Bloomington, Indiana, and Tehran, Iran, do not immediately look like places that belong in the same technological history. One was a Midwestern college town dominated by Indiana University and a sprawling RCA factory. The other was the capital of an oil-producing monarchy trying to industrialize at extraordinary speed during the Cold War. Yet beginning in the 1940s, the two cities became tied into overlapping American systems of education, television, electronics and international communications.

The connection was not one secret project and it should not be reduced to one. What emerges instead is a remarkably durable institutional corridor. Indiana University cultivated relationships with important Iranian educators and officials. RCA turned Bloomington into one of the central manufacturing locations of American television. In Iran, an RCA franchise holder established the country’s first television service. By the 1970s, RCA companies were building Iranian communications systems extending far beyond household television, including military telegraph switching and an integrated television-radio-communications system on Kish Island.

Bloomington Before Television

RCA’s Bloomington story began before the American television boom. The company established its Bloomington manufacturing operation in 1940, and wartime production helped turn the southern Indiana plant into a major electronics facility. After the war, RCA converted increasingly toward television. Indiana’s broader RCA manufacturing system became remarkably integrated: picture tubes came from Marion, cabinets from Monticello, parts and administrative functions were concentrated around Indianapolis, and final receiver assembly took place in Bloomington. The Indiana State Museum describes Bloomington as eventually becoming the world’s largest color-television assembly plant.

Television production began there in 1949. On March 25, 1954, commercial production of RCA’s CT-100 color receiver began in Bloomington only months after the FCC approved the compatible NTSC color standard. RCA invited representatives of competing manufacturers to inspect the line and provided technical information about the receiver, because the company understood that selling color television required creating an entire national ecosystem of broadcasters, manufacturers and viewers rather than merely selling a machine.

Bloomington itself was becoming a television laboratory. Sarkes Tarzian, an Armenian-born electrical engineer, had begun manufacturing television tuners there during the 1940s and launched WTTV in November 1949. Bloomington was then the smallest American city with a television station. Indiana University quickly became involved: the university supplied programming to WTTV, and by 1954 it was experimenting with courses delivered through television.

That combination matters. Bloomington contained an RCA manufacturing plant, an unusually early television station, a university experimenting with television education, and an administration consciously constructing international relationships. It was not simply a factory town making appliances. It was becoming one of those postwar American places where electronics manufacturing, broadcasting and education were developing alongside one another.

Iran Was Already in Bloomington

The Iran connection actually predates RCA’s Bloomington television production.

On July 5, 1945, Indiana University president Herman B Wells introduced Ali Akbar Siassi at IU. The university records identify Siassi at the time as Iran’s Minister of State and Chancellor of the University of Tehran. Ten days later, IU photographers documented Siassi visiting the University School in Bloomington with Wells.

Siassi was considerably more important than a routine visiting academic. He had served as Iran’s education minister, was intimately involved with the institutional development and independence of the University of Tehran, participated in Iran’s delegation at the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations, and later served briefly as foreign minister.

Wells’s own memoir makes the Bloomington-Tehran relationship unusually concrete. Wells recalled that Siassi had been IU’s guest while leading the University of Tehran and that Siassi’s sons attended Indiana University. Wells subsequently stayed at Siassi’s home in Tehran. During that visit, Siassi arranged an audience between Wells and Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

That is the documentary connection worth using. There is no need to inflate it into a claim that members of the Pahlavi royal family studied at IU; I have not found documentation supporting that. What is demonstrable is arguably more interesting: one of Iran’s leading educators and cabinet-level political figures had a direct relationship with Bloomington, sent his sons to IU, hosted Wells in Tehran, and personally carried Wells into an audience with the Shah.

Bloomington therefore already possessed an Iranian institutional connection before the city’s television industry reached full maturity. When RCA television production exploded during the 1950s, it was occurring beside a university whose president had direct personal access to important figures in Iran’s educational and political establishment.

That does not prove coordination between IU and RCA. It does establish that the two Bloomington institutions occupied the same local environment while independently participating in the rapidly expanding American international system.

