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How RCA Victor sold Sound Service to classrooms in 1939
First Published: 05/07/26
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 shortage of typewriters during World War II
The Poster
Today, we will explore the following poster:
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:
[the March 6, 1939 edition of LIFE magazine](https://books.google.com/books?id=lU0EAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
)
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:
Victor Talking Machine Company
seemed to have taken place on March 15, 1929
Rochester Evening Journal and the Post Express&pg=PA22#v=onepage&q&f=false)
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:
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.
the Wall Street crash of October 1929
Lecture notes from UH's Digital History
RCA underwent a 5:1 stock split
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.
While I do not have any concrete evidence, I imagine that the goal of
"Radio in Education" was to open a new revenue channel (schools) while
consumer radio spending was cratering. In the poster, RCA Victor is
marketing a program called "Sound Service for Schools" to modernize
education across American schools. They are marketing several products
for this. One of these is the "School Sound System" that can be used to
direct announcements, educational radio programs, latest news, recorded
lessons, emergency evacuation, and music. Then there is the "Recorder"
that seems to be used for helping improve students' pronunciation of
languages, and helps in replaying talks from prominent speakers only to
be later replayed in classrooms. In a localized-classroom setting, it
seemed to have the use of streaming plays, dramas, etc. too. A few pages
earlier in the same LIFE magazine, I read that:
In doing research for this blog, I read about
American Indian boarding schools
- so the "in appreciation of the white man's culture" part is certainly
unsettling.
American Indian boarding schools
As you might have imagined, there are a lot of parallels between this
and the internet in the education wave. Just like RCA, MOOCs (Coursera,
Khan Academy, MIT OCW, and Stanford Online) let a kid anywhere access
lectures from the best professors in real-time, no longer limited by
what's available locally. Both waves bundled hardware and
infrastructure, like Chromebooks and Raspberry Pi kits, with a promise
of modernization. And finally, both seemed to arrive against the
backdrop of a broader consumer technology boom.
The poster refers to a "Victor catalog" that seemed to be used
for selecting the records. I was able to dig through one of these on the
Internet Archive, titled "Complete Catalog of Victor Records for 1939-1940". Here is what it has to say about Sound Service for Schools:
Complete Catalog of Victor Records for 1939-1940
To the best of my understanding, the booklet "RCA Victor Sound Service
for Schools" is a lost artifact. I found RCA's above vision to be
fascinating - i.e., them trying to reinvent every field through the lens
of music. In the entire catalog, I saw no mention of lectures from
famous professors or scientists of that time, political speeches meant
to inspire students, people from different countries speaking about
their cultures and languages, or athletes/coaches discussing ways to
hone students' plays. Note that I am not discounting the fact that such
a recording was nonexistent. In fact, through initiatives such as the
Smithsonian's "The World Is Yours", we know that such programs existed
and flourished. Nevertheless, RCA Victor's catalog did not seem keen on
promoting any such activity. I strongly suspect two reasons for this.
First, this was meant to be a pure "records" catalog rather than a media
catalog, and second, music has always been an evergreen commercial
commodity with high reusability, whereas lectures and speeches can fade
quickly.
While researching the above, I stumbled across
ERPI Classroom Films, which later on went on to become Encyclopædia Britannica Films. From
its Wikipedia page:
Their entire catalog, with links to certain videos,
is available on Wikipedia. It's amazing how we as mankind have a knack for reinventing and
refining older problems in new, unique ways - all the while evolving how
a new generation interacts with and perceives its surroundings. I do
wonder how someone would describe today's "AI in Education" era a
century later! And that's it, folks! I will end this research dive with
a 1936 ERPI Classroom Film describing the Solar System.