Transistor Radio Brand Names - What's Up?

[Celt]

Originally Posted by mhardy6647

Fukuin = Pioneer

Hey! No cussin'!

[Charlie]

Another observation regarding transistor radio name brands-- many of them had names such as automobiles of the time...

Oldsmobile Jetstar-88
Oldsmobile Starfire
Mercury Comet
Mercury Meteor
Ford Galaxie
Plymouth Satellite
Chevrolet Nova

Both American cars and the race for space were major influences back then. Apparently, small transistor radios were seen as being the latest and greatest cool thing to have... so they got the "really cool" name brands.

Funny to think... I wonder what name brand would have been stuck on today's ipod... had it been invented back in 1960.

A little off topic... I find it interesting that both JVC and RCA used "His Master's Voice" with their brand names. On a related note, the label on my old Victrola shows the little nipper dog listening to the speaker, and under the dog... there is Japanese script.

[CUlater]

From the history section of the www.jvc.com website: "JVC was established in Yokohama, Japan in 1927 as the Japanese subsidiary of the U.S. firm, Victor Talking Machine Company. "

From Wikipedia: "The Victor Talking Machine Company (1901 - 1929) was an American corporation, the leading American producer of phonographs and phonograph records and one of the leading phonograph companies in the world at the time.

The company was incorporated in Camden, New Jersey on October 3, 1901 by Eldridge R. Johnson. It was created by merger and reorganization of two existing companies: The US division of Emile Berliner's Berliner Gramophone Company, which produced disc records, and Johnson's Consolidated Talking Machine Company, which produced machines for playing disc records. The European division of Gramophone remained as a separate company.
...
There is some controversy as to how the name came about. Fred Barnum gives various possible origins of the "Victor" name; he writes in "'His Master's Voice' In America," "One story claims that Johnson considered his first improved Gramophone to be both a scientific and business 'victory.' A second account is that Johnson emerged as the 'Victor' from the lengthy and costly patent litigations involving Berliner and Seaman. A third story is that Johnson's partner..., Leon Douglass, derived the word from his wife's name 'Victoria.' Finally, a fourth story is that Johnson took the name from the popular 'Victor' bicycle, which he had admired for its superior engineering. Of these four accounts the first two are the most generally accepted."

Victor had the rights in the United States and Latin America to use the famous trademark of the dog Nipper listening to an early disc phonograph.
...
In 1928, Johnson sold his controlling interest in Victor to the banking firm of Siegelman & Spyer, who in 1929 sold to the Radio Corporation of America, which then became known as the Radio-Victor Division of the Radio Corporation of America later RCA Victor.
...
The Japanese Victor Company (JVC), founded in 1927, severed its ties to RCA Victor at the start of World War II, and is still one of the oldest and most successful Japanese record labels as well as an electronics giant."

So there you have it - JVC and RCA were parent and child, estranged by the war...sounds kinda like the 60s, eh?