
(00:42):
into the strange but true stories of iconic companies. Whether
they're a current bright star, in the midst of a
massive dumpster fire, or settling into the desk heap of history,
they all have a past worth knowing. I'm Dana Barrett.
I'm a former tech executive and entrepreneur and a TV
and radio host, and over the course of my career,
I've interviewed thousands of business leaders and reported on the
(01:03):
bright beginnings and massive flame outs of the brands we
know and love. Some of their stories are eye opening,
some are disheartening, and some show us how interconnected it
all is. The story of r c A is one
I wanted to tell without really knowing why. It's the
brand I remember from my childhood that was I don't know,
just kind of everywhere. All of our TVs were our
(01:25):
c A. My cassette player was our ci A, and
of course there was our ci A Music with me
today as always is my producer, co host and the
official millennial in the room, Nick Bean. Nick, do you
even remember our c A. I think I had an
r c A TV in my room when I was
like a really little kid, but that's about all I remember,
(01:47):
you know. I have to say, though, after we've done
all this research, it's really crazy to know how our
CIA like weaves into the stories of so many other companies.
Did you know that? Is that what you wanted to
do this episode? Danta? You know, I have to admit
I really didn't, But somehow this brand just kept popping
into my head. Not to be all like woo woo,
but I feel like I must have known intuitively that
(02:09):
there was something to this story. But I think for me,
it really was just that it was everywhere, and then
you know, I got busy with my life and it's
the next time I looked up, there was no more
r c A, and so I just sort of I
think was always slightly curious about how they sort of
got to be everywhere, and then why they disappeared and
where they went, you know. Um, and then once to
(02:31):
your point, when we started to learn about the actual
history of the company, I was really surprised by how
many other company stories intersected with the story of our CIA. Anyway,
the bottom line is, I really didn't know. I didn't
even really remember that our CIA stands for Radio Corporation
of America. Uh, and that it's beginning was the beginning
of the radio business that we both know and love
(02:52):
and have been a part of for years now, right.
I know, I had no idea until we started researching
our c A. And I also didn't know that our
ci A kind of started as like a government conspiracy,
I know. I mean, it's funny how when I was
doing a business radio show for so many years, and
I always tried to keep sort of politics and like
government out of the business conversation. But really, even way
(03:15):
back then, government was inserting itself into private business whenever
it felt like it needed to, and business, of course
was doing what it could to influence the government all
the way back then. I know. I think the biggest
difference is now versus then? Is the average you know,
American citizen had no idea that all this stuff was
going on. Yeah, totally fair. We did not have the
interwebs back then. Um, so I think, you know, people
(03:37):
just thought there was a clear delineation and you know,
between business and government and all that. And so I
think given all of that, we need to go back
all the way to the beginning, essentially to the start
of radio, to truly tell the story of our CIA.
And that means we need to talk about, essentially the
inventor of radio, a guy named Guiolmo Marconi. Can you
(03:58):
say that three times fast? Guillamo? Hey, good job? Only
one time? Slow? Um? Can we call him just Marconi
from now on? We're gonna go with Mary. Let's make
that agreement, all right. Well, so Marconi was actually Italian nobility.
He was born in eighteen seventy four, never formally educated,
like a lot of our inventors on photography. I've noticed
(04:20):
that a lot of the folks that were these great, huge,
great minds of their time never went to school. Yeah.
I think current American culture we placed so much importance
on a college education and your ability to sort of
do anything without a college education. Is is brought into
question when when you look back in history, so many
(04:40):
great business minds, inventors, engineers, just great businessmen and women, uh,
did not have college. Yeah. Marconi was one of those.
And he in eighteen ninety four, at the age of twenty,
started experimenting with radio waves because you know, that's what
all people do. Every twenty year old likes to do
(05:01):
what right? Uh. A year after that, he discovers that
he could reach a greater range with radio waves if
he kind of raised the height of the antenna and
uh like sort of borrowing a technique in wired telegraphy.
I guess which was the thing, man, how do you
say that? Telegraph telegraphy? I don't know, like calligraphy, but telegraphing, right,
(05:24):
the exactly Anyway, he sort of followed their techniques, is
the bottom line, and figured out he could sort of
get radio waves to go further. So he's basically starting
to invent a wireless form of transmission using radio waves. Um.
And so as he starts to build this and realizes
he can repeat it and do something with it, he
knows he wants to start a business. I guess there
(05:46):
wasn't money in Italy at that time to do it.
So he goes over to the UK. This is now,
and later that year gets the world's first patent for
a system of wireless telegraphy. We're going with telegraphy. So
he's in the UK. Uh. And in eight year after
he has the patent, he starts the Wireless Telegraph and
(06:06):
Signal Company Limited, and later that company gets renamed to
Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company. Two years later American Marconi was
organized as a subsidiary company and it was formed to
hold the rights to use the Marconi patents in the
United States and Cuba at the time. Wow, so in
just a few years he already went international. Yes, I know,
(06:30):
and it's like we're sort of glazing over that part.
But that's you can tell that's pretty successful. He's in
the UK, gets a patent, starts a company, and two
years later people are wanting to have that patent in
other countries and make use of it. So pretty good. Uh. He,
by the way, was a genius. I think there's really
no other way around it. There was competition, of course
in the marketplace, but in nineteen twelve American Marconi took
(06:53):
over the assets of some of the competition because they
weren't doing as well. Of course, he had the patent,
so that helps. Right, He took over the assets of
the bankrupt United Wireless Telegraph Company, and from that point
forward his company, what was American Marconi, was the dominant
radio communications company in the United States. And so then
fast forward nineteen fourteen, just two years after that World
(07:15):
War One begins, and it's worth noting that Marconi served
in the war for Italy and during that time continued
his study of radio waves and in fact was considered
one of the contributors to the invention of radar. The
guy was, I'm not kidding, like really, this was one
of the brilliant minds of that era. He was given
like awards and honorary degrees by pretty much everyone for
(07:37):
his contributions to science, including getting the Nobel Prize for
Physics in nineteen o nine, which he shared with another professor. Right,
he dedicated his life to his work, Dana, I mean
so much so in fact that do you know how
Marconi actually ended up dying? Now, I don't think I
got that far in his story. Right, So he was
he was helping to develop microwaves like back in the twenties,
(07:58):
way before it became commonplace, and he was up there
in years when he was doing this in the span
of like sixteen months, he ended up having nine strokes.
He had like he had two or three strokes, And
finally they said, listen, you know, Marconi, you've got to
take a back seat. You're getting up there in years
help us with research, but you don't need to be
in here with us with all of these crazy radio waves.
(08:19):
It's affecting your heart. He was so dedicated to his work.
He's stuck to it until finally he had his ninth
stroke and they couldn't bring him back. He was that
dedicated to his work it literally killed him. Wow, Yeah,
that's crazy, especially because you know, remember when micros well
you don't remember when micro waves first came out, and
they were like, don't stand too close to the microwave.
You know, you'll get watching my hot pocket cook. When
(08:43):
I was a kid, my mom you never let me
stand there and watch. Don't stand too close to it,
right because yeah, anyway, all right, back to our timeline though,
so really, Marconi is obviously hugely important part of the
beginning of the story of radio, which by the way
is building us up to the big inning of the
story of our c A. But without that foundation, you
can't really tell the story. So here we are. It's
(09:05):
during World War One and the US government decides that
it needs to commandeer the private businesses just in general
that it feels like it needs to win the war,
and that includes the radio business. Right. The Navy knew
that communication was key, So in April of nineteen seventeen,
when the US finally decides to jump into the war,
the military starts to take over a lot of civilian
(09:27):
radio stations. Then about a year and a half later,
when the war ends in November of nineteen eighteen, the
Navy kind of likes having all these radio stations and
wants to keep control over all of them even now
that the war is over. Well, you know, Nick, it's
hard to give things back once you get used to
having them. Uh A. Last Congress eventually, I guess Congress
(09:48):
had a conscience at the time. Uh And Congress eventually
forces the Navy to return all the stations it has
taken back to their private owners. Right, But the Navy
doesn't want to give them up that easily. They go
national security and they're also worried about returning some of
these really high powered stations that they now had control
of because they put money into them while they were
(10:08):
in control of them. They didn't want to give those
stations back to American Marconi because even though it was
called American Marconi, it was mostly British owned, and the
British at the time had like almost all of the
undersea cables between North America and Europe. So even though
the British are our ally, we still don't want them
to have that much power. Right, Yes, it seems about
(10:31):
right right. Part of the reason is that a piece
of equipment called an Alexanderson alternator was made by GE
and it was like hundreds of times more powerful and
reliable than the spark transmitters that they had been using
in the towers. Right, So that piece of equipment was
one of the things the Navy was trying to protect. Right.
(10:53):
So in n eighteen one, American Marconi regains control of
its stations. Uh, it has one of these Alexanderson do hickeys,
and they're like, hey, this thing is pretty powerful. It's
pretty cool. Let's put this in all of our stations.
We want this thing, so American Marconi executives go to
General Electric and they make a deal to buy a whole,
(11:15):
big old bunch of them. But the Navy is not
having it. Uh. They are like, if American Marconi gets
their order from GE, they'll have way too much control
over international communications. So then the Navy goes to g
E looking for a way to have a air quote
this all American company, and to take over American Marconi's assets. Right.
(11:37):
It was so intensely involved by the Navy that they
literally sent two naval officers to meet with gees president
at the time, a guy named O. N. D. Young,
and they asked him to stop the sales of those
alternators to American Marconi, And of course G's like, yeah, no,
they already put the order in, Like we're already basically
starting to do it, and we're gonna make huge profits.
(11:58):
So the officers tell the president of GE well, why
don't you just buy American Marconi and do the radio
thing yourself, And that is how our CIA was born. Yep. So,
in November of nineteen GE General Electric completes the purchase
and transforms American Marconi into the Radio Corporation of America
(12:19):
r C. A and it's right from its start, the
very largest communications firm in the US at the time.
So this is like a very different story than a
lot of the other stories that we've told because the
day that r c A became a company, it was
already the biggest. So the new company, of course also
was promoted as being a patriotic gesture by GE. And
(12:40):
just to be sure the company stays all American. R
CIA's incorporation papers required that it's corporate officers, b U
S citizens and that a majority of the stock be
held by Americans. Wow, I would not fly, I think
in any way for a company today. Yeah, companies would
not agree. But again, this was sort of the government
we're seeing ish coercing coercing we'll go with coercing g
(13:04):
E into this. And so they were really wanting to
make sure, um that it was going to be American.
