Sorry, I nearly forgot about this and the deadline for replies is close. Easter got in the way, so did other matters. ;-)
Come to think of it, I reckon you're right, I've never seen a book on the history of RCA either, and there ought to be a detailed one given the worldwide importance of the company.
It's strange that I've not given much thought about RCA's history from a broader perspective because in recent years I'd thought that some of the work in the prototype lab where I worked was pioneering enough to be documented for posterity (as far as I'm aware it's never been documented). Given RCA's enormous size and its huge product range what we did was small scale (RCA was the largest electronics company in the world at the time), but the broadcast and telecommunications products we developed were leading edge and were not only copied by other RCA divisions but also later by competitors.
Let me explain. Although I've been there I didn't work in Camden, NJ but rather for RCA Australia and I'll use that fact to segue into the little I know about RCA's demise. Unfortunately, RCA closed down its Australian operation in the 1970s as part of its reorganization/rationalization under Sarnoff's son Robert. I'm not privy to inside information as to why RCA closed down its operation here but I've heard it was a combination of reasons including that at the time the US Government was seeking to reign in foreign investment abroad in the wake of the Vietnam War and it put pressure on US companies, this neatly dovetailed into Sarnoff Jr's rationalization plans for the company.
The argument that reigning in of foreign investment never made sense to me so I assume the closure of the local operation was primarily to satisfy Sarnoff Jr's reorganization plans for RCA in the light of falling profits. By the time RCA Australia closed, I'd already left so I wasn't around during its closure. Also, for a time I'd lost contact with most of those with whom I'd worked although over the years I caught up with a few of the key players including the chief engineer (my immediate boss) at broadcasting engineering exhibitions such as SMPTE. Nevertheless, I never thought to ask them about the division's demise which I now much regret (most are now dead including my old boss whose funeral I attended several years ago).
Thus, for me, the local closure is still a matter of conjecture (it's also another reason why a well researched history of RCA is needed), but I suppose it's not surprising when we examine RCA from when Robert Sarnoff became president in 1965. It's public knowledge that by the late '60s under his leadership RCA's fortunes slowly started to change for the worse and unsurprisingly they accelerated after Sarnoff Sr was ousted as chairman in 1970. One would assume that when Sarnoff Sr died in '71 any constraints imposed on Jr by his father would have lifted and he'd been freer to pursue his reorganization. Nevertheless, it didn't work out and the company never fully returned to the good times of the '50s and '60s. Robert Sarnoff wasn't a patch on his father, he was disliked and ousted around '75 in a boardroom coup. Subsequent presidents were mediocre which led to the company's further decline.
Whilst no doubt RCA suffered from bad management under the leadership of Robert Sarnoff I believe there were also other mitigating factors that lead to its decline. From my outside perspective here in Australia I was able watch the growth of the Japanese electronics industry with perhaps a little more objectivity and I believe that not only was RCA caught out by its spectacular growth throughout the 1960s through to the mid '80s but so too were many other American companies such as Ampex. The rise of Sony, Ikegami and many other Japanese manufacturers had huge negative impact on both the manufacture of domestic televisions sets and professional television equipment, cameras etc. both here and in the US, and elsewhere, Philips for instance (I have a cousin who once worked for Philips in Eindhoven and he recounted the considerable financial difficulties Philips had with Asian competition including the piracy of some of its television designs).
That's the short version, there's more. For instance, Western manufacturers suffered from complacency and didn't easily adapt to Asian competition. There was arrogance too, I recall an incident around 1982 when a group of us was touring Silicon Valley companies, at one point we were sitting at boardroom table of computer manufacturer Sirius Systems and quizzing its CEO with questions about the company. When asked if he was concerned about competition from Japanese computer manufacturers such as NEC he absolutely pooh-poohed the very notion that there was any threat from Asian manufacturers, his reaction was such that he seemed almost insulted by the very question. I was immediately shocked at his naivety, and about two years later Sirius went belly-up. Perhaps a bad example, but you'll get the gist.
It's been a while but if I recall correctly it was 1968 when I met David Sarnoff, he came to Australia to lay the 'foundation stone' for a new record plant that was to being built in the Sydney suburb of North Ryde which is about a dozen or so miles to the west of the RCA Australia factory at Artarmon. Most of us traveled over to the site for the afternoon, we were fed lunch and Sarnoff gave us pep-talk about RCA after which he met us individually to say a few words and to shake our hands (I can clearly remember my short conversation with him). Incidentally, RCA's new record factory was just down the road from Australia's once top electronics company AWA (Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia) Ltd) [1], which made world-class telecommunications equipment, military electronics, broadcast equipment and measuring instrumentation. Unfortunately, AWA also suffered an ignominious end but no so much from competition but rather by its own hand.
