Radio Corporation of America (RCA), for over fifty years, was one of the country's leading manufacturers and vendors of radios, phonographs, televisions, and a wide array of consumer and military electronics products. The company can trace its beginnings back to the Victor Talking Machine Company, which was incorporated in New Jersey on October 3, 1901, by Eldridge Reeves Johnson (1867-1945). Johnson was a machinist who had been a subcontractor for Emile Berliner's (1851-1929) Berliner Gramophone Company.

The company quickly became both the leading U.S. manufacturer of phonographs--the famous "Victrola," introduced in 1906--and the recorder and manufacturer of phonograph records by many of the leading musical artists of the day. However, during the 1920s, radio eclipsed the phonograph as a means of bringing popular entertainment into the home, and on March 15, 1929, the Radio Corporation of America bought control of the Victor Talking Machine Company. The Victor plants in Camden, New Jersey, and Oakland, California, were reorganized as the RCA Victor Company, Inc. at the end of 1929.

The company became the RCA Victor Divison of the RCA Manufacturing Company, Inc., in 1934 and of the Radio Corporation of America in 1942. Activities at the Camden Plant, later successively operated by the General Electric Company (which bought RCA in 1986) and the Martin Marietta Corporation, ended in 1993.