And you know, listen, we could go off on an
entire tangent here, but we don't really know what conversations
went on behind the scenes between the American government and
GE around the formation of our ci A. You have
(13:25):
to imagine, given everything we know now, that there were
some other promises made absolutely right I mean, if we're
while we were doing the research of our C eight,
there are far too many admirals and generals in the
story of our ci A. Yeah, I mean we know
how you know, government scratches the back of business and
vice versa, and that's clearly what was going on here. Uh.
(13:47):
The official story is, you know, wrapped up in a
nice bow and it's very pretty, but the reality who
knows what they were promised? So essentially, our c A
is not a company founded by a wacky inventor or
some one passionate about a particular product, like a lot
of our other episodes have been, but rather it's a
joint effort between a massive American company and the US
(14:09):
government to get control of a powerful technology. Now, we
do also need to point out, though, that when our
CIA began, it wasn't really about radio as entertainment or
broadcasting to a wide audience the way we think about
it now. It was really about point to point communications
across long distance wireless telegraphs. That was. It was about yeah,
(14:30):
super important point And so of course the next question
is how did our ci A go from something that
was of great interest to the US military for its
point to point communications ability, and how does it go
from that to become the brand that was known for
music and movies and TV and radio when I was
growing up. It's all about leaders with vision, of course,
like all the companies we've talked about on phosiography, and
(14:52):
one of those early leaders was David Sarnoff. We'll get
to his story next. M So r c A becomes
a thing, essentially the renamed American Marconi, but now g
E owned in Its first president is the guy who
was the president of American Marconi. He was named Edward J. Nally.
(15:16):
And while Natalie did have a storied career in radio
as it was at the time. Uh And though he
was the first president of r CIA and the president
for several years, without an up and comer named David Sarnoff,
radio and television might not be what they are today. So.
David Sarnoff was born in eighteen nine one outside Minsk
(15:38):
in Imperial Russia. I just really wanted to say Minsk. Uh.
He was nine years old when he immigrated to the
United States with his family. He was the oldest of
five kids, I believe, and Uh. They settled on the
Lower side of Manhattan in nineteen oh six. Just a
couple of years later, Sarnoff, who is another one of
our so called geniuses with very little form education. He
(16:01):
in fact did not have any formal education beyond elementary school. Uh,
goes and gets his first job. He's fifteen years old
and he goes to work for the commercial cable company,
which turns out to be a direct competitor of American Marconi.
Later that year, he asked for some paid leave for
Russia Shana. He was Jewish, and his boss said nope.
(16:24):
So he said, CIA wouldn't want to be a and
left the company and instead moved over to the competition,
American Marconi, getting a job as what at the time
was called an office boy, basically what we call probably
today an intern. I assume it wasn't paid. It was
a paid intern. Actually do you know it was a
paid intern? But yes, um, right, coffee, you know back then,
(16:49):
probably papers and stuff like that. But he he didn't
definitely was not doing anything highly radio related. He's working
for the company. But also just a fun side note
of that, he he was making five dollars and fifty
cents a week for that job. Yeah. Uh, he was
just he was a hard worker. And so he was
moving up and over the years and he stayed there
and he just kind of moved his way up. But
(17:09):
one of the jobs he had along the way was here,
I'm going to struggle again with the pronunciation a telegrapher. Okay,
he was a telegrapher, and in nineteen twelve was actually
managing the new Marconi station, a top wanna maker's department
store in Manhattan. There's actually an interesting story about him
being at that station being a telegraph manager. So during
(17:30):
the sinking of the Titanic and nineteen twelve, David Sarnoff
and two other operators that he was managing sent and
received wireless messages for seventy two hours surrounding the accident
to gather names for names of survivors for anxious relatives
when you know if their family was okay. The only
catch here is that later on David Sarnoff told the
(17:52):
story as like he was the one guy in the
room who stayed up for seventy two hours to get
everybody's names, Like he kind of made himself into hero.
It's so interesting we see people doing this like throughout history,
this is still happening. This is like a thing that
people feel the need to do, to take something that's
already really great and just exaggerated a little bit. I mean,
(18:14):
we see politicians doing it, and by the way, on
both sides of the aisle all the time. It's like,
you know, I did this big thing. No, I did
this thing that was bigger than big. It was huge.
It's like it was good enough when it was just
a big thing. If it's good, it's good, it's good. Uh.
In any case. Really interesting that that is a personality
(18:35):
trait that I think, interestingly, a lot of really successful
people seem to have. It's true, it's kind of the
you almost have to have a little bit of an ego. Yeah,
it's like a little bit of braggadociousness or something. It's
a good word, braggadociousness. Yeah. In any case, Sarnov continues
to climb the ranks after that Titanic incident, and around
nineteen fifteen or nineteen sixteen, about three years before American
(18:57):
Marconi actually became our c A, Starnoff is already thinking
about the possibilities for radio, and he sends a memo
to the president of the company, Edward J. Nalley, proposing
that the company developed a radio music box for what
at the time was thought of as the amateur market,
meaning the consumer market all of us. Um, and he's
(19:19):
predicting that there's an opportunity for radio to be in
every home like the phonograph the record player essentially was
at the time. There's a little interesting historical footnote here,
which is that the official memo that he wrote in
nineteen fifteen or nineteen sixteen has never been found, and
so there's been a lot of searching for it because
there are references to it, but nobody can find it.
(19:40):
So it has sort of lost to history, but it
is believed to have existed because there are other references
to it. And also in that same sort of braggadocious
nous that was David Sarnoff, only like you know, maybe
ten to fifteen years later, he himself was having people
go look for that original letter because he wanted to
take credit for the dah. He wanted to make sure
(20:01):
he had proof that it was his idea was cool
before it was cool, that's right. Um. In any case,
you have to remember that we now think of radio
and the idea of broadcasting as supernormal. We're completely used
to it. But at the time, as we already sort
of talked about, radio was a technology that was point
to point and it was a fascination for the military.
I mean, it wasn't something that average people were thought
(20:23):
to be uh having a need for. Most of the
equipment money came from government agencies wanting to be able
to talk to boats at sea. That's really where most
of it came. Yeah, and the trains were using it
some of those kinds of things. And it's really interesting
because you know, Starnoff allegedly writes this memo and sends
it to Nalie, and Nellie at the time resists the
idea because he is heads down focused on the current
(20:47):
clients he has and the current markets they have, and
he's not looking to sort of try this new crazy thing. Um.
That's a different kind of leader. And like I said,
he had a storied were in broadcasting. He was you know,
obviously a good manager, he worked his webs president of
a big company. But he I think if he had
not had sidekick Sarnoff, essentially he would u probably not
(21:12):
have taken our c A nearly to where it ended
up going. He just didn't have maybe the foresight, he
wasn't a visionary. Sarnof was a visionary, and visionaries, by
the way, often have visions of wonderfulness that work out,
and they also have see things that are not real.
And that is really the tale of Sarnoff's life. From there.
He he had vision for some things that were that
(21:35):
became icons and part of our culture, and then some
of the other things he tried were just massive flops.
So that's sort of a little bit of who Sarnoff was.
But by the early nineteen twenties, the idea of broadcasting
was starting to catch on, and David Sarnoff was right
there at the forefront. Interestingly enough, it wasn't music that
(21:56):
had the first real moment as a broadcast. It was sports. Yeah,
it was a sporting event. So Sarnoff contributes to this
rising interest in radio post World War One by helping
to arrange for the broadcast of the boxing match between
Jack Dempsey and George Carpentier. I tried really hard on
that name, that was very French. July of nine, and
(22:18):
almost three hundred thousand people heard the fight, and almost instantly,
home radio equipment demand skyrocketed in like the consumer market.
It just makes me want to say, like and then
the Super Bowl TV buying era was born, right, million
dollar commercials. Obviously we skipped a whole lot of history
(22:40):
in between those two things, but but essentially it was
that same idea. Right, a big sporting event is played
in a broadcast fashion, people are like, this is really cool.
I want to buy a radio now so I can
get more of this, because essentially it was marketed as
you can be at the event without having to buy
a ticket, and that was groundbreaking at the time. So
that was one and after that success that our c
(23:02):
A had with that boxing match, they quickly moved to
expand on their broadcast activities and set up their first
full time broadcast station. It was w d Y in
New Jersey. By the spring of the following year, Starnoff's
prediction of popular demand for broadcasting has essentially come true,
and r c A starts not only setting up of
(23:24):
the stations from which to broadcast, but also selling the
receivers for people to have in their homes. At the time,
they were doing it under the brand name Radiola, but
if you think about it, they really were going after
the entire market. We're going to do the broadcasting and
we're going to sell you the machine to receive the broadcast.
It makes me think almost like a real estate agent
who both sells the house for the seller and helps
the buyer buy the house. They were dipping into both ponds, right.
(23:47):
So r c A is now operating three radio station.
They've got w jay Z which is now w ABC
in New York so still exists. They've got w j
Y in New York City, and they've got w r
C which is now w U TEM A w T
e M in Washington, d C. Interestingly, radio has such
a funny history like that, there's so many stations that
have existed forever essentially and just changed call letters or
(24:11):
ownership or whatever, be like that same tower to which
is crazy. Yeah. Anyway, that's a T and T, who
had also been dabbling in the broadcast industry suddenly drops
out of the industry altogether, and r c A gets
the opportunity to purchase their two radio stations, which are
w E A F and w c A P both
(24:33):
in Washington, d C. And a T and T s
network operations. So at this point, our c A has
a strong foundation to create a new division of its
company just for broadcasting, and that is how another iconic
brand you know and love is born. It's NBC and
that three tone chime is so recognizable. It really is
(24:58):
fun fact that was actually the first audio trademark in
the United States. It was registered in nineteen fifty. That's
really cool and it's kind of a local tie in
for US. As we've mentioned before, we do record bisiography
here in Atlanta, and that three tone chime actually came
from NBC affiliate WUSB here in Atlanta. An executive at
(25:18):
NBC's headquarters in New York tuned in to hear a
Georgia Tech football game and the local producers here decided
they were going to use it. He heard it and
loved it, called back down to the station on Monday
and said, hey, can we use it nationally? And they
said sure, and that is how it came to be.
