The Victor Museum has opened in Berlin, New Jersey, a few miles from Camden, where the Victor Talking Machine Company built the Victrola and, later, where RCA Victor helped define what Americans listened to and watched for most of the 20th century.
The bottom line: dozens of original machines, in original solid-wood consoles, now sit in a former office building on White Horse Pike, tracing the company from the hand-cranked turntable of the 1890s to the collapse of the RCA corporation in the 1980s.
From Camden Workbenches to the World’s Largest
Victor made phonographs, and its Victrola became the household name for the machine that played records. By the time RCA came calling, Victor was the world’s largest manufacturer of phonographs and phonograph records.
In 1929, the Radio Corporation of America bought Victor outright. The company became the RCA Victor Division of RCA, and RCA picked up the New World rights to the Nipper trademark, the dog staring into the horn that generations of listeners still recognize. RCA Records, now owned by Sony Music Entertainment, is the corporate successor of the Victor Talking Machine Company.
The two firms had been rivals before the deal: one built turntables, the other built radios. The merger, as the museum’s backers tell it, was peanut butter and chocolate, a record player and a radio packaged together inside some of the finest furniture of the day.
Investors will note the scale of what followed. RCA Victor released Elvis Presley’s Spinout soundtrack in October 1966, an album built around his 23rd film. In 1960 the label put out “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”, which hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there six consecutive weeks, selling 1.8 million copies in the U.S. Charley Pride signed with RCA Victor in the mid-1960s and released his first album, Country Charley Pride, in 1966, the start of a run that made him one of the defining country singers of the century.
Inside the Museum
The collection has a working-history pedigree. Many of the pieces came from the former RCA Heritage Program Museum at Rowan University, run mostly by retired RCA employees. Richard Reindl, an RCA engineer in Camden from 1973 to 2013, has spent his retirement maintaining historic RCA-Victor equipment.
Rowan spent $23.4 million renovating its Campbell Library, where the heritage program was based, and that renovation pushed the program out. Reindl said the university offered the group 10 to 15% of its original space. “We decided that there would be a better opportunity for us to take what we had and move it elsewhere,” he said.
Camden’s manufacturing muscle is part of the story the exhibits tell. “Camden had the largest woodworking shop on the East Coast,” Reindl said. The figure that matters for visitors is simpler: the cabinets on display are the originals, not reproductions.
The Man Behind the Brand
Graham Alexander bought the rights to the Victor Talking Machine Company name a decade ago with an ambition to bring the music industry back to Camden. The museum is his latest expansion. He has already opened the Victor Vault, a music performance venue, plus a recording studio and a record label operating under the century-old name.
“We were there for so long that we had an opportunity to expand and make a greater experience that people could be part of,” Alexander said. “They really seem to like the history of the brand. I don’t think most people know that the recording industry from the 1890s was born in Camden.”
Why It Matters Now
The museum joins a small circuit of regional collections devoted to the Victrola. The Johnson Victrola Museum in Dover, Delaware, is state-run and currently closed for renovations. Berlin’s version is the New Jersey answer, a few miles from the original factory floors.
For an ordinary reader, the appeal is tactile. The exhibits are radios and televisions in their original condition, the furniture-sized sets that once anchored a living room. The recorded legacy is harder to see but easier to hear: the same corporate line that put Presley and Pride on the charts traces back to a Camden machine shop.
Alexander’s plans run past the display cases. The Victor Vault, the studio and the label are already running, and the museum is the newest piece of an effort to rebuild a music business around a name that has been quiet for decades.
Sources
- RCA Records
- A new museum in Camden County traces the history of RCA-Victor
- The Estate of Abbe Lane: A Legacy of Glamour and Style presented by John Moran Auctioneers
- Elvis Presley’s Spinout at 60 Bob Dylan Cover – Noise11 Music News
- This Day in Rock History: November 1
- Complete List Of Charley Pride Songs From A to Z
Photo: Cliff from I now live in Arlington, VA (Outside Washington DC), USA (CC BY 2.0)
