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A museum about the RCA-Victor company has opened in Berlin, New Jersey, just a few miles from where the stereo and TV equipment maker was born in Camden.
The Victor Museum, tracing the company from the birth of the Victrola hand-cranked turntable in the 1890s to the collapse of the RCA corporation in the 1980s, has opened in a former office building on White Horse Pike.
It is the latest expansion for entrepreneur Graham Alexander, who bought the rights to the Victor Talking Machine Company name a decade ago with an ambition to bring the music industry back to Camden. Alexander has already opened the Victor Vault, a music performance venue, a recording studio and a record label using the century-old brand 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,” he 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.”
Victor and RCA were once rival companies on the consumer technology front, one making turntables and the other making radios. In 1929 they merged, like peanut butter and chocolate, to make home stereo units with a record player and a radio packaged together inside some of the finest furniture of its day.
Dozens of original Victrola players, radios and televisions in their original solid-wood consoles are on display in the Victor Museum.
“Camden had the largest woodworking shop on the East Coast,” said Richard Reindl, a former engineer for RCA in Camden from 1973 to 2013.
Reindl has spent his retirement maintaining historic RCA-Victor equipment. Many of the pieces in the Victor Museum came from the former RCA Heritage Program Museum at Rowan University, run mostly by retired RCA employees, including Reindl.
Recently, the university spent $23.4 million to renovate its Campbell Library, where the RCA Heritage Program was based. That renovation pushed the program out.
“They asked us if we would be willing to downsize our facility. They said that we could have 10 to 15% of what they originally had allotted to us to present the museum,” Reindl said. “We decided that there would be a better opportunity for us to take what we had and move it elsewhere.”
Reindl and his colleagues moved their collection to the Victor Museum in Berlin. It is one of three regional museums focused on the local history of Victrolas: The Johnson Victrola Museum in Dover, Delaware, is run by the state of Delaware and currently closed for renovations, and the Sarnoff Collection housed at The College of New Jersey in Ewing.