It feels like that story is just a little piece
of all of the interconnectedness that is the story of
(25:40):
our c A. R c A is the company that
kicks off NBC. That was in the mid nineteen twenties,
before World War Two, before the Great Depression, but our
CIA for the next twenty to thirty years is an
iconic company that is growing. They are ahead of the curve, innovating,
(26:02):
inventing new technologies, um and creating a whole bunch of
iconic products and brands. And the ones that they didn't create,
they intersected with in some way they owned them, or
they were bought by them, or there were just so
many intersections they were hard to miss. We'll get into
all the innovations, inventions and intersections of our CIA and
(26:25):
the rest of the world right after this. So, as
we said, it was when r c A announced the
creation of this new division for broadcasting called the National
Broadcasting Company, known to us now as NBC. Now, of
course it wasn't television at the time, it was radio.
(26:48):
But it's also I think important to note that it
was not fully owned by r c A. Even at
the very beginning. It was their idea. It was fully
credited really to David Sarnoff and his um brilliant and
deal making and forward thinkingness. But remember, first of all,
he was still four years from even being president of
the company. But also um he was a dealmaker. And
(27:10):
so NBC comes together with our CIA as the majority owner,
but also their parent company g E has a big
share and Westinghouse, which was really a competitor to g
also has a share and that relationship ge Westinghouse r
c A was pretty fraught throughout the years UM and
(27:30):
caused some issues with the government and uh, you know,
monopolies and all of that, which did impact our CIA
but really would take us four more episodes I think
of phisography to fully delve into, right, lots of legalities there, Yeah,
absolutely so. As the twenties move on, our ci A
continues its growth and in r c A gets into
(27:53):
consumer electronics for the first time. They purchase the Victor
Talking Machine Company. I love that name talking machine, the
Victor Talking Machine. It sounds very old timy, it does. Uh.
They were, of course, at the time, the world's largest
manufacturer of phonographs, including the famous victrola and phonograph records.
(28:14):
That word phonograph also has sort of gone to the
dust heap of history. Like if you if you ask
a gen z or what a phonograph is, you ask
a millennial what a phonograph is. It's listen, folks, Basically,
it's a record player. It's a record player with like
a big horny thing. Yeah, the big the big right exactly. Um,
The deal to buy the Victor Talking Machine Company also
(28:36):
was a deal put together by David Sarnoff, and in
that deal they also got a majority ownership in a
related company, the Japan Victor Company, which you may remember
because in the US it was also somewhat iconic and
that we called it j VC. Wow. Wow, another three
(28:56):
letter brand that was big and it's kind of gone.
And I also think if you ask most people, even
those who knew JVC myself included that it stood for
Japan Victor Company, I would not have known that. Yeah,
I had JVC cassettes, the video cassettes like lined up
on my you know, bookshelf, and I never knew what
(29:17):
JVC stood for. Who cared right? Right? It was a
good VHS tape there he count exactly. Uh So, finally
David Sarnoff takes over as the president of our c A.
I feel like the way we're telling the story that
was inevitable. Probably didn't feel that way to him, right,
Definitely not, because he sat under the shadow of some
of these presidents for over a decade, never could get
(29:38):
there right. Uh, But he was a hard worker, he persevered,
and uh he was there waiting for his his turn
and it came in and I don't know that we're
going to really get through the rest of his entire career,
but essentially he ran the company until for the rest
of his life. Essentially his son took over at some
point further down the road. I think Robert Sarnoff I
(30:00):
believe was his son who took over much later. But
he stayed on and was on the board and all
of that, and was really working until the year before
he died, which was I think in the early nineteen seventies. Yeah.
So in any case, back in the thirties, Uh, he
takes over, David Sarnoff does as president, and then in
one continuing down that consumer Electronics road r CIA begins
(30:23):
to sell the first electronic turntable, so you know, the
Victor La the phonograph. Now really gets into the turntable era.
And this is all because of the invention and innovation
of our ci A. They sort of fixed the technology,
made it better, created this new stylist that made the
quality of record playing so much better, and that that
(30:45):
became the standard and stayed the standard for a long
time for the entire industry. Basically copied what they did. Yeah,
exactly now. We mentioned um that the intersection of Westinghouse
and GE and our ci A was a little bit
fraught legally speaking, and that started to come to ahead
in the early nineteen thirties. UM so much in fact,
that r c A was um sort of forced out
(31:09):
onto its own essentially, does that make sense, sort of
thrown out of the nest of G E and right.
The government came in said, go get your own house. Ye,
stay in here anymore. Right, it was too much of
a monopoly, and so GE was not really allowed to
keep them anymore. So r c A in the nineties
becomes its own company and GE is no longer attached.
In three, and this is more of the intersection part
(31:32):
that I kind of love. Three thirty Rockefeller Plaza in
New York becomes the r c A building. It's the
headquarters back then of both r c A and NBC.
I think everybody who watches television knows about thirty Rockefeller Plaza, right,
kind of Yeah, of course you do, right, I think
so pretty iconic. Yeah, I think everybody knows. And NBC
(31:55):
is still there to this day at thirty Rockefeller Plaza
and r c A was actually the primary investor in
the building itself when it began in nine thirty and
in fact, David Rockefeller cites our CIA's action investing in
the project as being responsible for the salvation of the project.
It had some financial difficulties, So our Cia is the
(32:15):
reason that building is there. The iconic Rockefeller Plaza in
New York City that people go to as tourists would
not exist, is what we're saying here. If it wasn't
for our CI, a a brand that you have all
but forgotten about. Yeah, I mean that gives me chills.
They continue on with their growth and their success, and
of course radio is giving way at this point in
(32:37):
history to television. Television technology is starting to um advance
and in a demonstrates an all electronic black and white
television system. I like that. It's a system at the
New York World's Fair. And they also developed the first
ever television test pattern. Yes to the old school the
(33:01):
I mean we probably mostly know them as the colored bars.
They were black and white and gray back then. But yeah,
that pattern made by r c A. Yeah, interesting to
note for the kiddies who are probably not listening yet,
but maybe well in a few years that TV was
not when it started, it turned off. It turned off
at midnight in a lot of places, little national anthem
played a little flag waving, and then the test pattern
(33:23):
came on and thank you. R C A. R C
A is what you slept to probably many days back
when you were a kid. Also, the first television broadcast
aired at that same New York World's Fair, and it
was introduced by David Sarnoff himself. It was only seen
in the New York area because there was only one
station and only about a thousand people saw it on
(33:44):
the two d TV sets that existed in New York
at the time. And I will say I tried to
do some research on this part. Nobody knows how many
TV sets there are, but let's just think about how
many millions of people in New York. Most households have
at least two. It's just crazy to think there were
only two TV sets in New York City at a time. Yeah,
I think we need some some tweets on this one.
(34:05):
First of all, I gotta ask you, Nick, how many
TV sets in your house? Oh, in my house alone,
we've got probably five. But you have a lot of people,
do you have a lot of people? But we've Yeah,
we've got one in each bedroom, one in the living room.
Yeah yeah, yeah. I live alone, and I want to
say I have three. Yeah, and that doesn't include the
computer screens on which I can watch television and remind
you folks, this is only like a generation ago. Yeah,
(34:29):
that's it. Yeah. Yeah. Also, I love the little fun
fact you found about the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Yeah,
nineteen thirty nine, at this little bitty station with a
couple of thousand people watching, was the first time that
Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade was aired on television, and it
has been on TV ever since, which is crazy. Eighty
(34:51):
years crazy to think about that. A couple of years later,
one commercial television officially begins. Our c A quickly becomes
the market leader manufactured TV sets because remember they're in
the consumer electronics business, and NBC becomes the first television
network in the United States. Fun fact on that front,
the first official paid TV advertisement broadcast by any U
(35:14):
S station was for the watch manufacturer Boliva. That's really cool.
Right before a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball game. What my brain
hurts all of these intersections alright, So, then on October twelve, three,
after some trouble with the FCC once again in this
(35:36):
whole era of you know, our C A and G
E and everybody being too big and dominating markets. Uh,
the FCC says, NBC now is too big, and it
has been operating with essentially two divisions, NBC Red, which
is its traditional commercial radio at the time primarily, and
NBC Blue, which is it's sort of non commercial radio,
(35:57):
kind of like a private version of NPR. It's a
valid example. And the FCC now says, uh, you can't
do that. You're too big. You've got to sell one
or the other. We don't care which one. Well, obviously
they're going to keep the one that makes them money,
which would be the commercial station, NBC Red. And so
they decide, as I said in October of ninety three,
to get rid of NBC Blue and sell it off.
(36:18):
So they sell it to a candy maker, a candy
guy TV. Okay, yeah, this was a guy named Edward
no Ball. He was a candy magnate, and he bought
NBC Blue for eight million dollars in and renamed it
the Blue Network. It's not that creative, that's true. It's
(36:39):
really nice. Took what was given to them. Okay, Yeah, Um,
the Blue Network changed its name in ninety six to
the American Broadcasting Company. That's that other iconic television company
we know so well, ABC. What Okay, So basically what
you're saying is r C A made NBC and kind
(36:59):
of by default ABC as well. Right, Yeah, two of
the biggest TV networks in the country. Right, And you've
got to tell everybody because you did this homework what
Edward Noble is really famous for. Edward Noble got all
of his money to buy the Blue Network from founding
the Life Savers Company. So the next time you've got
ABC on the television and you're eating Life Savers, Edward
(37:21):
Noble spirit is smiling down upon you. Yeah. Absolutely, So
he didn't invent Life Savers. He was actually a chocolate manufacturer,
but he um bought the invention of life Savers from
another guy. And I also love the fact that Life
Savers were created as a quote summer candy unquote because well,
you know, they didn't melt, right. That's the whole point
that Edward Noble got involved is he couldn't sell much
(37:43):
chocolate in the summer. People didn't want it to melted.
He would something that didn't melt and boom, so cool
love that. Um. Alright, So meanwhile, NBC retains what was
the Red network. They dropped the red part and it
just is NBC and it stays NBC, and it stays
under our c A ownership into the nineties, all the
way until Night six. So before we get to the eighties,
we have to stick with our original timeline, and the
(38:06):
sale of NBC Blue was in the early nineteen forties.
That gets us right into the World War two era.
