RCA’s beginnings wind through the creation and development of two other well-known companies - General Electric and Westinghouse Electric. It started with one man’s passion for electricity.
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Elihu Thomson was born in England in 1853. He grew up in Massachusetts. Even in high school, was aware of the possibilities electricity held for the future. As a student he wrote, “There is scarcely a day passing on which some new use for electricity is not discovered. It seems destined to become at some future time the means of obtaining light, heat, and mechanical force.”
Educated in science, Thomson became a professor at Philadelphia’s Central High School. In 1880, he and fellow science professor Edwin Houston established Thomson-Houston company, selling arc lamp systems. With their initial success they expanded into new markets, purchasing Sawyer & Man Electric Co. in 1886. They made incandescent lamps using the Sawyer-Man patents.
Over time, they built a leading electrical company of the nineteenth century. In 1889, after German physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz publicly released his initial work with electro-magnetic waves, Thomson addressed their use for signaling through fog or and solid bodies where light could not penetrate. At the time, Thomas Edison preferred direct current technology, and considered alternate current too dangerous. Thomson disagreed. It was his experiments with alternating current that led to it becoming the U.S. standard. In fact, Elihu Thomson’s system was lighting streets in Kansas City, Missouri six months before Thomas Edison opened his first power station in New York.
By 1890, Edison’s company, Edison General, and Thomson-Houston were two of the big three in the American lighting industry which also included Westinghouse Electric Co. In 1892, John Pierpont Morgan, who financed such enterprises as Federal Steel Company and Carnegie Steel Company, engineered a merger between the Edison interests and Thomson-Houston. He named the new company General Electric.
In his five-decade career, Elihu Thomson received 696 U.S. patents on numerous electrical inventions, including arc lights, generators, electric welding machines, and x-ray tubes. He even created a practical method for measuring the electrical consumption of homes and businesses, the wattmeter.
During World War II, in order to keep radio patents under American control, General Electric was asked to take the lead in organizing an American radio company. GE agreed, and the Radio Corporation of America was formed in October 1919. Though originally meant to merge the interests of both private corporations and the government for the development of wireless communication, RCA soon moved in a new direction. They entered the world of consumer electronics.
Within six years, RCA’s consumer radio sales were bringing in ten times the revenue “wireless technology” generated.
Westinghouse, an RCA manufacturer, became the first commercial broadcaster in 1920. Their station KDKA aired results of the Harding-Cox presidential election. RCA aired the world heavyweight boxing championship by the next summer. This ushered in a new era of technology in homes around the country.
