Three-Bar Promotional Chimes

This is an advertisement from the 1938 RCA publication LISTEN for the three-bar hand chimes sold as a promotional item.
Listen magazine

RAILROAD CHIMES
 

NBC Gives Hand Chimes To Be Used On Passenger Rail Trains

"While passengers of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Company look on, a waiter aboard the B & O Royal Blue sounds the first of the NBC chimes recently presented to the road for all its dining cars by the National Broadcasting Company. Other trains on which the chimes were placed are the B & O Columbian, like the Royal Blue a limited between New York and Washington; the limiteds operating to Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit, and the limiteds of the Alton Railroad Company, B & O Subsidary, on the Cincinati-St. Louis runs. The NBC radio trade mark, heard many times daily from coast to coast, has also been synchronized with a large clock in Rockefeller Plaza to sound the hour throughout Radio City, New York." NBC Photo

 
Promotional Chimes Sold by RCA/NBC

In 1938, a set of these promotional chimes was being used to sound the dinner call in the palatial dining room of William S. Knudsen, President of General Motors

PROMOTIONAL CHIMES
 

Schoenhut Miniature Verson of the NBC Chimes

That same year, the Schoenhut Toy Manufacturing Co. of Philadelphia, PA also produced a miniature verson of the NBC Chimes. The NBC legal department forbid Schoenhut from using the words "NBC Radio Chimes" on the box but did allow the wording "A Miniature of the Famous NBC Chimes Tuned to the Correct Notes". NBC also provided a line drawing of the NBC microphone, but would not allow the letters NBC to appear on the microphone. These toy chimes were priced to retail for thirty-five cents.

SCHOENHUT CHIMES