I think it's fair to say that a lot went
on with r c A during those years, but it
was mostly around wartime technology, and so we'll kind of
let that go. Somebody else can cover that in their podcast, uh,
and look at sort of what was going on in
(38:28):
the nineteen fifties and beyond. So in the early nineteen fifties,
r c A had a lot of success in the
television world, doing a better job than anybody else with
color TV technology. Of course, up to that point, television
had been all black and white, and the television sets
were made to handle black and white transmissions. The new
(38:49):
color TV technology that everybody else was coming up with
required people to buy a new TV set, But our
CIA came up with technology that would work with existing
black and white sets or new color TV sets, and
that is why they sort of became the standard. And
r c A televisions became the hot consumer electronic item.
And that is why I remember having them, because they
(39:10):
were the hot TV all the way through the eighties. Also,
because of their proficiency in color technology, they became the
professional video camera and studio gear company. Also, so all
the big TV stations that we're making shows, we're using
r c A technology, i e. You means CBS and ABC,
the biggest competitors of NBC. Dang, dang, double dang. That
(39:33):
is exactly right. Yeah, So that's what really the fifties
was doing. Again, this is all under the umbrella of
David Sarnoff during his presidency of the company, and that
gets us all the way into the nineteen sixties. In
nineteen sixty five, David Sarnoff's son, Robert Sarnoff, takes over
the company and it is that era that starts to
(39:54):
be the beginning of the end of r c A
because Robert just wasn't the visionary that his father was.
Uh In the nineteen sixties, r CIA gets into mainframe
computers but doesn't do it well. Um, they get into
home computers and don't do it well. Uh. And they
invest a lot of money in various technologies that essentially
just are not first and not best. That brings us
(40:17):
to a philosophy for the company of our ci A
to just sort of grow by buying up other companies,
which is sort of perfect for our story because we
keep telling you how they intersected with all these other brands.
Well in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, they did
it essentially by buying them. In that era, they bought
companies like Hurts, Rental cars, Yeah, Banquet Foods, which they
(40:42):
then later sold to ConAgra. They owned Random House Publishing
for about I think fifteen years. They owned Cornet Carpeting.
They owned a greeting card company, Gibson Greeting Cards, which
you've probably seen. So that was all just our c
A trying to become a massive conglomerate, but without that
sort of focus on broadcasting and broadcasting technology that they
(41:02):
had had before. Right, So that gets us kind of
close to the extinction event that caused our c A
ultimately to completely go away right way to bring back
our dinosaur reference. I like it. Yeah, we started the
episode talking about how our CIA was kind of like
the dinosaurs in that they were huge, they were everywhere,
and then they vanished. So up next we'll talk about
(41:23):
what happened, where did they go? What was their meteor?
So we got to take this dinosaur analogy all the
way to the end of our episode because we started
out by saying, you know, for me, as a kid
growing up in the nine eighties, our CIA seemed to
(41:43):
be everywhere, and then you know, I got into my
life and I looked up a few years later and
no more our c A and I never really understood
what happened. But the truth is they really started dying
in the nine seventies. I just wasn't aware of it
yet because it hadn't really hit the consumer market, the
debt right, and so it was really in nineteen seventy
five when things started going terribly wrong. Now by this point,
(42:05):
David Sarnoff has been dead for four years. Robert Sarnoff,
his son, has been uh at the Helm for about
ten years, and he's just pretty much done everything wrong,
so much so that he gets ousted in nineteen seventy
five in a boardroom coup led by a guy named
Anthony Conrad, who became the new company president. Well, Conrad
resigns less than a year later, admitting that he failed
(42:28):
to file some income tax returns for like, I don't know,
half a decade. Oh, that's so bad. And then the
guy right that takes over for him, a guy named
Edgar Griffith's proofs so unpopular they make him retire in
early nine. Yeah, so basically they're picking one loser after
the next. Um. The final guy was a guy named
Thornton Bradshaw, who was the final president of our c
(42:49):
A and pretty much took them to the end. Um,
I don't even know. Can you do that gracefully? Quietly?
Maybe quietly without scandal. We'll give him credit for that
without scandal. So in that era, essentially what's happening is
they've had a lot of failures. All those companies that
we were mentioning that they bought towards the end of
(43:10):
the sixth season in the early seventies, they sort of
bought and sold, maybe made a few bucks on or
lost some money on, but all the inventions that they
went after and tried, they just spent millions on research
and development that weren't straight into the garbage essentially, right
the main fame computers failed, They had a video game
console that failed. They had a version of a CD
that came out way too late and totally got crushed
(43:31):
by eight tracks, So they lost hundreds of billions of dollars.
In the seventies and eighties, right now, they had a
couple of pieces of business, a couple lines of business
that we're doing well. Um. One of them was our
ci A Records, for example, that that was doing pretty well,
but it wasn't massive financial success, but it was solid.
The real rock star, though, was NBC. NBC was crushing
(43:55):
it in those days, and media on the whole was
a really popular thing to be invested in. I mean
that was in the era you think about it in
the seventies and the eighties is the early era of cable.
It's when CNN is starting to come up and some
of those other So investing in television and media in
general is a popular thing to do at that time.
I feel like we need some like Dent Denta re
(44:16):
entering the picture is the ones parent company g e
oh g's gonna swoop in and save a little brother, right,
They're gonna come in and save the day. Except they didn't.
They didn't really care about the brand r c A.
But GE does finally come in ten years after the
meteor shower essentially began. They come in in and they
(44:41):
buy back essentially r c A, except they really just
bought it because they wanted NBC. It's like buying the
box of cracker Jack just to get the prize and
throwing out all of the delicious caramel corn. That's a
that's a great example. At the bottom. It's right, you
buy the cereal to get the prize at the bottom
of the box. That's exactly it. So they buy back
(45:03):
our CIA and just begin selling off all of the
r c A assets. I mentioned our ci A music
that got sold to b MG, and that's essentially who
owns it to this day. Um and a lot of
it either just was sold off or just shut down altogether.
And little by little the pieces that were our CIA
began to fade from the consumer market. So where our
(45:24):
c A, t v s where everything, They stopped being manufactured,
and you know, people still had them in their homes,
which is why in the eighties I didn't know that
Our Cia was gone really because we didn't need a
new TV yet. It wasn't until you needed a new
TV and you went out to go buy one and
you realize some other brands had taken over. Remember Zenith
Zenith TV that was the same time period also gone,
(45:46):
also completely disappeared. Yeah, in any case, it really is
an interesting phenomenon because this was a company that sort
of came out of a government conspiracy, grew because of
the genius and you know, visionary thinking of one man
essentially in the team that he built, and then when
he was no longer there to to you know, to
(46:08):
shepherd the company in the right direction, it floundered and disappeared, right.
I will say though, it's almost like, you know, we
have the bones of dinosaurs. Now we don't still have
them around, but we can still have a an inkling
of what they were like. In the same way, the
r C A brand name still exists mostly internationally, but
it's like other companies that have contracted with companies. Nothing
(46:30):
Our Cia is our Cia. It's made by other people,
but the brand name still exists on certain things out there. Yeah,
I think the most sort of famous part of our
CIA that is still out there that people sort of go,
oh yeah if you say it to them, is our
CIA Records. It's the music label, um because they won,
you know, awards over the years that various artists that
were signed to our Cia Records were Grammy winners and
(46:51):
all of that. So there is some recognition of our
record label. But I agree with you, I think beyond that,
it's not here, it's not in the u US, and
and to your point, it's just licensed. At this point,
there is no company called our CI. There's just the
brand name that's licensed out to other parts of the world.
Would be really weird to go to another country and
see like an r C A TV, right, It's almost
(47:12):
kind of like that that hit of nostalgia a little
bit probably to see an r C A TV set.
I can't imagine a r C A flat screen, especially
because the logo, even the licensed out logo that exists
in the world, is still the very nine seventies looking Yeah,
so I guess you know, the question really becomes kind
(47:32):
of company that is created out of a government conspiracy
that sort of isn't really created out of innovation and
genius and brilliance, but rather out of a desire to
keep technology from another country. Can that really ever be
a true icon and a successful you know, I don't know,
a successful brand. And I feel like the answer is
(47:54):
sort of maybe, because if they had brought another visionary
in place after David Sarnoff, and if they had cemented
in their uh, you know, their paperwork how the business
was to be run going forward, maybe the company would
still exist and be relevant. But they sort of lost
it. It It turned from a from a government conspiracy company
into a one man show sort of company. Very much
(48:17):
was David Sarnoff's ship under his command, and he did
a great job. But yeah, losing that that that head
person who has, like you said, who is a visionary
like that, who has that kind of foresight and forethought
to be into broadcast media decades before it happened. It's
a big loss to a company when you lose someone
like that. Yeah, we didn't really get into it, but
this is a guy who in like the early nineteen sixties,
(48:39):
um basically predicted the Internet. Yeah he did, And I
mean he was just really that good, uh and and
that forward thinking. It is really fascinating to see somebody
like that, uh and imagine what our world would be
like had they not done what they did right and
for what it's worth. In his time, r c A
was an iconic brand, absolutely, and that why I wanted
(49:00):
to tell the story. And I think that's almost why
I wanted to do this whole series like this, like
the fact that we have dug through all of these
company histories. Now we're, you know, intour. I think that
this is what our ninth or tenth episode, and I
feel like we've kind of gotten down to the layer.
You know, if we're instead of paleontologists, if were like archaeologists,
and we're digging down into deeper layers. You know, this
(49:20):
is the kind of story that is in the desk
heap of history, as we like to say in our opening.
But yet it does have value and it is worth
knowing because it is so impactful to all of these
other companies and all of these technologies that we use
to this day. Right, the brand itself may not be
iconic anymore, but it has led to so many other
icons we still deal with on a day to day basis. Right,
(49:43):
it's a foundational brand, um and you know, GE is
having its own troubles, right, now, so who knows where
they will end up and when we might not know
their name anymore. Be another episode of Bisography in a
couple of years. It might just. On that note, I
think we should wrap it up. That is our show
for today. We'll see next time. Physiography is produced by
(50:04):
the I Heart Podcast Network. I'm your host Dana Barrett.
My co host is Nick Bean, our producer is Torri Harrison,
and our executive producer is Jonathan Strickland. Have questions I
want to give us feedback or have a company you'd
like us to cover. Email us at info at physiography
dot Show, or contact us on social. I'm at the
Danta Barrett on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or just search
(50:26):
for me on LinkedIn. Thanks for your support.
