What’s fascinating to me about the RCA ads is that many of them are not advertisements for electron microscopes or esoteric research devices… they’re apparently advertisements for television receivers, going to a general audience. But rather than talk about televisions, the approach seems to be to talk about some great research work they’ve been doing at the company, and then say at the very end that since they’re doing all this amazing stuff, they clearly make the best television receivers.
I’ve seen quite a few of these sorts of ads from that era; it’s interesting to see how companies were very much interested in telling potential customers for consumer products about the great new scientific and industrial things they were inventing (or during the war, devices for the military they were developing), describing how they were clearly at the forefront of modern technology even if the products they were selling to consumers weren’t obviously so. They’re from an era where companies had major labs that did major research, and, if these ads are taken as an indication, were very proud of them.
Outside of perhaps ads for ASIMO, I’m not sure that this is quite so prevalent now.