At the time I met David Sarnoff I was young and not overly familiar with his background. My dislike of him grew only slowly—after I read about his ruthless business practices, unfair fights over patents—how he hounded Armstrong (in the book Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong) [2] (a copy of which I still own), and Philo Farnsworth, and his looseness with the truth such as the 'Titanic incident', also his exaggeration of RCA's early involvement in the development of television. Listening to the 'Dynamic Duo'—Zworykin and Sarnoff—praising their involvement in the development of television in the 1956 documentary The Story Of Television [3] is rather sickening, as one would never learn of the many other important people involved in the development of television and of their pioneering inventions. Zworykin and Sarnoff are on a self-aggrandisement kick and history, as always, has caught them out.
Sure, Zworykin played an early role but likely not all of his ideas about the iconoscope were original but likely those of Rosing, his teacher. Watching both the 1956 doco and the earlier 1939 Word's Fair one [4], one would never learn of the importance of people like Willoughby Smith (of photoelectric fame), Tihanyi, Rosing, Nipkow, Farnsworth, J. J. Thompson (of CRT fame), and Isaac Shoenberg and his famous Marconi-EMI team including Alan Blumlein—those who developed most of the essential electronic circuits for modern television systems (they essentially developed the electronic 405-line television system from scratch, all RCA had to do was to adopt it to the 525-line US system). Moreover, the BBC went live with television in 1936 which was three years before RCA even demonstrated its television. Even the Nazis broadcast the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games on television!
And that's just the short list: many contributed, even now-obscure people like William Eccles and Wilfred Jordan who invented the flip-flop (multivibrator) circuit around 1918 are an essential part of the development of television, their Eccles-Jordan circuit as it's known today was an essential part of mid-to-late 20th Century television electronics, it was used in the critical scanning and sync lock circuits essential for modern TV systems, and in many other electronic circuits (oscilloscope triggers for instance).
What's so annoying about Sarnoff is both his arrogance and his attempt to rewrite history. Sure, RCA did develop great technologies such as the image orthicon (a truly remarkable device but nevertheless an evolution of earlier tech) and the shadow mask color tube, and much, much more, but much of it was after much of the early pioneering work had already been done. Essentially, at no time did Sarnoff give credit to any of these earlier television pioneers but also he effectively went out of his way to write them out of history.
Whilst I am very glad to have worked for RCA and I am forever thankful for the valuable experience I gained whilst working there, I nevertheless consider Sarnoff dishonest and his behavior impertinent, insulting and offensive.
This post is close to its text limit, if I've time and I can beat the timeout then I'll post some info about the products that we produced at RCA Australia and why they are an important, albeit small, part of RCA's history.
At the time I had applied for two position in the electronics industry and both were in the television, and as both my applications had been successful I had to decide which one to take. The other position was closer to home but I chose RCA because I thought I would gain more experience working there. This, I reckon, was one of the best decisions I've ever made, working for RCA turned out to be an extremely rewarding experience as it cemented much of the type of work that I would be involved in through a significant part of my career. From RCA I went on to work in the engineering side of television broadcasting, and much later in my career I was involved in setting standards for industrial television systems for use in surveillance applications for a well-known international organization. The requirements were such that standards had to incorporate both encryption and authentication (the stakes were high and authentication a critical aspect of the tech). I was also involved in the early days of FM broadcasting in Australia, this work not only involved FM engineering but also politics (convincing government to introduce a new broadcasting service wasn't easy and not for the fainthearted but the dedicated work of many individuals made it possible and Australia's FM service first commenced in December 1974—this being the 50th anniversary year). My background working with RCA helped equip me for this task.
RCA Australia manufactured a range of electronic products including domestic stuff such as Hi-Fi amplifiers but its primary focus was on professional broadcasting and telecommunications products of the type broadly classifiable as line, terminal and distribution equipment as used by telcos, broadcasting stations and program production companies. For example, audio line equipment such as sound distribution amplifiers (SDAs), video processing equipment—video clamping and video distribution amplifiers (VDAs) and the like. Other work included setting up and maintaining imported film equipment (for telecine), studio television cameras, broadcast quality monitors (all usually of RCA manufacture), RCA Australia even had manufactured high powered television broadcast antennae for local consumption (those were the days when no one gave a moment's thought to them being plated in bright cadmium).
