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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Oeconomicus who wrote (33277)	4/23/2005 7:56:26 PM
From: Lady Lurksalot	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

R. D., I guess for the "GE corporate handshake," you woulda hafta of seen it. <g> Re the NBC three-tone note, I cheated and googled. old-time.com - Holly

To: Oeconomicus who wrote (33277)	4/23/2005 9:23:23 PM
From: Jagfan	Respond to of 90947

The famous 3-note NBC chimes came about after several years of trying different musical note combinations. The three note combination (G-E-C; not related at all to RCA's original stockholder General Electric) came from WSB in Atlanta which used it for its own purposes until one day someone at NBC in New York heard the WSB version of the notes during a networked broadcast of a Georgia Tech football game and asked permission to use it on the national network. NBC started to use the 3 notes in 1931, and it was the first ever audio trademark to be accepted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. An alternate jingle was also used that went E-G-C-C, known as "the fourth chime" and used during wartime (especially in the wake of the Pearl Harbor bombing) and other disasters. The NBC chimes were mechanized in 1932; their purpose was to send a low level signal of constant amplitude that would be heard by the various switching stations manned by NBC and AT&T engineers, and thus used as a system cue for switching different stations between the Red and Blue network feeds. Because of fears of offending commercial sponsors by cutting their programs off in mid-sentence, the mechanized chimes were always rung by an announcer pushing a button; they were never set to an automatic timer, although heavy discussions on the subject were held between the Engineering and Programming departments throughout the 1930s and 1940s.