David Sarnoff
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David Sarnoff (February 27, 1891–December 12, 1971) led the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in various capacities shortly after its founding in 1919 to his retirement in 1970. Known as the general, he ruled over an ever-growing radio and electronics empire that became one of the largest companies in the world.
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[edit] Early years
David Sarnoff was born in Uzliany shtetl near Minsk, Russia (now in Belarus) to a poor Jewish family, the eldest son of Abraham and Leah. Given limited opportunities for Jews in Russia, Sarnoff's future as a bright young boy seemed assured as a rabbi. Until his father emigrated to the United States and raised funds to bring the family, Sarnoff spent much of his early childhood in a kheder studying and memorizing the Torah. He emigrated with his mother and two brothers to New York City in 1900, where he supported his family by selling penny newspapers before and after schooling at the Educational Alliance. When his father became incapacitated by tuberculosis in 1906, Sarnoff planned to pursue a full-time career in the newspaper business. A chance encounter led to a position as an office boy at the Commercial Cable Company. When his superior refused him unpaid leave for Rosh Hashanah, he joined the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America on Sunday, September 30, beginning a career of over sixty years in electronic communications.
Over the next thirteen years Sarnoff rose from office boy to commercial manager of the company, learning about the technology and business of electronic communications on the job and in various libraries. He served at Marconi stations on ships and posts on Siasconset, Nantucket and the New York Wanamaker Department Store. In 1911 he installed and operated wireless equipment on a ship hunting seals off Newfoundland and Labrador, and used the technology to relay the first remote medical diagnosis from the ship's doctor to a radio operator at Belle Isle with an infected tooth. The following year he led two other operators at the Wanamaker station in an effort to confirm the fate of Titanic and gather the survivors' names. Over the next two years Sarnoff earned promotions to chief inspector and contracts manager for a company whose revenues swelled after Congress passed legislation mandating 24-7 staffing of commercial shipboard radio stations and Marconi won a patent a suit that gave it the coastal stations of the United Wireless Telegraph Company. He also demonstrated the first use of radio on a railroad line, the Lackawanna Railroad Company's link between Binghamton, New York, and Scranton, Pennsylvania; permitted and observed Edwin Armstrong's demonstration of his regenerative receiver at the Marconi station at Belmar, New Jersey; and used H. J. Round's hydrogen arc transmitter to demonstrate the broadcast of music from the New York Wanamaker station.
This demonstration and the AT&T demonstrations in 1915 of long-distance wireless telephony inspired the first several of many memos to his superiors on applications of current and future radio technologies. Sometime late in 1915 or in 1916 he proposed to the company's president, Edward J. Nally, that the company develop a "radio music box" for the "amateur" market of radio enthusiasts. Nally deferred on the proposal because of the expanded volume of business during World War I, and Sarnoff devoted his time to managing the company's factory in Roselle Park, New Jersey.
[edit] RCA
When Owen D. Young of the General Electric Company arranged the purchase of American Marconi and turned it into the Radio Corporation of America, a radio patent monopoly, Sarnoff revived his proposal in a lengthy memo on the company's business and prospects. His superiors again ignored him but he contributed to the rising postwar radio boom by helping arrange for the broadcast of a heavyweight boxing match between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier in July 1921. Up to 300,000 people heard the fight, and demand for home radio equipment bloomed that winter. By the spring of 1922 Sarnoff's prediction of popular demand for broadcasting had come true, and over the next eighteen months, he gained in stature and influence.
Sarnoff was instrumental in building and established the AM broadcasting radio business which became the preeminent public radio standard for the majority of the 20th century. This was until FM broadcasting radio reemerged in the 1960's (following FM's initial appearance and disappearance during the 1930's and 1940's - see Yankee Network for more details on early FM broadcasting and a tragic legacy to the Sarnoff story).
When he was put in charge of radio broadcasting at RCA, he soon recognized the potential of television. He was determined for his company to pioneer the medium. He met with Westinghouse engineer Vladimir Zworykin in 1928, who was developing an all-electronic television system in his spare time on the company premises. Zworykin told Sarnoff he could build a viable television system with a mere $100,000 grant in two years. Sarnoff decided to fund his research but the estimate was off by several orders of magnitude and several years. RCA demonstrated a working iconoscope camera tube and kinescope receiver tube to the press on April 24, 1936.