One of the huge advantages of working for RCA Australia was that I got to work with a very broad range of electronics and related equipment. One of the statements that Sarnoff makes in the The Story Of Television with which I wholeheartedly agree is that television brings together a very broad range of technologies, to quote "...I marvel at their accomplishment [referring to RCA researchers] bringing into focus the principles of radio, optics, electronics, photography and chemistry so that they might all work together to make color television practical..." To give him credit where credit's due it's a damn good summary of the technologies involved in television engineering although I'd have added physics (given that a good understanding of fundamental physics is necessary to design, say, image orthicon and vidicon camera tubes or shadow-mask color picture tubes), also one had to have a good understanding of advanced color theory such as CIE 1931 color space parameters (a brief look at the RCA Electro-optics Handbook will attest to this https://www.amazon.com/RCA-Electro-Optics-Handbook-Author/dp...).
I think perhaps the best way to illustrate why I believe RCA Australia ought to rate in any detailed history of RCA is the high performance of its professional products. Let me cite an example. The VDA (video distribution amplifier) type TA-100B was a solid state video amplifier with both bridging and matching input options and five outputs. It offered adjustable gain together with a plug-in cable equalizer module (which could be changed for optimal performance depending on the type of coaxial cable used), it was made in very large quantities at the Artarmon plant in Sydney and was used by both the common-carrier telco and by television stations, primarily the national broadcaster the ABC (then known as the Australian Broadcasting Commission). I knew one of the principal engineers at the ABC, Neville Thiele, and he kindly sent me copies of manuals written by him on pulse-and-bar video testing. Neville was a brilliant engineer, he was just as at home when designing television IF amplifiers (which he did at EMI) or when designing loudspeaker enclosures. He was also a very nice and helpful fellow (and it was through RCA that I'd gotten to know him).
Even by today's standards, the baseband performance of the TA-100B video amplifier for PAL, NTSC etc. would be considered very good but for its time of 50+ years ago its performance was exceptional. It had a differential phase and gain performance on 10 MHz T pulse-and-bar, modulated saw-tooth and other test signals of less than 0.1% which was around the limit of measurement of the differential phase and gain test equipment used at that time (today, a top baseband VDA should reach around 0.03%).
I recall seeing a test setup where a TA-100B launched a high speed 10 MHz T pulse-and-bar test signal from the equipment test bench at the Artarmon plant into the telco's coaxial feed which was received by Sydney's Test Room (the telco's main switching hub), which was about 10 miles away, the test signal was then rerouted to Melbourne via the then new intercity coaxial cable—a distance of about 545 miles (877kms), in Melbourne's Test Room it was then looped and rerouted back to Sydney's Test Room via the coax thence back to us at Artarmon—a total distance of well over 1000 miles. (Incidentally, back then the only telco in Australia was the Government's Postmaster General's Department which was responsible for all communications (telephone lines, spectrum management etc.))
I have a figure in my head for the number of VDAs used in the loop but I cannot guarantee its accuracy so I won't mention it but it was many hundreds. The outgoing feed and the received loop signal were fed into a Tektronix 465 dual channel oscilloscope on the test bench (which incidentally used RCA-designed Nuvistors in its input amplifiers), the two signals were then superimposed over each other using delayed sweep. What I saw almost defied belief, the T pulses when expanded and superimposed over each other appeared almost as one single trace albeit with a slightly fussy appearance caused by noise (the noise only increased the trace thickness by about half as much again (perhaps it was a just a whisker more—I wish I'd had a photo of the 465's screen that would have documented the event). Keep in mind the pulse-and-bar test signal wasn't the lower performance 5 MHz 2T pulse but the full T/10 MHz one. As far as I am aware, this exceptional performance was never published in journals and I only wish I had more information about the test (I wasn't responsible for setting up the test, after all back then I was the youngest and most inexperienced member of the prototype lab team).
Incidentally, the TA-100B VDA was designed by an engineer who left to work in the US just before I joined RCA but the chief engineer to whom I reported was quite brilliant especially in the area of filter design. BTW, the TA-100B used a very low impedance totem pole-type output stage which fed into an array of 75-ohm resistors to define its output impedance, this was quite novel for the time. I could say much more about this device and the work of the prototype lab [1] in general but unfortunately there's not the time nor space.
One final point, I was informed that after RCA Australia closed that RCA Switzerland continued to make the TA-100B. Sometime later a Canadian company whose name I've temporarily forgotten made a copy of the VDA (I've no idea whether it was made under license or just reverse-engineered). About a decade later I was visiting AVE (Australian video Engineering), a manufacturer based in Sydney that began operation after RCA Australia had closed, and the company's chief engineer showed me their VDA together with a copy of its circuit diagram, they also informed me that they'd based their design on one that originated in Canada. I instantly recognized it for what it was—an almost identical copy of RCA's original TA-100B albeit with a different circuit board design and mechanical construction! He was somewhat taken aback that I already knew so much about its operation and of its background. Right, the design that originated in the RCA prototype lab in Sydney had returned home after traveling full circle.
