Encyclopedia
David Sarnoff led the
Radio Corporation of America 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.
Early years, 1891-1919
David Sarnoff was born in Uzliany
shtetl near
Minsk,
Russia to a poor
Jewish family, the eldest son of Abraham and Leah. Given the 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 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
was an Olympic class passenger liner [i] that became...
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.
RCA, 1919-1956
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 in 1919-1920, 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
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 managed to secure
patents in 1930 for his solution to broadcasting moving pictures. 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 hard work, Sarnoff's determination and Zworykin's
genius, 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 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.
Later years, 1956-1971
Sarnoff retired in 1970, at the age of 79, and died the subsequent year. He is interred in a mausoleum featuring a stained-glass vacuum tube in
Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.
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' . The best biography available, by the retired RCA vice president of public affairs
- Carl Dreher, 'Sarnoff: An American Success' . A thoughtful biography by an early associate of Sarnoff's.
- Tom Lewis, 'Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio' . Profiles Sarnoff's life along with those of Edwin Armstrong and Lee De Forest, drawing on archival sources.
- Eugene Lyons, 'David Sarnoff: A Biography' . A cousin's sympathetic but insightful biography approved by Sarnoff.
- David Sarnoff, 'Looking Ahead: The Papers of David Sarnoff' . 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' . The most authoritative history on the company by a prolific business historian, with a thorough bibliography but no footnotes.
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, a spinoff of RCA named after David Sarnoff
External links
