NBC chimes
They soon became associated with NBC programming in general, and are an early example of an "interval signal" used to help establish a broadcaster's identity with its audience.
In 1950 the NBC chimes became the first "purely audio" service mark granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
A commonly suggested explanation for the chimes' "G-E-C" sequence is that it comes from the initials of the General Electric Company (GE).
As part of an antitrust case settlement, in late 1932 GE agreed to relinquish its RCA and NBC holdings.
Because radio is sound oriented, it was a natural development for stations to independently adopt a variety of audio signatures, which in some cases took the form of chimes.
Examples existed from the earliest days of organized broadcasting, including at least three by the summer of 1923: What differentiated the NBC chimes from these earlier identifying sounds, at least in the beginning, is their use for network communications and coordination.
In 1932,[8] NBC stated that: "The purpose of the chimes... is to synchronize local station identification announcements and to serve as a cue to engineers at relay points all over the country to switch various branches of the networks on or off as the programs change every 15 minutes.
[12] Phillips Carlin was a well-known NBC announcer, who had experience employing chimes in radio broadcasts dating back to at least 1924.
At that time he was the announcer for the Silvertown Chimes program, which was broadcast over the "WEAF chain" network originating in New York City.
In late 1942 Phillips Carlin became vice president of programming at the soon-to-be independent Blue network, which later became the American Broadcasting Company (ABC).
In 1942, NBC estimated that the average listener heard the tones 16 times a day, while annually there were nearly 20 billion impressions worldwide.
[26] Ranger's creation was a music box-style electro-mechanical device, which played the three-note sequence at the push of a button.
By the mid-1980s, these dedicated devices had been replaced by a magnetic tape cartridge recording of a chimes machine that was played back as needed.
It was initially adopted as a paging method for the New York City area, summoning employees listening at home to report for work at NBC headquarters in order to assist with an important developing story.
An NBC account of its employment at the start of the "D-day" invasion on June 6, 1944, stated: "At 2:30 a.m. the network was put on 'flash' basis; the NBC four-chime-alert calling all newsmen and commentators to their microphones, key operating personnel to their stations, sounded from the newsroom control room.
[35] There were no objections raised, so on April 4, 1950[36] the three notes of the NBC chimes became an officially registered service mark.
The video network slashed the time quite a while back to give the affiliates 10 seconds instead of eight when the outlets began selling shared identifications to sponsors.The use of the chimes as a network communications signal ended around 1971, the result of automation, which in the case of radio led to shorter tones and "chirps" that were commonly filtered out by the stations so they were unheard by listeners, and in the case of television included use of the vertical blanking interval to transmit cues that were not seen by viewers.
[45] That same year the network's fans could buy their own set of chimes from NBC for $2.95 each, with the suggested uses of "Call your family to dinner .
In the 1943 MGM animated short film Who Killed Who?, the NBC chimes are heard when a mysterious killer in a heavy black cloak and hood shoots him dead with a large pistol.