If you eliminated dinosaurs from the history of the Earth,
you'd be missing an important piece of why things are
the way they are today. Dinosaurs were here, they were huge,
and without them we wouldn't have birds, and without studying dinosaurs,
we wouldn't truly understand our planet. So today we're gonna
be the paleontologist of the business world. Our c A
(00:21):
was here, it was huge, and then it vanished, just
like that. This is bisiography, the show where we dive
(00:42):
into the strange but true stories of iconic companies. Whether
they're a current bright star, in the midst of a
massive dumpster fire, or settling into the desk heap of history,
they all have a past worth knowing. I'm Dana Barrett.
I'm a former tech executive and entrepreneur and a TV
and radio host, and over the course of my career,
I've interviewed thousands of business leaders and reported on the
(01:03):
bright beginnings and massive flame outs of the brands we
know and love. Some of their stories are eye opening,
some are disheartening, and some show us how interconnected it
all is. The story of r c A is one
I wanted to tell without really knowing why. It's the
brand I remember from my childhood that was I don't know,
just kind of everywhere. All of our TVs were our
(01:25):
c A. My cassette player was our ci A, and
of course there was our ci A Music with me
today as always is my producer, co host and the
official millennial in the room, Nick Bean. Nick, do you
even remember our c A. I think I had an
r c A TV in my room when I was
like a really little kid, but that's about all I remember,
(01:47):
you know. I have to say, though, after we've done
all this research, it's really crazy to know how our
CIA like weaves into the stories of so many other companies.
Did you know that? Is that what you wanted to
do this episode? Danta? You know, I have to admit
I really didn't, But somehow this brand just kept popping
into my head. Not to be all like woo woo,
but I feel like I must have known intuitively that
(02:09):
there was something to this story. But I think for me,
it really was just that it was everywhere, and then
you know, I got busy with my life and it's
the next time I looked up, there was no more
r c A, and so I just sort of I
think was always slightly curious about how they sort of
got to be everywhere, and then why they disappeared and
where they went, you know. Um, and then once to
(02:31):
your point, when we started to learn about the actual
history of the company, I was really surprised by how
many other company stories intersected with the story of our CIA. Anyway,
the bottom line is, I really didn't know. I didn't
even really remember that our CIA stands for Radio Corporation
of America. Uh, and that it's beginning was the beginning
of the radio business that we both know and love
(02:52):
and have been a part of for years now, right.
I know, I had no idea until we started researching
our c A. And I also didn't know that our
ci A kind of started as like a government conspiracy,
I know. I mean, it's funny how when I was
doing a business radio show for so many years, and
I always tried to keep sort of politics and like
government out of the business conversation. But really, even way
(03:15):
back then, government was inserting itself into private business whenever
it felt like it needed to, and business, of course
was doing what it could to influence the government all
the way back then. I know. I think the biggest
difference is now versus then? Is the average you know,
American citizen had no idea that all this stuff was
going on. Yeah, totally fair. We did not have the
interwebs back then. Um, so I think, you know, people
(03:37):
just thought there was a clear delineation and you know,
between business and government and all that. And so I
think given all of that, we need to go back
all the way to the beginning, essentially to the start
of radio, to truly tell the story of our CIA.
And that means we need to talk about, essentially the
inventor of radio, a guy named Guiolmo Marconi. Can you
(03:58):
say that three times fast? Guillamo? Hey, good job? Only
one time? Slow? Um? Can we call him just Marconi
from now on? We're gonna go with Mary. Let's make
that agreement, all right. Well, so Marconi was actually Italian nobility.
He was born in eighteen seventy four, never formally educated,
like a lot of our inventors on photography. I've noticed
(04:20):
that a lot of the folks that were these great, huge,
great minds of their time never went to school. Yeah.
I think current American culture we placed so much importance
on a college education and your ability to sort of
do anything without a college education. Is is brought into
question when when you look back in history, so many
(04:40):
great business minds, inventors, engineers, just great businessmen and women, uh,
did not have college. Yeah. Marconi was one of those.
And he in eighteen ninety four, at the age of twenty,
started experimenting with radio waves because you know, that's what
all people do. Every twenty year old likes to do
(05:01):
what right? Uh. A year after that, he discovers that
he could reach a greater range with radio waves if
he kind of raised the height of the antenna and
uh like sort of borrowing a technique in wired telegraphy.
I guess which was the thing, man, how do you
say that? Telegraph telegraphy? I don't know, like calligraphy, but telegraphing, right,
(05:24):
the exactly Anyway, he sort of followed their techniques, is
the bottom line, and figured out he could sort of
get radio waves to go further. So he's basically starting
to invent a wireless form of transmission using radio waves. Um.
And so as he starts to build this and realizes
he can repeat it and do something with it, he
knows he wants to start a business. I guess there
(05:46):
wasn't money in Italy at that time to do it.
So he goes over to the UK. This is now,
and later that year gets the world's first patent for
a system of wireless telegraphy. We're going with telegraphy. So
he's in the UK. Uh. And in eight year after
he has the patent, he starts the Wireless Telegraph and
(06:06):
Signal Company Limited, and later that company gets renamed to
Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company. Two years later American Marconi was
organized as a subsidiary company and it was formed to
hold the rights to use the Marconi patents in the
United States and Cuba at the time. Wow, so in
just a few years he already went international. Yes, I know,
(06:30):
and it's like we're sort of glazing over that part.
But that's you can tell that's pretty successful. He's in
the UK, gets a patent, starts a company, and two
years later people are wanting to have that patent in
other countries and make use of it. So pretty good. Uh. He,
by the way, was a genius. I think there's really
no other way around it. There was competition, of course
in the marketplace, but in nineteen twelve American Marconi took
(06:53):
over the assets of some of the competition because they
weren't doing as well. Of course, he had the patent,
so that helps. Right, He took over the assets of
the bankrupt United Wireless Telegraph Company, and from that point
forward his company, what was American Marconi, was the dominant
radio communications company in the United States. And so then
fast forward nineteen fourteen, just two years after that World
(07:15):
War One begins, and it's worth noting that Marconi served
in the war for Italy and during that time continued
his study of radio waves and in fact was considered
one of the contributors to the invention of radar. The
guy was, I'm not kidding, like really, this was one
of the brilliant minds of that era. He was given
like awards and honorary degrees by pretty much everyone for
(07:37):
his contributions to science, including getting the Nobel Prize for
Physics in nineteen o nine, which he shared with another professor. Right,
he dedicated his life to his work, Dana, I mean
so much so in fact that do you know how
Marconi actually ended up dying? Now, I don't think I
got that far in his story. Right, So he was
he was helping to develop microwaves like back in the twenties,
(07:58):
way before it became commonplace, and he was up there
in years when he was doing this in the span
of like sixteen months, he ended up having nine strokes.
He had like he had two or three strokes, And
finally they said, listen, you know, Marconi, you've got to
take a back seat. You're getting up there in years
help us with research, but you don't need to be
in here with us with all of these crazy radio waves.
(08:19):
It's affecting your heart. He was so dedicated to his work.
He's stuck to it until finally he had his ninth
stroke and they couldn't bring him back. He was that
dedicated to his work it literally killed him. Wow, Yeah,
that's crazy, especially because you know, remember when micros well
you don't remember when micro waves first came out, and
they were like, don't stand too close to the microwave.
You know, you'll get watching my hot pocket cook. When
(08:43):
I was a kid, my mom you never let me
stand there and watch. Don't stand too close to it,
right because yeah, anyway, all right, back to our timeline though,
so really, Marconi is obviously hugely important part of the
beginning of the story of radio, which by the way
is building us up to the big inning of the
story of our c A. But without that foundation, you
can't really tell the story. So here we are. It's
(09:05):
during World War One and the US government decides that
it needs to commandeer the private businesses just in general
that it feels like it needs to win the war,
and that includes the radio business. Right. The Navy knew
that communication was key, So in April of nineteen seventeen,
when the US finally decides to jump into the war,
the military starts to take over a lot of civilian
(09:27):
radio stations. Then about a year and a half later,
when the war ends in November of nineteen eighteen, the
Navy kind of likes having all these radio stations and
wants to keep control over all of them even now
that the war is over. Well, you know, Nick, it's
hard to give things back once you get used to
having them. Uh A. Last Congress eventually, I guess Congress
(09:48):
had a conscience at the time. Uh And Congress eventually
forces the Navy to return all the stations it has
taken back to their private owners. Right, But the Navy
doesn't want to give them up that easily. They go
national security and they're also worried about returning some of
these really high powered stations that they now had control
of because they put money into them while they were
(10:08):
in control of them. They didn't want to give those
stations back to American Marconi because even though it was
called American Marconi, it was mostly British owned, and the
British at the time had like almost all of the
undersea cables between North America and Europe. So even though
the British are our ally, we still don't want them
to have that much power. Right, Yes, it seems about
(10:31):
right right. Part of the reason is that a piece
of equipment called an Alexanderson alternator was made by GE
and it was like hundreds of times more powerful and
reliable than the spark transmitters that they had been using
in the towers. Right, So that piece of equipment was
one of the things the Navy was trying to protect. Right.
(10:53):
So in n eighteen one, American Marconi regains control of
its stations. Uh, it has one of these Alexanderson do hickeys,
and they're like, hey, this thing is pretty powerful. It's
pretty cool. Let's put this in all of our stations.
We want this thing, so American Marconi executives go to
General Electric and they make a deal to buy a whole,
(11:15):
big old bunch of them. But the Navy is not
having it. Uh. They are like, if American Marconi gets
their order from GE, they'll have way too much control
over international communications. So then the Navy goes to g
E looking for a way to have a air quote
this all American company, and to take over American Marconi's assets. Right.
(11:37):
It was so intensely involved by the Navy that they
literally sent two naval officers to meet with gees president
at the time, a guy named O. N. D. Young,
and they asked him to stop the sales of those
alternators to American Marconi, And of course G's like, yeah, no,
they already put the order in, Like we're already basically
starting to do it, and we're gonna make huge profits.
(11:58):
So the officers tell the president of GE well, why
don't you just buy American Marconi and do the radio
thing yourself, And that is how our CIA was born. Yep. So,
in November of nineteen GE General Electric completes the purchase
and transforms American Marconi into the Radio Corporation of America
(12:19):
r C. A and it's right from its start, the
very largest communications firm in the US at the time.
So this is like a very different story than a
lot of the other stories that we've told because the
day that r c A became a company, it was
already the biggest. So the new company, of course also
was promoted as being a patriotic gesture by GE. And
(12:40):
just to be sure the company stays all American. R
CIA's incorporation papers required that it's corporate officers, b U
S citizens and that a majority of the stock be
held by Americans. Wow, I would not fly, I think
in any way for a company today. Yeah, companies would
not agree. But again, this was sort of the government
we're seeing ish coercing coercing we'll go with coercing g
(13:04):
E into this. And so they were really wanting to
make sure, um that it was going to be American.
