Word: zenith
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...there are clear signs of advance. Westinghouse's new washer-dryers have a hinged panel on the front so the repairman can get at the motor in a jiffy; before, it took two men just to pull the appliance away from the wall. Motorola, G.E., Admiral, RCA, Zenith are redesigning their radios and TV sets, using more transistors in place of tubes, so that they will be more rugged, last much longer...
Nevertheless, the race centers on three major companies: Manhattan's Skiatron Electronics and Television Corp., Los Angeles' International Telemeter Corp. (88% owned by Paramount Pictures), Chicago's Zenith Radio Corp.. which pioneered toll TV in 1947. All three transmit scrambled TV pictures, and the viewer decodes them by dropping coins into a box affixed to the set or by slipping a billing card into a slot...
Rebellion. Like Henry Ford, who broke the Selden pool of automotive patents in 1911 by refusing to pay royalties, Zenith President Eugene McDonald openly rebelled. In 1946 he stopped RCA royalty payments on radio tubes, filed a suit in Delaware charging an RCA conspiracy to monopolize the industry through patent control. In 1954 Zenith incorporated the original suit in a new one filed in Chicago, asking $16,056,000 in damages from RCA, Western Electric, Westinghouse, General Electric and 14 foreign electric companies. It charged that all had conspired with RCA to keep Zenith out of foreign markets through patent...
...trial from a final showdown for years, RCA in 1954 hired Lawyer Adlai Stevenson to get an injunction against U.S. District Judge Michael Igoe on the charge that he was biased. Stevenson lost in the U.S. Supreme Court. Igoe finally set the trial for last week. By that time Zenith had spent $2,000,000 on legal fees and gathering evidence and RCA $5,000,000. But the case did not come to trial, apparently because Zenith had gathered too much legal ammunition to fire...
Payoff. To settle the suit, the defendants agreed to pay Zenith ten annual installments of $1,000,000 beginning Oct. 1. More important, Zenith got royalty-free licensing rights from RCA and General Electric on black-and-white TV equipment, including tubes. It got similar rights on common-carrier communications equipment from Western Electric and the Bell System. At Philco Corp., which in 1956 filed a still pending $150 million antitrust suit against RCA involving color TV patents, nobody was talking yet. But after Zenith broke the ice, RCA's patent pool seemed to be thawing at last...