RCA's research laboratories produced innovative technologies
especially during the 1970s and helped advance computers, integrated circuits,
lasers, and other devices. It introduced innovative products like the
45-rpm record and the solid-state television camera. Even some of the
company's minor innovations were very successful, such as an RCA connector
jack found on many types of audio equipment. This donation represents
several early items of that period of innovation.
The RCA/David Sarnoff Research Center background information
has now become quite popular in that it is historically significant. Information
regarding this is mentioned here as a quick reference.
Research laboratories, from the time
of Thomas Edison's "invention factory" at Menlo Park to the
present day, have been the driving force behind progress in electrical
engineering. One of the longest-lived and most important corporate research
laboratories in the electrical engineering field began its life in late
1942 in Princeton, New Jersey. That year, the leaders of the Radio Corporation
of America decided to concentrate their research and development activities
in a new facility built near Princeton University. The location was close
to RCA's main manufacturing facilities at Camden and Harrison, New Jersey,
and its corporate headquarters in New York City. Launched in the midst
of World War II, the RCA Laboratories staff naturally turned to war-related
work almost immediately. Over the next few years, engineers developed
improved radar antennas, radar-jamming systems, and acoustical depth charges
to combat enemy submarines, all the while continuing to improve their
newly developed system of electronic television.
After the war, RCA was able to attract
government funding for military research and development, and also to
invest more of the company's own profits back into basic research. The
research staff in the 1950s, now about double its wartime size, led in
the development of a variety of new technologies such as color television,
high-fidelity phonographs and tape recorders, transistors, lasers, computers,
integrated circuits, advanced vacuum tubes, and one of the first commercial
videodisc players.
The facility was renamed the David
Sarnoff Laboratories in 1951 to honor the founder of RCA. After RCA was
purchased by the General Electric Corporation in 1986, Sarnoff Laboratories
was renamed Sarnoff Corporation and became a subsidiary to SRI International,
the non-profit company that was once the research institute of Stanford
University in California.
Courtesy < http://www.ieee-virtual-museum.org
> 6.22.2008
For general reference only. The National
Museum of American History and the
Smithsonian Institution make no claims as to the accuracy or completeness
of this reference.
NMAH
Catalog Number 1984.0120.01 thru .03