The final cost of the enterprise was closer to $50 million. On the way they had to battle young inventor Philo T. Farnsworth who had been granted patents in 1930 for his solution to broadcasting moving pictures, and eventually were ordered to pay him $1,000,000 in royalties. In 1929, Sarnoff engineered the purchase of the Victor Talking Machine Company, the nation's largest manufacturer of records and phonographs, merging radio-phonograph production at Victor's large manufacturing facility in Camden, New Jersey.
Sarnoff became president of RCA on January 3, 1930, succeeding General James Harbord. On May 30 the company was involved in an antitrust case concerning the original radio patent pool. Sarnoff was able to negotiate an outcome where RCA was no longer partly owned by Westinghouse and General Electric, giving him final say in the company's affairs.
Initially, the Great Depression caused RCA to cut costs, but Zworykin's project was protected. After nine years of Zworykin's hard work, Sarnoff's determination, and legal battles with Farnsworth (in which Farnsworth was proved in the right), they had a commercial system ready to launch. The standard approved by the NTSC in 1941 differed from RCA's, but RCA quickly became the market leader.
Meanwhile, system developed by EMI based on Zworykin's work was adopted in Britain and used by the BBC in 1936. However, World War II put a halt to a dynamic growth of the early television.
During the war, Sarnoff served on Eisenhower's propaganda staff, arranging expanded radio circuits for NBC to transmit news from the invasion of France in June 1944. In France, Sarnoff arranged for the restoration of the Radio France station in Paris that the Germans destroyed and oversaw the construction of a radio transmitter powerful enough to reach all of the allied forces in Europe. He received the Brigadier General's star (at his own insistence) in December, and thereafter preferred to be known as "General Sarnoff."
After the war, monochrome television production began in earnest. Color television was the next major development and CBS had their electro-mechanical color television system approved by the FCC on October 10, 1950. Sarnoff filed an unsuccessful suit in the United States district court to suspend the ruling. He made an appeal to the Supreme court which also upheld the FCC decision. Sarnoff pushed his engineers to perfect an all-electronic color television system that used a signal that could be received on existing monochrome sets. CBS was unable to take advantage of the color market, due to lack of manufacturing capability and sets that were triple the cost of monochrome sets. A few days after CBS had its color premiere on 14 June 1951, RCA demonstrated a fully functional all-electronic color television system.
Color television production was suspended in October 1951 for the duration of the Korean War. As more people bought monochrome sets, it was increasingly unlikely that CBS could achieve any success with its incompatible system. The NTSC was reformed and recommended a system virtually identical to RCA's in August 1952. On December 17, 1953 the FCC approved RCA's system as the new standard.
[edit] Later years
In 1955, General Sarnoff received The Hundred Year Association of New York's Gold Medal Award "in recognition of outstanding contributions to the City of New York."
Sarnoff retired in 1970, at the age of 79, and died the following year, aged 80. He is interred in a mausoleum featuring a stained-glass vacuum tube in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.
[edit] Noted Publications
No scholarly biography of Sarnoff--one that documents its sources and draws on multiple archives--yet exists.
- Kenneth Bilby, 'The General: David Sarnoff and the Rise of the Communications Industry' (NY: Harper & Row, 1986). The best biography available, by the retired RCA vice president of public affairs
- Carl Dreher, 'Sarnoff: An American Success' (NY: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Company, 1977). A thoughtful biography by an early associate of Sarnoff's.
- Tom Lewis, 'Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio' (NY: Edward Burlingame, an imprint of HarperCollins, 1991). Profiles Sarnoff's life along with those of Edwin Armstrong and Lee De Forest, drawing on archival sources.
- Eugene Lyons, 'David Sarnoff: A Biography' (NY: Harper & Row, 1966). A cousin's sympathetic but insightful biography approved by Sarnoff.
- David Sarnoff, 'Looking Ahead: The Papers of David Sarnoff' (NY: McGraw Hill, 1968). A useful one-volume compendium of Sarnoff's writings, covering his views on innovation, broadcasting, monopoly rights and responsibilities, freedom, and future electronic innovations.
- Robert Sobel, 'RCA' (NY: Stein and Day, 1984). The most authoritative history on the company by a prolific business historian, with a thorough bibliography but no footnotes.
[edit] See also
- Edwin Armstrong, inventor of FM
- George H. Brown, research engineer who led RCA's development of electronic color television
- RKO Pictures
- Sarnoff Corporation, the eponymous successor organization to RCA Laboratories following the 1986 acquisition of RCA by General Electric.
- Arturo Toscanini, the conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra recruited by David Sarnoff to NBC
- Philo Farnsworth, inventor of electronic television
