Company
DissolvedRCA
New York · 1919 – 1986
General Electric bought RCA in 1986 and broke it apart. The trademark lives on under license. The company does not.
The Radio Corporation of America was created in 1919, at the urging of the United States Navy, to keep British Marconi from controlling American long-distance radio. General Electric, Westinghouse, and AT&T put their radio patents in. David Sarnoff made it a broadcaster and a manufacturer.
RCA built radios, then television sets, ran NBC, and pressed records. It was a factory for receivers and a factory for what the receivers played. Both employed people the nineteenth century could not have named.
New rooms, new jobs
Engineers designed circuits. Line workers assembled cabinets. Announcers, musicians, and the technicians who ran a live studio were on a payroll that existed because a network needed a schedule. Sarnoff's company sold the set and filled it. The manufacturing was in Camden and Bloomington and other plants. The glamour was in New York. They were one firm, which is why a strike in a cabinet plant could embarrass a broadcast.
Bought and broken up
General Electric reacquired RCA in 1986 and dismantled it. NBC went one way, the consumer electronics brand another, the records another. The RCA trademark is still licensed onto televisions the original company does not make. The 1919 corporation ended with the breakup. The occupations it assembled, from studio engineer to line worker, scattered into other employers.
The work it organized
- Radio assembler
- Studio engineer
- Announcer
- Patent lawyer
On the timeline
Related
- General ElectricReorganized