RCA

Unless otherwise noted, these documents came from a collection that can be tracked back to Von C. Campbell, an engineer who worked at General Electric's Cathode Ray Tube Department for nearly his entire career, from 1941 to 1982. For most of this time he was located at GE's Electronic Park in Syracuse, New York. He accumulated various internal memos, GE technical reports, and other technical papers that crossed his desk. Since GE was tightly coupled to RCA by license agreements, many RCA reports and manufacturing specs are included in this collection. There are many memos that are addressed to other employees at GE, so Campbell probably collected documents from other employees. Upon retirement, he apparently brought this documentation home.

When Von Campbell died in 2012, his document collection was put up for sale on eBay, and was bought by Ryan Hare of RCH Labs in Mound House, Nevada, just east of the capital, Carson City. RCH Labs was a start-up that planned to make audiophile-grade vacuum tubes. This document purchase was one of several that Hare made in an effort to learn about vacuum tube production. For various reasons, both technical and financial, RCH Labs failed and went bankrupt in 2016. There was an effort to resurrect the tube-making operation without Hare, but this folded in 2018.

A friend of mine, John Lawson, bought the remnants of RCH Labs, including the Von Campbell collection, as well as other books and documents purchased by RCH Labs. John gave me the documents in order sort through and evaluate them. Given both the technical and historical importance of these documents, I have been scanning the interesting ones and putting them up on my One Electron site.

Some of the RCA documents came from the H.W. Ulmer collection, and are marked with a dot (·) after the name.

- John Atwood