And you know, listen, we could go off on an
entire tangent here, but we don't really know what conversations
went on behind the scenes between the American government and
GE around the formation of our ci A. You have
(13:25):
to imagine, given everything we know now, that there were
some other promises made absolutely right I mean, if we're
while we were doing the research of our C eight,
there are far too many admirals and generals in the
story of our ci A. Yeah, I mean we know
how you know, government scratches the back of business and
vice versa, and that's clearly what was going on here. Uh.
(13:47):
The official story is, you know, wrapped up in a
nice bow and it's very pretty, but the reality who
knows what they were promised? So essentially, our c A
is not a company founded by a wacky inventor or
some one passionate about a particular product, like a lot
of our other episodes have been, but rather it's a
joint effort between a massive American company and the US
(14:09):
government to get control of a powerful technology. Now, we
do also need to point out, though, that when our
CIA began, it wasn't really about radio as entertainment or
broadcasting to a wide audience the way we think about
it now. It was really about point to point communications
across long distance wireless telegraphs. That was. It was about yeah,
(14:30):
super important point And so of course the next question
is how did our ci A go from something that
was of great interest to the US military for its
point to point communications ability, and how does it go
from that to become the brand that was known for
music and movies and TV and radio when I was
growing up. It's all about leaders with vision, of course,
like all the companies we've talked about on phosiography, and
(14:52):
one of those early leaders was David Sarnoff. We'll get
to his story next. M So r c A becomes
a thing, essentially the renamed American Marconi, but now g
E owned in Its first president is the guy who
was the president of American Marconi. He was named Edward J. Nally.
(15:16):
And while Natalie did have a storied career in radio
as it was at the time. Uh And though he
was the first president of r CIA and the president
for several years, without an up and comer named David Sarnoff,
radio and television might not be what they are today. So.
David Sarnoff was born in eighteen nine one outside Minsk
(15:38):
in Imperial Russia. I just really wanted to say Minsk. Uh.
He was nine years old when he immigrated to the
United States with his family. He was the oldest of
five kids, I believe, and Uh. They settled on the
Lower side of Manhattan in nineteen oh six. Just a
couple of years later, Sarnoff, who is another one of
our so called geniuses with very little form education. He
(16:01):
in fact did not have any formal education beyond elementary school. Uh,
goes and gets his first job. He's fifteen years old
and he goes to work for the commercial cable company,
which turns out to be a direct competitor of American Marconi.
Later that year, he asked for some paid leave for
Russia Shana. He was Jewish, and his boss said nope.
(16:24):
So he said, CIA wouldn't want to be a and
left the company and instead moved over to the competition,
American Marconi, getting a job as what at the time
was called an office boy, basically what we call probably
today an intern. I assume it wasn't paid. It was
a paid intern. Actually do you know it was a
paid intern? But yes, um, right, coffee, you know back then,
(16:49):
probably papers and stuff like that. But he he didn't
definitely was not doing anything highly radio related. He's working
for the company. But also just a fun side note
of that, he he was making five dollars and fifty
cents a week for that job. Yeah. Uh, he was
just he was a hard worker. And so he was
moving up and over the years and he stayed there
and he just kind of moved his way up. But
(17:09):
one of the jobs he had along the way was here,
I'm going to struggle again with the pronunciation a telegrapher. Okay,
he was a telegrapher, and in nineteen twelve was actually
managing the new Marconi station, a top wanna maker's department
store in Manhattan. There's actually an interesting story about him
being at that station being a telegraph manager. So during
(17:30):
the sinking of the Titanic and nineteen twelve, David Sarnoff
and two other operators that he was managing sent and
received wireless messages for seventy two hours surrounding the accident
to gather names for names of survivors for anxious relatives
when you know if their family was okay. The only
catch here is that later on David Sarnoff told the
(17:52):
story as like he was the one guy in the
room who stayed up for seventy two hours to get
everybody's names, Like he kind of made himself into hero.
It's so interesting we see people doing this like throughout history,
this is still happening. This is like a thing that
people feel the need to do, to take something that's
already really great and just exaggerated a little bit. I mean,
(18:14):
we see politicians doing it, and by the way, on
both sides of the aisle all the time. It's like,
you know, I did this big thing. No, I did
this thing that was bigger than big. It was huge.
It's like it was good enough when it was just
a big thing. If it's good, it's good, it's good. Uh.
In any case. Really interesting that that is a personality
(18:35):
trait that I think, interestingly, a lot of really successful
people seem to have. It's true, it's kind of the
you almost have to have a little bit of an ego. Yeah,
it's like a little bit of braggadociousness or something. It's
a good word, braggadociousness. Yeah. In any case, Sarnov continues
to climb the ranks after that Titanic incident, and around
nineteen fifteen or nineteen sixteen, about three years before American
(18:57):
Marconi actually became our c A, Starnoff is already thinking
about the possibilities for radio, and he sends a memo
to the president of the company, Edward J. Nalley, proposing
that the company developed a radio music box for what
at the time was thought of as the amateur market,
meaning the consumer market all of us. Um, and he's
(19:19):
predicting that there's an opportunity for radio to be in
every home like the phonograph the record player essentially was
at the time. There's a little interesting historical footnote here,
which is that the official memo that he wrote in
nineteen fifteen or nineteen sixteen has never been found, and
so there's been a lot of searching for it because
there are references to it, but nobody can find it.
(19:40):
So it has sort of lost to history, but it
is believed to have existed because there are other references
to it. And also in that same sort of braggadocious
nous that was David Sarnoff, only like you know, maybe
ten to fifteen years later, he himself was having people
go look for that original letter because he wanted to
take credit for the dah. He wanted to make sure
(20:01):
he had proof that it was his idea was cool
before it was cool, that's right. Um. In any case,
you have to remember that we now think of radio
and the idea of broadcasting as supernormal. We're completely used
to it. But at the time, as we already sort
of talked about, radio was a technology that was point
to point and it was a fascination for the military.
I mean, it wasn't something that average people were thought
(20:23):
to be uh having a need for. Most of the
equipment money came from government agencies wanting to be able
to talk to boats at sea. That's really where most
of it came. Yeah, and the trains were using it
some of those kinds of things. And it's really interesting
because you know, Starnoff allegedly writes this memo and sends
it to Nalie, and Nellie at the time resists the
idea because he is heads down focused on the current
(20:47):
clients he has and the current markets they have, and
he's not looking to sort of try this new crazy thing. Um.
That's a different kind of leader. And like I said,
he had a storied were in broadcasting. He was you know,
obviously a good manager, he worked his webs president of
a big company. But he I think if he had
not had sidekick Sarnoff, essentially he would u probably not
(21:12):
have taken our c A nearly to where it ended
up going. He just didn't have maybe the foresight, he
wasn't a visionary. Sarnof was a visionary, and visionaries, by
the way, often have visions of wonderfulness that work out,
and they also have see things that are not real.
And that is really the tale of Sarnoff's life. From there.
He he had vision for some things that were that
(21:35):
became icons and part of our culture, and then some
of the other things he tried were just massive flops.
So that's sort of a little bit of who Sarnoff was.
But by the early nineteen twenties, the idea of broadcasting
was starting to catch on, and David Sarnoff was right
there at the forefront. Interestingly enough, it wasn't music that
(21:56):
had the first real moment as a broadcast. It was sports. Yeah,
it was a sporting event. So Sarnoff contributes to this
rising interest in radio post World War One by helping
to arrange for the broadcast of the boxing match between
Jack Dempsey and George Carpentier. I tried really hard on
that name, that was very French. July of nine, and
(22:18):
almost three hundred thousand people heard the fight, and almost instantly,
home radio equipment demand skyrocketed in like the consumer market.
It just makes me want to say, like and then
the Super Bowl TV buying era was born, right, million
dollar commercials. Obviously we skipped a whole lot of history
(22:40):
in between those two things, but but essentially it was
that same idea. Right, a big sporting event is played
in a broadcast fashion, people are like, this is really cool.
I want to buy a radio now so I can
get more of this, because essentially it was marketed as
you can be at the event without having to buy
a ticket, and that was groundbreaking at the time. So
that was one and after that success that our c
(23:02):
A had with that boxing match, they quickly moved to
expand on their broadcast activities and set up their first
full time broadcast station. It was w d Y in
New Jersey. By the spring of the following year, Starnoff's
prediction of popular demand for broadcasting has essentially come true,
and r c A starts not only setting up of
(23:24):
the stations from which to broadcast, but also selling the
receivers for people to have in their homes. At the time,
they were doing it under the brand name Radiola, but
if you think about it, they really were going after
the entire market. We're going to do the broadcasting and
we're going to sell you the machine to receive the broadcast.
It makes me think almost like a real estate agent
who both sells the house for the seller and helps
the buyer buy the house. They were dipping into both ponds, right.
(23:47):
So r c A is now operating three radio station.
They've got w jay Z which is now w ABC
in New York so still exists. They've got w j
Y in New York City, and they've got w r
C which is now w U TEM A w T
e M in Washington, d C. Interestingly, radio has such
a funny history like that, there's so many stations that
have existed forever essentially and just changed call letters or
(24:11):
ownership or whatever, be like that same tower to which
is crazy. Yeah. Anyway, that's a T and T, who
had also been dabbling in the broadcast industry suddenly drops
out of the industry altogether, and r c A gets
the opportunity to purchase their two radio stations, which are
w E A F and w c A P both
(24:33):
in Washington, d C. And a T and T s
network operations. So at this point, our c A has
a strong foundation to create a new division of its
company just for broadcasting, and that is how another iconic
brand you know and love is born. It's NBC and
that three tone chime is so recognizable. It really is
(24:58):
fun fact that was actually the first audio trademark in
the United States. It was registered in nineteen fifty. That's
really cool and it's kind of a local tie in
for US. As we've mentioned before, we do record bisiography
here in Atlanta, and that three tone chime actually came
from NBC affiliate WUSB here in Atlanta. An executive at
(25:18):
NBC's headquarters in New York tuned in to hear a
Georgia Tech football game and the local producers here decided
they were going to use it. He heard it and
loved it, called back down to the station on Monday
and said, hey, can we use it nationally? And they
said sure, and that is how it came to be.
