How RCA Victor sold Sound Service to classrooms in 1939

If you like this blog post, do subscribe to my RSS feed First Published: 05/07/26 Dr. Eve: ..... Every Main Street is an aurora. Woman: Wait, you don't mean neon signs? Dr. Eve: Exactly. Woman: Oh, you're joking! Dr. Eve: No, I was never more serious. Do you know how a neon sign works? Woman: No, I haven't the slightest idea. How do they work? Dr. Eve: Neon signs are glass tubes filled with neon gas, a very rare element at low pressure. An electrical charge shot through the tube causes the glass to glow. Woman: Oh, but Dr. Eve, what has an eye-blinding red sign on Main Street got to do with the beautiful soft Northern Lights? Now really. Dr. Eve: Just this. The Northern Lights are caused by practically the same action. - “The World Is Yours” radio episode from 1937 explaining Northern Lights.

Welcome again to the fourth blog in my retro poster collection series. In the past, we have explored quite a few diverse posters - from Navitrainers, which were among the earliest flight simulators, to Addressographs and the shortage of typewriters during World War II. This is quite possibly one of the last times I'll be covering posters bought from what used to be my local bookstore, Reader's Corner, as in 2025 I moved from Raleigh, NC, to the Puget Sound region. There are not many local bookstores near where I live. While we have Half Price Books nearby, I've yet to find any interesting retro posters there.

The Poster

Today, we will explore the following poster:

Figure 1: My poster of the RCA Victor Sound Service for Schools advertisement from LIFE magazine, March 6, 1939.

Just like our past ones, this one too is cut out from a copy of LIFE magazine. Particularly, it belongs to the March 6, 1939 edition of LIFE magazine. As the bold embellishment at the bottom indicates, this advertisement is sponsored by RCA (Radio Corporation of America) Victor. Encyclopædia Britannica describes RCA's history as follows:

RCA was founded as Radio Corporation of America by the General Electric Company in 1919 to acquire Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America (incorporated in 1899). A subsidiary of a British-owned company, Marconi Wireless at that time was the only company capable of handling commercial transatlantic radio communications, and General Electric took it over with the assistance of the U.S. Navy Department, which was eager to keep the technology in American hands. For the following 50 years the company was led by David Sarnoff, who built the company into a modern communications conglomerate.

RCA, Victor Talking Machine Company, and the Great Depression

RCA Victor became its consumer-oriented brand, which originated from a merger with the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1929. While the merger seemed to have taken place on March 15, 1929, speculation about the merger was flying in 1928 too. Here is a stub written by the Associated Press and published in the "Rochester Evening Journal and the Post Express" on December 15th, 1928:

Radio Merger Seen Near ..... Merger of Radio Corporation of America and Victor Talking Machine Company was believed near completion today. It would join companies valued at the close of 1927 at $116,000,000. The general plan of the merger was said to have been worked out, but pending the settlement of minor details announcement was withheld.

The merger of Victor Talking Machine with Radio would be the most important of several steps the R.C.A has taken in its entry into the general “amusement” field. Radio controls the National Broadcasting Company, R.C.A. Photophone, Inc., and is allied with the Radio-Keith-Albee-Orpheum Corporation. It has contracts with Victor and Brunswick-Balke-Collender Company for years.

Victor's contracts with many musical artists would make them available for sound pictures and broadcasting under R.C.A. management.

RCA gained control of the Victor Talking Machine Company through an "exchange of shares" for $54 million (likely a stock swap; the actual cash value of the deal is a bit murky and so I am citing Hagley's findings). Post-merger, an article from the December 1929 edition of Radio Broadcast succinctly describes the landscape and RCA's focus points:

New Company Formed to Manufacture and Sell All RCA Home-Entertainment Apparatus Effective January 1, 1930, all radio material in the home-entertainment field previously sold under RCA's name will be manufactured as well as sold by the RCA-Victor Corporation. Included in the new arrangements between Radio Corporation, General Electric, and Westinghouse, are radio sets, talking machines, records, and other devices in the home entertainment field. This represents a new step in the activities of the enlarged program of the RCA subsidiaries. The 20 per cent. manufacturing profit retained by General Electric and Westinghouse in the making of radio units exclusively sold by RCA will be removed and the new organization called the RCA-Victor Corporation will encompass the research, engineering, manufacturing, and selling activities which have hitherto been distributed among the constituent companies. The new company will be headed by E.E. Shumaker, now president of the Victor Talking Machine Company. ..... Speculation in the industry is now centering around the probable moves of General Electric, Westinghouse, and Western Electric.

Will the radio plants of these companies continue to make sets and appliances, to be sold under the well known trademarks of each, in open competition with the products of the new RCA-Victor corporation? Will Western Electric enter the retail field with a line of tubes and super heterodynes? One well-known figure in radio who would not be quoted remarked that in his opinion another twelvemonth would see separate radio sets (in each of which the Radio Group has strong financial interest) made and marketed by the following: General Electric, Westinghouse, Western Electric, RCA-Victor, and General Motors Radio Corporation. “This new step on RCA's part will enable them to make more sets at a lower price and get them on the market quicker than ever before,” remarked one radio observer.

Figure 2: General view of the plant of the Victor Talking Machine Division of the Radio-Victor Corporation of America. This was published in the December 1929 edition of Radio Broadcast.

As you may be aware, 1929 to 1939 marked a dark period in American history due to the Great Depression and its severe economic turmoil. The event was triggered by the Wall Street crash of October 1929, where by 1932 stocks were worth only about 20 percent of their value in the summer of 1929. Naturally, this caused a decline in consumer spending between 1929-39, which surely should have hampered RCA Victor's early ambitions. Nevertheless, the timing of the merger - a few months prior to the crash - should have been a blessing in disguise for them. RCA was the quintessential technology stock of this era, mimicking today's MANGOS and FAANG-like companies.

Lecture notes from UH's Digital History mention that on March 3rd, 1928, RCA was trading at $94, which jumped to $300 on January 1st, 1929, and was at $505 on September 3rd, 1929, only to collapse by ~96% to $17 by July of 1932. Note that, RCA underwent a 5:1 stock split sometime in early 1929, so the $17 price is likely to be pre-split.

Figure 3: Snapshot of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and various other companies from 1927 to 1932, showing the tumbling of the stock market during the crash of 1929. From UH's Digital History lecture notes.

There is a nuance though. RCA bought Victor at the absolute peak of a bubble in a stock-swap deal! So, it managed to acquire hard durable assets such as factories, contract artists, trademarks, and patents using overvalued paper money. When the bubble burst, RCA was left with tangible assets that could be used to generate revenue in the future. They also performed key business optimizations. As mentioned in the Radio Broadcast article above, the new RCA-Victor Corporation consolidated research, engineering, manufacturing, and selling into one entity. Moreover, it removed "20 per cent. manufacturing profit retained by General Electric and Westinghouse" on radio units. Therefore, owning Victor's factories let RCA manufacture in-house and stopped the 20% margin leak to its parents. All of this should have helped RCA streamline some of its operations going into the Depression.

Sound Service for Schools

Anyway, it is nearly a decade after the backdrop of this event that our poster was born - a few months prior to the outbreak of World War 2.