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Check out this beauty that I got for Christmas. Although not an actual portable, this baby is much smaller than the other desktop models that I own and only weighs four pounds and three ounces. Much less than my Zenith Beehive.

Of course it’s made of my beloved Bakelite and has the signature round corners and horizontal grooves that grace the front of many compact units of the era. The dial is a lovely rectangle that lights up to illuminate the pretty gold bands around the edges. A beautiful contrast to the rich brown of the unit.

A handy brown pointer perched atop a creamy beige background, could be turned toward any set of numbers, thereby tuning the radio to the right frequency to pick up stations broadcasting a selection of programming for the day, circa 1940. Anything from comedy, to crime drama, to musical entertainment was available for your listening pleasure.

But one of the most amazing design features of this unit, at least to me, is the name to the left of the dial, and embossed into the Bakelite. This name strikes a chord with me for two reasons. One is simply the way it is displayed, vertically not horizontally, with one letter on top of the other in a column. I love this because you don’t often see signs or vertical logos like this today.

I used to work in Burbank California and there was a drug store near the airport that advertised its name on a beautiful, vertical sign. I think it was a Rexall, but I’m not sure.

Anyway, the drug store went out of business, but when they remodeled the building. I was thrilled to see that they kept the front with the vertical sign intact. It’s a 7-Eleven now, probably the fanciest 7-Eleven in the country, at least from the outside. A touch of class that still exists, and harkens back to a more stylish, bygone era.

But back to my radio. As I said the name struck a chord with me for two reasons. The first was the vertical style. The second is the name itself. A name that changed your life, as well as mine, long before most of us were born.

A name that impacted history so deeply, our way of life is still shaped by it today.

This name is RCA Victor. Not only a key player in the birth of radio, but in the creation of network broadcasting, the gold standard of communications, at least until the arrival of the internet. Almost forgotten today, RCA was a powerhouse at the height of the radio age.

I’m not going to give you a whole history of the birth of broadcasting here and now, just the highlights. A man named Marconi invented wireless communications in the mid 1890s. You can read more about him here.

RCA came into the picture a hundred years ago in 1919. They weren’t the first radio broadcaster. According to ethw.org, several stations operated around the country at that time, but each one provided their own, independent programming. Some were still transmitting in Morse code.

After World War One, the government seized stations in the U.S. owned by foreign nationals and gave them to U.S. companies. Four of those, General Electric otherwise known as GE, Westinghouse, AT&T and United Fruit, an international shipping company, got together and set up an organization to run the stations and called it the Radio Corporation of America, or RCA.

KDKA in Pittsburgh was the first station to move beyond Morse code to provide election returns and live musical performances. The shows were a big hit and a few years later, RCA, GE and Westinghouse created a chain of stations, each located in a different area, but all broadcasting the same program at the same time.

Network programming was born and the name of this network was the National Broadcasting Corporation, or NBC. This model of broadcasting held throughout the peak of radio and the early days of television. Even the introduction of cable in the 1980s didn’t disrupt the network model. Everyone was watching the same program at the same time, as long as they lived in the same time zone of course. Even if it was a cable channel it still was a network type broadcast.

This gave us a communal experience, one that is sorely lacking today. Immediately after the show a viewer or listener could talk about the episode with others and share their likes or dislikes about the program.

Such events are still possible, but you have to remember, in the beginning there were only a handful of networks and even cable only introduced a few dozen more channels. Now with DVR’s, downloads, streaming, You Tube and blogs like this one, the number of places we can amuse ourselves is almost unlimited. An advantage in some ways, this blog wouldn’t exist without such changes, but the shared entertainment experience has taken a hit, that’s for sure.

That’s why I love traveling to yesteryear through my little RCA unit. It represents so much more than a form of entertainment that time has past by.

This particular unit has a very special nick-name. I found the model number on the bottom, 45Xl. Sounds futuristic, doesn’t it? But when I googled it I found that this radio has a link to a 20th century advertising icon. It’s not visible on this particular set, but it is on other products.

According to Wikipedia, in 1929 RCA bought the “Victor Talking Machine Company,” the largest maker of both records and phonographs at the time. Along with the company came their trademark, a painting of a dog named Nipper, looking into an Edison Bell phonograph. The artist, Francis Barraud, said the reason the dog was looking at the speaker was because he heard “his master’s voice.”

The logo was an instant hit and graced RCA products for decades.

So why am I telling you about this particular logo when it doesn’t appear on my radio? Well, it may not be visible, but its presence is felt. When I googled 45X1, up popped the true name of my special unit.

“Little Nipper!”

So, there you have it. Another Glorious piece of Vintage Stuff!