RCA was born because the US Navy feared British control of radio
After the First World War, American naval officers worried that a British-linked company would dominate transatlantic wireless. Their solution was to press General Electric into buying American Marconi. That 1919 deal created the Radio Corporation of America, a firm that would launch NBC, champion colour television and end up as a licensed brand name.
American Marconi, a subsidiary set up in 1899 to hold Guglielmo Marconi's patents in the United States and Cuba, had become the country's leading radio company after absorbing the bankrupt United Wireless in 1912. Most of its shares, though, were foreign-owned. When the war ended, Congress refused the Navy peacetime control of radio, and officers grew alarmed that GE's powerful Alexanderson alternators, which outperformed spark-gap transmitters across the Atlantic, were about to be sold mostly to Marconi.
In April 1919 two naval officers, Bullard and Hooper, sat down with GE president Owen D. Young and proposed that GE buy American Marconi instead. Young agreed, and on November 20, 1919, the Radio Corporation of America came into being, with officers required to be US citizens. Patent swaps followed with AT&T, United Fruit and Westinghouse, which held key Armstrong and Fessenden patents. RCA was, in effect, a patent trust until an antitrust settlement made it independent in 1932.
Technology soon upended the founding logic. RCA opened a giant Radio Central site on Long Island in 1921, but Westinghouse engineer Frank Conrad showed in 1924 that a modest shortwave transmitter in East Pittsburgh could be heard in London by a receiver using a curtain rod as its aerial. The costly alternators that had justified RCA's creation became obsolete. The company pivoted, founding NBC in 1926 as the first nationwide radio network and pushing broadcast television, including colour.
David Sarnoff, general manager from the start and president from 1930 to 1965, became the face of RCA. Decline set in as it tried to become a sprawling conglomerate, lost heavily on mainframe computers and the CED videodisc, and faced Sony, Philips and others. GE bought it back in 1986; Jack Welch kept NBC and sold off most of the rest. RCA survives as a trademark owned by Sony Music Entertainment and Vantiva.
Source: RCA Corporation