Habib Sabet and RCA’s Iranian Television Market

Iran’s television story makes the RCA connection considerably harder.

Habib Sabet was one of the most important private industrialists in Iran during the Pahlavi period. His holdings and franchises extended across machinery, automobiles, agricultural equipment, beverages and electronics. Among those commercial relationships was an RCA franchise.

According to Sabet’s biographical account preserved by Encyclopaedia Iranica, his son Iraj returned from the United States with a small closed-circuit television system. It was demonstrated for the Queen Mother, and the Shah subsequently saw it and became interested in television’s possibilities. Sabet was encouraged to establish television service in Iran.

Television Iran began broadcasting in Tehran in 1958. Unlike the later national television system, it began as a private commercial enterprise. Encyclopaedia Iranica describes the station as American-managed, with Americans involved in training Iranian personnel. Roughly half of the programming consisted of imported American serials and films, while locally produced material borrowed extensively from Western television formats. Sabet’s RCA franchise gave the enterprise another important advantage: he could sell the receivers needed to create an audience for the broadcasts his company was transmitting.

That business model is extraordinarily revealing. Television was not simply a broadcasting operation. The station created demand for television sets; the television sets created an audience for programming; programming created an advertising market; advertising encouraged consumer purchases; and expanding consumer demand justified additional broadcasting infrastructure.

It was a vertically reinforcing system.

The first regional television station opened in Abadan in 1960, where an unusually prosperous oil-industry population provided precisely the sort of consumer audience advertisers wanted. Iranica explicitly notes that early commercial television helped spread a Western-oriented consumer culture in Iran.

This is the point at which Bloomington becomes especially intriguing. At essentially the same historical moment that Habib Sabet was building an RCA television market in Iran, RCA’s Indiana system was producing picture tubes in Marion, components and management functions around Indianapolis, cabinets in Monticello and complete televisions in Bloomington.

I still would not write that Sabet’s Iranian RCA receivers were manufactured in Bloomington unless we locate export records, serial-number documentation, shipping manifests or RCA corporate records saying so. The evidence presently establishes the two ends of the organization but not that individual shipment.

That distinction actually makes a better historical question: where were the RCA receivers sold by Sabet in Iran manufactured?

Bloomington is an obvious place to look.

Television Becomes State Infrastructure

Iran’s television system did not remain a private RCA-centered operation indefinitely. Mohammad Reza Shah formally inaugurated National Iranian Television in March 1967, and in 1971 National Iranian Radio and Television was created to administer the expanding national broadcast system. By the late 1970s, Iranian television infrastructure had spread through most of the country’s urban areas and large villages.

That later system should not simply be called an RCA network. Iran bought technology from multiple Western suppliers and adopted broadcasting decisions that were not identical to the American television system. The important continuity is broader: the Pahlavi state increasingly treated electronic communication as infrastructure.

RCA was still very much part of that environment, but increasingly through communications technology rather than merely consumer television.

The documentary evidence here becomes particularly strong.

On April 16, 1974, RCA Globcom Disc entered into a contract with the Imperial Iranian Supreme Commander’s Staff’s Military Switching Project Office. The later Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal record describes the agreement as the purchase of switching equipment for automatic telegraphic services in Iran, together with installation and related services. When the revolution disrupted the arrangement, the contract became part of the subsequent legal dispute between RCA entities and the Islamic Republic.

This is no longer a household television story.

RCA had moved from supplying technology associated with Iran’s consumer-media revolution into communications infrastructure used by the Iranian military.

An RCA corporate engineering history from the same period provides another telling detail. RCA Service Company’s overseas activities included operating a calibration facility supporting the Iranian Air Force. The same corporate division was active globally in military electronics, communications networks, radar support and broadcasting infrastructure.

Seen from that angle, the RCA logo appearing on an Iranian television receiver and RCA equipment appearing inside Iranian military communications systems were not unrelated historical curiosities. They were different divisions of a corporation whose technological capabilities stretched from the living room to telecommunications switching, satellites, radar and defense electronics.

Kish Island: The Entire System in Miniature

Then comes Kish Island.