It feels like that story is just a little piece
of all of the interconnectedness that is the story of
(25:40):
our c A. R c A is the company that
kicks off NBC. That was in the mid nineteen twenties,
before World War Two, before the Great Depression, but our
CIA for the next twenty to thirty years is an
iconic company that is growing. They are ahead of the curve, innovating,
(26:02):
inventing new technologies, um and creating a whole bunch of
iconic products and brands. And the ones that they didn't create,
they intersected with in some way they owned them, or
they were bought by them, or there were just so
many intersections they were hard to miss. We'll get into
all the innovations, inventions and intersections of our CIA and
(26:25):
the rest of the world right after this. So, as
we said, it was when r c A announced the
creation of this new division for broadcasting called the National
Broadcasting Company, known to us now as NBC. Now, of
course it wasn't television at the time, it was radio.
(26:48):
But it's also I think important to note that it
was not fully owned by r c A. Even at
the very beginning. It was their idea. It was fully
credited really to David Sarnoff and his um brilliant and
deal making and forward thinkingness. But remember, first of all,
he was still four years from even being president of
the company. But also um he was a dealmaker. And
(27:10):
so NBC comes together with our CIA as the majority owner,
but also their parent company g E has a big
share and Westinghouse, which was really a competitor to g
also has a share and that relationship ge Westinghouse r
c A was pretty fraught throughout the years UM and
(27:30):
caused some issues with the government and uh, you know,
monopolies and all of that, which did impact our CIA
but really would take us four more episodes I think
of phisography to fully delve into, right, lots of legalities there, Yeah,
absolutely so. As the twenties move on, our ci A
continues its growth and in r c A gets into
(27:53):
consumer electronics for the first time. They purchase the Victor
Talking Machine Company. I love that name talking machine, the
Victor Talking Machine. It sounds very old timy, it does. Uh.
They were, of course, at the time, the world's largest
manufacturer of phonographs, including the famous victrola and phonograph records.
(28:14):
That word phonograph also has sort of gone to the
dust heap of history. Like if you if you ask
a gen z or what a phonograph is, you ask
a millennial what a phonograph is. It's listen, folks, Basically,
it's a record player. It's a record player with like
a big horny thing. Yeah, the big the big right exactly. Um,
The deal to buy the Victor Talking Machine Company also
(28:36):
was a deal put together by David Sarnoff, and in
that deal they also got a majority ownership in a
related company, the Japan Victor Company, which you may remember
because in the US it was also somewhat iconic and
that we called it j VC. Wow. Wow, another three
(28:56):
letter brand that was big and it's kind of gone.
And I also think if you ask most people, even
those who knew JVC myself included that it stood for
Japan Victor Company, I would not have known that. Yeah,
I had JVC cassettes, the video cassettes like lined up
on my you know, bookshelf, and I never knew what
(29:17):
JVC stood for. Who cared right? Right? It was a
good VHS tape there he count exactly. Uh So, finally
David Sarnoff takes over as the president of our c A.
I feel like the way we're telling the story that
was inevitable. Probably didn't feel that way to him, right,
Definitely not, because he sat under the shadow of some
of these presidents for over a decade, never could get
(29:38):
there right. Uh, But he was a hard worker, he persevered,
and uh he was there waiting for his his turn
and it came in and I don't know that we're
going to really get through the rest of his entire career,
but essentially he ran the company until for the rest
of his life. Essentially his son took over at some
point further down the road. I think Robert Sarnoff I
(30:00):
believe was his son who took over much later. But
he stayed on and was on the board and all
of that, and was really working until the year before
he died, which was I think in the early nineteen seventies. Yeah.
So in any case, back in the thirties, Uh, he
takes over, David Sarnoff does as president, and then in
one continuing down that consumer Electronics road r CIA begins
(30:23):
to sell the first electronic turntable, so you know, the
Victor La the phonograph. Now really gets into the turntable era.
And this is all because of the invention and innovation
of our ci A. They sort of fixed the technology,
made it better, created this new stylist that made the
quality of record playing so much better, and that that
(30:45):
became the standard and stayed the standard for a long
time for the entire industry. Basically copied what they did. Yeah,
exactly now. We mentioned um that the intersection of Westinghouse
and GE and our ci A was a little bit
fraught legally speaking, and that started to come to ahead
in the early nineteen thirties. UM so much in fact,
that r c A was um sort of forced out
(31:09):
onto its own essentially, does that make sense, sort of
thrown out of the nest of G E and right.
The government came in said, go get your own house. Ye,
stay in here anymore. Right, it was too much of
a monopoly, and so GE was not really allowed to
keep them anymore. So r c A in the nineties
becomes its own company and GE is no longer attached.
In three, and this is more of the intersection part
(31:32):
that I kind of love. Three thirty Rockefeller Plaza in
New York becomes the r c A building. It's the
headquarters back then of both r c A and NBC.
I think everybody who watches television knows about thirty Rockefeller Plaza, right,
kind of Yeah, of course you do, right, I think
so pretty iconic. Yeah, I think everybody knows. And NBC
(31:55):
is still there to this day at thirty Rockefeller Plaza
and r c A was actually the primary investor in
the building itself when it began in nine thirty and
in fact, David Rockefeller cites our CIA's action investing in
the project as being responsible for the salvation of the project.
It had some financial difficulties, So our Cia is the
(32:15):
reason that building is there. The iconic Rockefeller Plaza in
New York City that people go to as tourists would
not exist, is what we're saying here. If it wasn't
for our CI, a a brand that you have all
but forgotten about. Yeah, I mean that gives me chills.
They continue on with their growth and their success, and
of course radio is giving way at this point in
(32:37):
history to television. Television technology is starting to um advance
and in a demonstrates an all electronic black and white
television system. I like that. It's a system at the
New York World's Fair. And they also developed the first
ever television test pattern. Yes to the old school the
(33:01):
I mean we probably mostly know them as the colored bars.
They were black and white and gray back then. But yeah,
that pattern made by r c A. Yeah, interesting to
note for the kiddies who are probably not listening yet,
but maybe well in a few years that TV was
not when it started, it turned off. It turned off
at midnight in a lot of places, little national anthem
played a little flag waving, and then the test pattern
(33:23):
came on and thank you. R C A. R C
A is what you slept to probably many days back
when you were a kid. Also, the first television broadcast
aired at that same New York World's Fair, and it
was introduced by David Sarnoff himself. It was only seen
in the New York area because there was only one
station and only about a thousand people saw it on
(33:44):
the two d TV sets that existed in New York
at the time. And I will say I tried to
do some research on this part. Nobody knows how many
TV sets there are, but let's just think about how
many millions of people in New York. Most households have
at least two. It's just crazy to think there were
only two TV sets in New York City at a time. Yeah,
I think we need some some tweets on this one.
(34:05):
First of all, I gotta ask you, Nick, how many
TV sets in your house? Oh, in my house alone,
we've got probably five. But you have a lot of people,
do you have a lot of people? But we've Yeah,
we've got one in each bedroom, one in the living room.
Yeah yeah, yeah. I live alone, and I want to
say I have three. Yeah, and that doesn't include the
computer screens on which I can watch television and remind
you folks, this is only like a generation ago. Yeah,
(34:29):
that's it. Yeah. Yeah. Also, I love the little fun
fact you found about the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Yeah,
nineteen thirty nine, at this little bitty station with a
couple of thousand people watching, was the first time that
Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade was aired on television, and it
has been on TV ever since, which is crazy. Eighty
(34:51):
years crazy to think about that. A couple of years later,
one commercial television officially begins. Our c A quickly becomes
the market leader manufactured TV sets because remember they're in
the consumer electronics business, and NBC becomes the first television
network in the United States. Fun fact on that front,
the first official paid TV advertisement broadcast by any U
(35:14):
S station was for the watch manufacturer Boliva. That's really cool.
Right before a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball game. What my brain
hurts all of these intersections alright, So, then on October twelve, three,
after some trouble with the FCC once again in this
(35:36):
whole era of you know, our C A and G
E and everybody being too big and dominating markets. Uh,
the FCC says, NBC now is too big, and it
has been operating with essentially two divisions, NBC Red, which
is its traditional commercial radio at the time primarily, and
NBC Blue, which is it's sort of non commercial radio,
(35:57):
kind of like a private version of NPR. It's a
valid example. And the FCC now says, uh, you can't
do that. You're too big. You've got to sell one
or the other. We don't care which one. Well, obviously
they're going to keep the one that makes them money,
which would be the commercial station, NBC Red. And so
they decide, as I said in October of ninety three,
to get rid of NBC Blue and sell it off.
(36:18):
So they sell it to a candy maker, a candy
guy TV. Okay, yeah, this was a guy named Edward
no Ball. He was a candy magnate, and he bought
NBC Blue for eight million dollars in and renamed it
the Blue Network. It's not that creative, that's true. It's
(36:39):
really nice. Took what was given to them. Okay, Yeah, Um,
the Blue Network changed its name in ninety six to
the American Broadcasting Company. That's that other iconic television company
we know so well, ABC. What Okay, So basically what
you're saying is r C A made NBC and kind
(36:59):
of by default ABC as well. Right, Yeah, two of
the biggest TV networks in the country. Right, And you've
got to tell everybody because you did this homework what
Edward Noble is really famous for. Edward Noble got all
of his money to buy the Blue Network from founding
the Life Savers Company. So the next time you've got
ABC on the television and you're eating Life Savers, Edward
(37:21):
Noble spirit is smiling down upon you. Yeah. Absolutely, So
he didn't invent Life Savers. He was actually a chocolate manufacturer,
but he um bought the invention of life Savers from
another guy. And I also love the fact that Life
Savers were created as a quote summer candy unquote because well,
you know, they didn't melt, right. That's the whole point
that Edward Noble got involved is he couldn't sell much
(37:43):
chocolate in the summer. People didn't want it to melted.
He would something that didn't melt and boom, so cool
love that. Um. Alright, So meanwhile, NBC retains what was
the Red network. They dropped the red part and it
just is NBC and it stays NBC, and it stays
under our c A ownership into the nineties, all the
way until Night six. So before we get to the eighties,
we have to stick with our original timeline, and the
(38:06):
sale of NBC Blue was in the early nineteen forties.
That gets us right into the World War two era.