Finally, I can only repeat that I was very privileged to work at RCA Australia but it was just sheer good luck and happenstance that I landed the job when I did.
It would be good if anyone knows more about the history of RCA Australia and of say the test results of the equipment that was designed there, and or engineering details of the Sydney-Melbourne coaxial cable. I again failed to ask my former boss for these details before he died, that now is a matter of great regret. Incidentally, I still possess a handbook for the TA-100B, it includes a description of its operation together with a circuit diagram and complete parts list.
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[1] There was one important aspect about RCA's prototype lab that I forgot to mention. Its windows looked out and across the nearby railway line directly towards Channel 9's television tower. From the windows we had an excellent view of the antenna's radiating panels which meant the RF levels from the TV channel were exceptionally strong within the lab. Thus, breadboard and bird's nest type mock-ups of prototypes suffered considerable interference to the extent of it being common to see directly-demodulated TV video complete with TV sync block appearing within these circuits.
This was both a curse and a blessing. We became quite expert at suppressing and or eliminating the RF interference altogether from our designs. Ferrite beads and various other RF suppression methods came to the rescue. Our lab environment not only forced us to harden our designs against the direct injection of RF but also we paid particular attention to mains-borne interference including mains hum. It was commonplace to see ferrite beads on transistor leads and such, the beads also eliminated high frequency parasitics that were occasionally troublesome. In essence, the lab's poor and inadequate RF environment forced RCA Australia to build better products.
Come to think of it, I reckon you're right, I've never seen a book on the history of RCA either, and there ought to be a detailed one given the worldwide importance of the company.
It's strange that I've not given much thought about RCA's history from a broader perspective because in recent years I'd thought that some of the work in the prototype lab where I worked was pioneering enough to be documented for posterity (as far as I'm aware it's never been documented). Given RCA's enormous size and its huge product range what we did was small scale (RCA was the largest electronics company in the world at the time), but the broadcast and telecommunications products we developed were leading edge and were not only copied by other RCA divisions but also later by competitors.
Let me explain. Although I've been there I didn't work in Camden, NJ but rather for RCA Australia and I'll use that fact to segue into the little I know about RCA's demise. Unfortunately, RCA closed down its Australian operation in the 1970s as part of its reorganization/rationalization under Sarnoff's son Robert. I'm not privy to inside information as to why RCA closed down its operation here but I've heard it was a combination of reasons including that at the time the US Government was seeking to reign in foreign investment abroad in the wake of the Vietnam War and it put pressure on US companies, this neatly dovetailed into Sarnoff Jr's rationalization plans for the company.
The argument that reigning in of foreign investment never made sense to me so I assume the closure of the local operation was primarily to satisfy Sarnoff Jr's reorganization plans for RCA in the light of falling profits. By the time RCA Australia closed, I'd already left so I wasn't around during its closure. Also, for a time I'd lost contact with most of those with whom I'd worked although over the years I caught up with a few of the key players including the chief engineer (my immediate boss) at broadcasting engineering exhibitions such as SMPTE. Nevertheless, I never thought to ask them about the division's demise which I now much regret (most are now dead including my old boss whose funeral I attended several years ago).
Thus, for me, the local closure is still a matter of conjecture (it's also another reason why a well researched history of RCA is needed), but I suppose it's not surprising when we examine RCA from when Robert Sarnoff became president in 1965. It's public knowledge that by the late '60s under his leadership RCA's fortunes slowly started to change for the worse and unsurprisingly they accelerated after Sarnoff Sr was ousted as chairman in 1970. One would assume that when Sarnoff Sr died in '71 any constraints imposed on Jr by his father would have lifted and he'd been freer to pursue his reorganization. Nevertheless, it didn't work out and the company never fully returned to the good times of the '50s and '60s. Robert Sarnoff wasn't a patch on his father, he was disliked and ousted around '75 in a boardroom coup. Subsequent presidents were mediocre which led to the company's further decline.