In 1975, RCA Government Systems began work on a large telecommunications project on Kish, the Persian Gulf island the Shah’s government was developing as an international resort. RCA’s own historical account says the company designed, supplied and installed a radio and television production center, cable-television distribution for 3,500 color receivers, three FM stereo stations, a two-way radio network and a computerized cash-register system.

Kish deserves far more attention in this history because it demonstrates what television had become by the mid-1970s. RCA was no longer merely selling a box that displayed moving pictures. It could build the studio, distribute the television signal, create the radio network, connect mobile communications and integrate computerized commercial systems.

The resort itself became an electronic environment.

That makes Kish almost a miniature version of the Pahlavi modernization program: tourism, telecommunications, television, radio, computerized commerce and international capital packaged into one deliberately modern landscape.

It also takes us directly back to Bloomington.

The Bloomington plant represented the earlier industrial logic of television: assemble millions of complicated physical receivers and put a screen into the household. Kish represented the later systems logic: connect thousands of those screens to an engineered information environment.

RCA participated in both.

Bloomington Was More Than the Factory

This is why Indiana University should remain in the article rather than being treated as an unrelated Bloomington footnote.

Herman B Wells consciously transformed IU from a provincial Midwestern institution into an internationally oriented university. IU established foreign-student programs, built area and language studies and participated in technical-assistance projects abroad. Siassi’s 1945 visit occurred right at the beginning of that transformation.

At almost exactly the same time, television was becoming part of Bloomington’s identity. WTTV began broadcasting in 1949. IU began experimenting with televised education. RCA started producing television receivers. A decade later an RCA franchise holder was establishing Iran’s first commercial television service. Meanwhile Wells’s Iranian relationship had matured to the point that a former Bloomington visitor could host him in Tehran and arrange his meeting with the Shah.

None of this demonstrates a secret IU-RCA program for Iran.

It shows something historically more useful: the same small American city contained both the industrial machinery and the international educational relationships associated with the postwar export of American technological modernity.

Bloomington produced screens, engineers, broadcasters, students and international academic relationships. Tehran was simultaneously absorbing foreign technical expertise, consumer electronics, university exchange, broadcasting practices and increasingly sophisticated communications systems.

Those are two sides of the same Cold War history.

From a Television Set to a Communications State

The usual history of RCA in Bloomington ends with American consumer electronics. Workers assembled televisions, families bought them, Japanese competition intensified, the American television-manufacturing industry declined, and eventually the enormous Bloomington factory closed.

The Iranian side makes that story look different.

The television set was only the visible endpoint of a much larger communications architecture.

Iran’s first commercial television operator held the RCA franchise. American personnel helped train Iranian television workers. RCA receivers helped create the audience for commercial broadcasting. The national government subsequently turned television into state infrastructure. RCA companies later provided military telegraphic switching, Iranian Air Force technical support and an integrated communications environment on Kish Island.

And sitting behind the American end of that story was Bloomington, where RCA had built one of the great television-manufacturing centers of the twentieth century while Indiana University was simultaneously cultivating relationships reaching directly into Iran’s educational establishment and ultimately to the Shah himself.

The archival question left hanging over the whole story is therefore extremely specific.

Were the RCA televisions that helped introduce mass television to Iran actually Bloomington televisions?

We cannot say that yet.

But now we know exactly where the missing piece is. Sabet’s company records, Iranian customs documents, RCA export records, model numbers and surviving Iranian RCA sets could potentially establish the manufacturing origin. If those receivers trace back to Bloomington, then the Bloomington–Tehran circuit stops being merely institutional and becomes physical: Indiana-built machines sitting in Iranian homes while an RCA-backed broadcasting enterprise taught a country how to watch television.

Even without that final shipping record, the larger history is already there. From Siassi standing beside Herman B Wells in Bloomington in 1945, to Sabet’s RCA-backed television operation in Tehran in 1958, to RCA military communications in 1974 and the electronically wired landscape of Kish Island in 1975, RCA and Iran were connected for decades.

Bloomington belongs inside that history.