If you’re familiar with Albany, you know Nipper. You know his cute, curious posture. You know he lives as a statue atop a warehouse building and he’s maybe the closest thing we have to a city icon. (Besides, maybe, a tulip? The brutalist silhouette of Empire State Plaza? Mozz sticks and melba? I don’t know.)

You might also recognize him as the longtime mascot for Radio Corporation of America (RCA). After digging into his history, I additionally suggest we regard Nipper as a hero of the rise and fall of US optimism and innovation in the 20th century. Too grand? Maybe, but you decide!

Nipper was a real dog — a terrier who allegedly got his name because he nipped at people’s heels and ankles, which sounds like a nuisance to me but we can still assume this dog was well-loved. After the end of Nipper’s life, Liverpoolian Francis Barraud created a painting in 1898 which depicted the dog listening curiously to a recording of his original owner, Francis’ late brother Mark.

Barraud had hopes of selling this painting to the Edison phonograph company to use in their promotional images. They declined. But luckily, Gramophone was interested instead, and Barraud revised the painting accordingly to match the brand and strike the deal. Not long after, the trademark went to Victor, which was then acquired by RCA in 1929.

Over the decades, RCA grew to industry giants with consumer radios, and later led the way for color TVs. Nipper’s image in “His Master’s Voice” became one of the most successful trademarks of all time. Nipper showed up in print, on packaging, and seemingly everywhere even throughout the changing technology landscape. If you now search Etsy and eBay, you’ll find Nipper ephemera that give a peek at how widespread his image remained for a long time.

Nipper even lived for a time in Walt Disney World. When Space Mountain opened in 1975, RCA was the original sponsor. Somewhere near the entrance to this indoor coaster, a Nipper statue rotated in a flying saucer, welcoming guests to outer space. (Apparently, there aren’t really photos of this Nipper in his prime.)

Even after RCA relinquished sponsorship of Space Mountain to FedEx in 1993, Nipper morphed into a robot dog. It actually blew my mind to realize that the robot dog at the ride’s exit was a skinned Nipper, but his tilted head is unmistakable. (Is it the same dog from the saucer? A different one? I haven’t found a consistent answer, especially because there was also an audio animatronic robot dog in the 1990s. But I like to think of it as the very same.)

Meanwhile, it seemed Nipper was not connecting very well in advertising with modern 1990s kids. So RCA introduced Chipper the puppy to do cool stuff like skydive and skateboard and deliver quips in ad copy. Also notable (at least to me) is that the ‘90s ads for RCA seemed to emphasize ease-of-use of VCR technology at a time when new gadgets may have started feeling unwieldy to consumers. Nipper and Chipper became stand-ins for us dummies at home who couldn’t figure out how to program a VCR.

RCA still exists as more of brand name owned by other companies, since the corporation itself didn’t survive the shifting landscape of consumer electronics. Nipper remains sort of well-known, and sort of not. There are currently nods to Nipper and Chipper throughout the RCA website, plus a whole page dedicated to their histories.

As for the statue in Albany, our Nipper is one of a few remaining. There used to be more, and there is also one in Bristol and one in Baltimore. Albany’s Nipper is the largest at nearly 30 feet high, sitting atop a former distribution warehouse. This building is just sorta hanging there, and it has exactly one Google review which only exemplifies the sad state of affairs that have befallen our giant dog.

Francis Barraud (and Nipper) do have a memorial plaque in London. And besides the antiques and resales for Nipper items, Wayfair and other retailers sell new little Nipper statues. Our Albany Nipper remains a landmark in a section of the city undergoing revitalization. Maybe there’s hope for Nipper’s return to prominence in a bigger way, or at least to stick around as an echo of consumerism’s past.

miscellany

• U2 performed Achtung Baby in a giant dome with all kinds of projection effects. Am I the only one who didn’t realize the Sphere in Las Vegas had an inside? I thought it was just gonna display a moving eyeball and other ads and art pieces on the outside. Anyway, during my past academic life in virtual environments, we’d have called this concert experience mixed reality: U2 is real, the stage and seats and people are real, but the surrounding environment is an immersive virtual space — sometimes with realistic imagery like the sprawling desert, and other times with wild visual effects (that hopefully don’t make people motion sick).

• New York City is getting redesigned garbage bins, guided by some observational research that revealed how sanitation workers were apparently banging their shins all the time. Plus, they got input from a rodent biologist to keep the rats out. We’ll see about that.

• I recently learned that painter Leslee Turnbull created amazing pieces that hang inside the exclusive Club 33 dining space in Disneyland in California. My favorite is the one called “The Guests Arrive” that shows Victorian inhabitants and visitors fluttering around a pre-haunted Haunted Mansion in New Orleans. I love a storytelling scenescape but especially this one, because you can spot some recognizable characters from the attraction in their corruptible, mortal state.