A PHOTO HISTORY OF RCA'S GOLDEN YEARS IN CAMDEN
Pioneering The Technology of Music and TV
By Hoag Levins
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March, 2009
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CAMDEN, N.J. -- Standing as the central landmark of this city since the early years of the twentieth century, the "Nipper Building" is also a monument to Camden's crucial role in the development of the modern music, radio and television business. The structure's tower is emblazoned on all four sides with gigantic stained glass windows showing the brand icon of the RCA Victor Company. Also known as RCA Building 17, it was once the center of an industrial complex as large as a small city. And what went on there for nearly a century dramatically changed our world in several ways.
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In this ramshackle workshop at 108 N. Front street in 1896, 29-year-old machinist Eldridge Johnson invented the spring mechanism that made recorded music a commercially viable possibility. By 1900 he was manufacturing recorded music on the flat disks we would come to know as "records." And by the next year, after prevailing in a series of grueling legal battles over the product, he started the Victor Talking Machine Company here. Its first hand-cranked music machine, bearing the "His Master's Voice" Nipper logo, is pictured above, right.
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With its business exploding, Victor Talking Machine quickly moved into this factory building (above, left) on Front Street just off Cooper. By 1910 the company was an industrial colossus sprawling across Camden's downtown. The "Nipper" tower was built to instantly become an icon of the company as well as the city. As shown in this 1917 magazine cover painting (above, right), it was the most visually striking landmark along a waterfront that was then the gateway to the city in an era before river bridges existed.
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The early years of recorded music used recording and playback devices powered by springs rather than electricity. There was no such thing as a microphone. Instead, musicians played up close to a large sound horn that was connected to a needle that converted vibrations into grooved patterns on a master disk. The disk was then used to stamp out records played on hand-cranked home Victorolas that converted the groove patterns back into audible sound. Above, right, is the Victor Talking Machine orchestra recording a song in Camden in 1916.
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In 1929 the Victor Talking Machine Company was purchased by the Radio Corporation of America, a New York firm that had, in the previous ten years, done for the development of commercially viable radio what Victor had done for recorded music. The merger quickly made Camden a leading center in the new broadcast medium. Along with record players, the waterfront RCA-Victor complex became the world's largest manufacturers of radio sets.
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RCA's Camden facilities played a major role in the development of the technology that would eclipse radio as the most revolutionary medium: television. In 1933 an experimental TV station in Camden broadcast a moving picture image to a prototype TV set in Collingswood. After World War II, Camden became a major world center for the manufacture of both consumer TV sets and the equipment needed to operate TV broadcast studios. And in 1969 RCA literally took Camden to the moon. When Neil Armstrong and Edward "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr., became the first human beings to set foot on the moon, they communicated with each other as well as the rest of the world through backpack radio systems built at RCA's Camden facility.
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All Rights Reserved © 2009, Hoag Levins
HoagL@earthlink.net
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