Whilst no doubt RCA suffered from bad management under the leadership of Robert Sarnoff I believe there were also other mitigating factors that lead to its decline. From my outside perspective here in Australia I was able watch the growth of the Japanese electronics industry with perhaps a little more objectivity and I believe that not only was RCA caught out by its spectacular growth throughout the 1960s through to the mid '80s but so too were many other American companies such as Ampex. The rise of Sony, Ikegami and many other Japanese manufacturers had huge negative impact on both the manufacture of domestic televisions sets and professional television equipment, cameras etc. both here and in the US, and elsewhere, Philips for instance (I have a cousin who once worked for Philips in Eindhoven and he recounted the considerable financial difficulties Philips had with Asian competition including the piracy of some of its television designs).
That's the short version, there's more. For instance, Western manufacturers suffered from complacency and didn't easily adapt to Asian competition. There was arrogance too, I recall an incident around 1982 when a group of us was touring Silicon Valley companies, at one point we were sitting at boardroom table of computer manufacturer Sirius Systems and quizzing its CEO with questions about the company. When asked if he was concerned about competition from Japanese computer manufacturers such as NEC he absolutely pooh-poohed the very notion that there was any threat from Asian manufacturers, his reaction was such that he seemed almost insulted by the very question. I was immediately shocked at his naivety, and about two years later Sirius went belly-up. Perhaps a bad example, but you'll get the gist.
It's been a while but if I recall correctly it was 1968 when I met David Sarnoff, he came to Australia to lay the 'foundation stone' for a new record plant that was to being built in the Sydney suburb of North Ryde which is about a dozen or so miles to the west of the RCA Australia factory at Artarmon. Most of us traveled over to the site for the afternoon, we were fed lunch and Sarnoff gave us pep-talk about RCA after which he met us individually to say a few words and to shake our hands (I can clearly remember my short conversation with him). Incidentally, RCA's new record factory was just down the road from Australia's once top electronics company AWA (Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia) Ltd) [1], which made world-class telecommunications equipment, military electronics, broadcast equipment and measuring instrumentation. Unfortunately, AWA also suffered an ignominious end but no so much from competition but rather by its own hand.
At the time I met David Sarnoff I was young and not overly familiar with his background. My dislike of him grew only slowly—after I read about his ruthless business practices, unfair fights over patents—how he hounded Armstrong (in the book Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong) [2] (a copy of which I still own), and Philo Farnsworth, and his looseness with the truth such as the 'Titanic incident', also his exaggeration of RCA's early involvement in the development of television. Listening to the 'Dynamic Duo'—Zworykin and Sarnoff—praising their involvement in the development of television in the 1956 documentary The Story Of Television [3] is rather sickening, as one would never learn of the many other important people involved in the development of television and of their pioneering inventions. Zworykin and Sarnoff are on a self-aggrandisement kick and history, as always, has caught them out.
Sure, Zworykin played an early role but likely not all of his ideas about the iconoscope were original but likely those of Rosing, his teacher. Watching both the 1956 doco and the earlier 1939 Word's Fair one [4], one would never learn of the importance of people like Willoughby Smith (of photoelectric fame), Tihanyi, Rosing, Nipkow, Farnsworth, J. J. Thompson (of CRT fame), and Isaac Shoenberg and his famous Marconi-EMI team including Alan Blumlein—those who developed most of the essential electronic circuits for modern television systems (they essentially developed the electronic 405-line television system from scratch, all RCA had to do was to adopt it to the 525-line US system). Moreover, the BBC went live with television in 1936 which was three years before RCA even demonstrated its television. Even the Nazis broadcast the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games on television!
And that's just the short list: many contributed, even now-obscure people like William Eccles and Wilfred Jordan who invented the flip-flop (multivibrator) circuit around 1918 are an essential part of the development of television, their Eccles-Jordan circuit as it's known today was an essential part of mid-to-late 20th Century television electronics, it was used in the critical scanning and sync lock circuits essential for modern TV systems, and in many other electronic circuits (oscilloscope triggers for instance).
What's so annoying about Sarnoff is both his arrogance and his attempt to rewrite history. Sure, RCA did develop great technologies such as the image orthicon (a truly remarkable device but nevertheless an evolution of earlier tech) and the shadow mask color tube, and much, much more, but much of it was after much of the early pioneering work had already been done. Essentially, at no time did Sarnoff give credit to any of these earlier television pioneers but also he effectively went out of his way to write them out of history.
Whilst I am very glad to have worked for RCA and I am forever thankful for the valuable experience I gained whilst working there, I nevertheless consider Sarnoff dishonest and his behavior impertinent, insulting and offensive.
This post is close to its text limit, if I've time and I can beat the timeout then I'll post some info about the products that we produced at RCA Australia and why they are an important, albeit small, part of RCA's history.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWA_Technology_Services
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Man-High-Fidelity-Howard-Armstrong/dp...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ombUhZHddho
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y32ZxGfiXs