I think it's fair to say that a lot went
on with r c A during those years, but it
was mostly around wartime technology, and so we'll kind of
let that go. Somebody else can cover that in their podcast, uh,
and look at sort of what was going on in
(38:28):
the nineteen fifties and beyond. So in the early nineteen fifties,
r c A had a lot of success in the
television world, doing a better job than anybody else with
color TV technology. Of course, up to that point, television
had been all black and white, and the television sets
were made to handle black and white transmissions. The new
(38:49):
color TV technology that everybody else was coming up with
required people to buy a new TV set, But our
CIA came up with technology that would work with existing
black and white sets or new color TV sets, and
that is why they sort of became the standard. And
r c A televisions became the hot consumer electronic item.
And that is why I remember having them, because they
(39:10):
were the hot TV all the way through the eighties. Also,
because of their proficiency in color technology, they became the
professional video camera and studio gear company. Also, so all
the big TV stations that we're making shows, we're using
r c A technology, i e. You means CBS and ABC,
the biggest competitors of NBC. Dang, dang, double dang. That
(39:33):
is exactly right. Yeah, So that's what really the fifties
was doing. Again, this is all under the umbrella of
David Sarnoff during his presidency of the company, and that
gets us all the way into the nineteen sixties. In
nineteen sixty five, David Sarnoff's son, Robert Sarnoff, takes over
the company and it is that era that starts to
(39:54):
be the beginning of the end of r c A
because Robert just wasn't the visionary that his father was.
Uh In the nineteen sixties, r CIA gets into mainframe
computers but doesn't do it well. Um, they get into
home computers and don't do it well. Uh. And they
invest a lot of money in various technologies that essentially
just are not first and not best. That brings us
(40:17):
to a philosophy for the company of our ci A
to just sort of grow by buying up other companies,
which is sort of perfect for our story because we
keep telling you how they intersected with all these other brands.
Well in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies, they did
it essentially by buying them. In that era, they bought
companies like Hurts, Rental cars, Yeah, Banquet Foods, which they
(40:42):
then later sold to ConAgra. They owned Random House Publishing
for about I think fifteen years. They owned Cornet Carpeting.
They owned a greeting card company, Gibson Greeting Cards, which
you've probably seen. So that was all just our c
A trying to become a massive conglomerate, but without that
sort of focus on broadcasting and broadcasting technology that they
(41:02):
had had before. Right, So that gets us kind of
close to the extinction event that caused our c A
ultimately to completely go away right way to bring back
our dinosaur reference. I like it. Yeah, we started the
episode talking about how our CIA was kind of like
the dinosaurs in that they were huge, they were everywhere,
and then they vanished. So up next we'll talk about
(41:23):
what happened, where did they go? What was their meteor?
So we got to take this dinosaur analogy all the
way to the end of our episode because we started
out by saying, you know, for me, as a kid
growing up in the nine eighties, our CIA seemed to
(41:43):
be everywhere, and then you know, I got into my
life and I looked up a few years later and
no more our c A and I never really understood
what happened. But the truth is they really started dying
in the nine seventies. I just wasn't aware of it
yet because it hadn't really hit the consumer market, the
debt right, and so it was really in nineteen seventy
five when things started going terribly wrong. Now by this point,
(42:05):
David Sarnoff has been dead for four years. Robert Sarnoff,
his son, has been uh at the Helm for about
ten years, and he's just pretty much done everything wrong,
so much so that he gets ousted in nineteen seventy
five in a boardroom coup led by a guy named
Anthony Conrad, who became the new company president. Well, Conrad
resigns less than a year later, admitting that he failed
(42:28):
to file some income tax returns for like, I don't know,
half a decade. Oh, that's so bad. And then the
guy right that takes over for him, a guy named
Edgar Griffith's proofs so unpopular they make him retire in
early nine. Yeah, so basically they're picking one loser after
the next. Um. The final guy was a guy named
Thornton Bradshaw, who was the final president of our c
(42:49):
A and pretty much took them to the end. Um,
I don't even know. Can you do that gracefully? Quietly?
Maybe quietly without scandal. We'll give him credit for that
without scandal. So in that era, essentially what's happening is
they've had a lot of failures. All those companies that
we were mentioning that they bought towards the end of
(43:10):
the sixth season in the early seventies, they sort of
bought and sold, maybe made a few bucks on or
lost some money on, but all the inventions that they
went after and tried, they just spent millions on research
and development that weren't straight into the garbage essentially, right
the main fame computers failed, They had a video game
console that failed. They had a version of a CD
that came out way too late and totally got crushed
(43:31):
by eight tracks, So they lost hundreds of billions of dollars.
In the seventies and eighties, right now, they had a
couple of pieces of business, a couple lines of business
that we're doing well. Um. One of them was our
ci A Records, for example, that that was doing pretty well,
but it wasn't massive financial success, but it was solid.
The real rock star, though, was NBC. NBC was crushing
(43:55):
it in those days, and media on the whole was
a really popular thing to be invested in. I mean
that was in the era you think about it in
the seventies and the eighties is the early era of cable.
It's when CNN is starting to come up and some
of those other So investing in television and media in
general is a popular thing to do at that time.
I feel like we need some like Dent Denta re
(44:16):
entering the picture is the ones parent company g e
oh g's gonna swoop in and save a little brother, right,
They're gonna come in and save the day. Except they didn't.
They didn't really care about the brand r c A.
But GE does finally come in ten years after the
meteor shower essentially began. They come in in and they
(44:41):
buy back essentially r c A, except they really just
bought it because they wanted NBC. It's like buying the
box of cracker Jack just to get the prize and
throwing out all of the delicious caramel corn. That's a
that's a great example. At the bottom. It's right, you
buy the cereal to get the prize at the bottom
of the box. That's exactly it. So they buy back
(45:03):
our CIA and just begin selling off all of the
r c A assets. I mentioned our ci A music
that got sold to b MG, and that's essentially who
owns it to this day. Um and a lot of
it either just was sold off or just shut down altogether.
And little by little the pieces that were our CIA
began to fade from the consumer market. So where our
(45:24):
c A, t v s where everything, They stopped being manufactured,
and you know, people still had them in their homes,
which is why in the eighties I didn't know that
Our Cia was gone really because we didn't need a
new TV yet. It wasn't until you needed a new
TV and you went out to go buy one and
you realize some other brands had taken over. Remember Zenith
Zenith TV that was the same time period also gone,
(45:46):
also completely disappeared. Yeah, in any case, it really is
an interesting phenomenon because this was a company that sort
of came out of a government conspiracy, grew because of
the genius and you know, visionary thinking of one man
essentially in the team that he built, and then when
he was no longer there to to you know, to
(46:08):
shepherd the company in the right direction, it floundered and disappeared, right.
I will say though, it's almost like, you know, we
have the bones of dinosaurs. Now we don't still have
them around, but we can still have a an inkling
of what they were like. In the same way, the
r C A brand name still exists mostly internationally, but
it's like other companies that have contracted with companies. Nothing
(46:30):
Our Cia is our Cia. It's made by other people,
but the brand name still exists on certain things out there. Yeah,
I think the most sort of famous part of our
CIA that is still out there that people sort of go,
oh yeah if you say it to them, is our
CIA Records. It's the music label, um because they won,
you know, awards over the years that various artists that
were signed to our Cia Records were Grammy winners and
(46:51):
all of that. So there is some recognition of our
record label. But I agree with you, I think beyond that,
it's not here, it's not in the u US, and
and to your point, it's just licensed. At this point,
there is no company called our CI. There's just the
brand name that's licensed out to other parts of the world.
Would be really weird to go to another country and
see like an r C A TV, right, It's almost
(47:12):
kind of like that that hit of nostalgia a little
bit probably to see an r C A TV set.
I can't imagine a r C A flat screen, especially
because the logo, even the licensed out logo that exists
in the world, is still the very nine seventies looking Yeah,
so I guess you know, the question really becomes kind
(47:32):
of company that is created out of a government conspiracy
that sort of isn't really created out of innovation and
genius and brilliance, but rather out of a desire to
keep technology from another country. Can that really ever be
a true icon and a successful you know, I don't know,
a successful brand. And I feel like the answer is
(47:54):
sort of maybe, because if they had brought another visionary
in place after David Sarnoff, and if they had cemented
in their uh, you know, their paperwork how the business
was to be run going forward, maybe the company would
still exist and be relevant. But they sort of lost
it. It It turned from a from a government conspiracy company
into a one man show sort of company. Very much
(48:17):
was David Sarnoff's ship under his command, and he did
a great job. But yeah, losing that that that head
person who has, like you said, who is a visionary
like that, who has that kind of foresight and forethought
to be into broadcast media decades before it happened. It's
a big loss to a company when you lose someone
like that. Yeah, we didn't really get into it, but
this is a guy who in like the early nineteen sixties,
(48:39):
um basically predicted the Internet. Yeah he did, And I
mean he was just really that good, uh and and
that forward thinking. It is really fascinating to see somebody
like that, uh and imagine what our world would be
like had they not done what they did right and
for what it's worth. In his time, r c A
was an iconic brand, absolutely, and that why I wanted
(49:00):
to tell the story. And I think that's almost why
I wanted to do this whole series like this, like
the fact that we have dug through all of these
company histories. Now we're, you know, intour. I think that
this is what our ninth or tenth episode, and I
feel like we've kind of gotten down to the layer.
You know, if we're instead of paleontologists, if were like archaeologists,
and we're digging down into deeper layers. You know, this
(49:20):
is the kind of story that is in the desk
heap of history, as we like to say in our opening.
But yet it does have value and it is worth
knowing because it is so impactful to all of these
other companies and all of these technologies that we use
to this day. Right, the brand itself may not be
iconic anymore, but it has led to so many other
icons we still deal with on a day to day basis. Right,
(49:43):
it's a foundational brand, um and you know, GE is
having its own troubles, right, now, so who knows where
they will end up and when we might not know
their name anymore. Be another episode of Bisography in a
couple of years. It might just. On that note, I
think we should wrap it up. That is our show
for today. We'll see next time. Physiography is produced by
(50:04):
the I Heart Podcast Network. I'm your host Dana Barrett.
My co host is Nick Bean, our producer is Torri Harrison,
and our executive producer is Jonathan Strickland. Have questions I
want to give us feedback or have a company you'd
like us to cover. Email us at info at physiography
dot Show, or contact us on social. I'm at the
Danta Barrett on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or just search
(50:26):
for me on LinkedIn. Thanks for your support.
Bizography with Dana Barrett News
Hosts And Creators
Dana Barrett
Nick Bean
Show Links
About BizographyRSSPopular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.