David Allen Sarnoff (February 27, 1891 –
December 12, 1971) was a Russian-born American businessman and pioneer of American commercial
radio and television. He founded the
National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and throughout most of his career he led the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in various capacities from shortly after its founding in 1919 until his
retirement in 1970. Known as "The General", he ruled over an ever-growing telecommunications and consumer electronics empire to
include both RCA and NBC, which became one of the largest companies in the world.
Early years
David Sarnoff was born in Uzlian, a small Jewish village near Minsk, Russia (now in Belarus), to a poor Jewish family,
the eldest son of Abraham and Leah Sarnoff. Given the limited opportunities for Jews in Russia at that time, 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 cheder studying and memorizing
the Torah. He emigrated with his mother and nine brothers and sisters to New York City in 1900, where he helped support his family by selling newspapers for a penny before and
after his classes at the Educational Alliance. In 1906 his father became incapacitated by
tuberculosis and David assumed the role as head of the household at the age of 15. He had planned to pursue a full-time career in
the newspaper business but 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 September 30, 1906, and thus started 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 the business of electronic communications on the job and in various libraries. He also served at Marconi stations on ships
and posts on Siasconset, Nantucket and the New
York Wanamaker Department Store. In 1911 he installed and operated the 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. That same year Marconi won a patent a suit that gave it the coastal stations of the
United Wireless Telegraph Company. Sarnoff also demonstrated the first use of radio on a railroad
line, the Lackawanna Railroad Company's link between Binghamton, New York, and
Scranton, Pennsylvania; and permitted and observed Edwin Armstrong's
demonstration of his regenerative receiver at the Marconi station at Belmar, New
Jersey. Sarnoff 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.
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 realized his dream and 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 re-emerged in the 1960s (following FM's initial appearance and disappearance
during the 1930s and 1940's - see Yankee Network for more details on early
FM broadcasting and a tragic legacy to the Sarnoff story).
Marshall McLuhan, which discovered the media laws in the 1960s, quoted Sarnoff
acceptance speech for an honorary degree by University of Notre Dame, while he
was RCA head. Sarnoff said: "We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield
them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value."
McLuhan called this "the voice of the current somnambulism", an example of conventional so-called media experts, which are
blinded by media content/use, and are not aware of their real meaning, their social and psychic impact, the way the intrinsic
characteristics of a particular media amplifies existing processes in human association. "There is simply nothing in the Sarnoff
statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of
one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form."[1]
NBC
When Sarnoff was put in charge of radio broadcasting at RCA, he soon recognized the potential for television. He was determined for his company to pioneer the medium and so he organized to meet with
Westinghouse engineer Vladimir
Zworykin in 1928, who at the time 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 in two years with a mere $100,000 grant. 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 road to success they also encountered a battle with the
young inventor Philo T. Farnsworth, who had been granted patents in 1930 for his solution to broadcasting moving pictures.
Eventually Sarnoff was 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's tenacity and intelligence 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. Finally, in 1939
Television in America was born under the name of the National Broadcast Corporation. The first television show aired at the New
York World's Fair and was introduced by the General himself.
The standard approved by the NTSC in 1941 differed from RCA's, but RCA quickly became the market
leader of manufactured sets and NBC became the first Television network in the United States.
There are those who say that Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first
president to be shown on TV (at the 1939 New York World's Fair). Meanwhile, a 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 development stages.
At the onset of World War II, Sarnoff served on Eisenhower's communications
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, called Radio Free Europe. Thanks to his communications skills and support he
received the Brigadier General's star in December of 1945, and thereafter was known as
"General Sarnoff." The star, which he proudly and frequently wore, was buried with him.
After the war, monochrome television production began in earnest. Color television was the next major development and NBC once
again won the battle. CBS also had their electro-mechanical color television system approved by the
FCC on October 10, 1950 however, Sarnoff filed an unsuccessful suit in
the United States district court to suspend that ruling. Subsequently he
made an appeal to the Supreme court which eventually upheld the FCC
decision. Sarnoff's tenacity and determination to win the "Color War" pushed his engineers to perfect an all-electronic color
television system that used a signal that could be received on existing monochrome sets that finally won the day. CBS was now
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 and became the leading manufacturer of color Television sets in the United States.
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.
Family Life
David married Lizette Herman, a conservative Jewish girl from Paris, France and their 54-year marriage proved the bedrock of
his life. They had three sons: Robert, Edward, and Thomas. Robert succeeded his father as RCA's Chairman in 1971 while the
youngest of their three sons, Thomas, became NBC West Coast President. Each son had three children, expanding the Sarnoff clan to
include nine grandchildren: Rosita, Serena, and Claudia (Robert's daughters); James, Russell and John (Edward's sons); and Daniel
J., Timothy and Cynthia (Thomas' children). Today, the family brood continues to grow and the third-generation's
great-grandchildren include: David and Alexander (James'children), Sabrina and Andrew (Russell's children); Cristina and Nicholas
(Daniel's children with his first wife): Aaron, Anna and Aria (Timothy's children); Isabella and Lily (Daniel's daughter's by his
second marriage); Abigail (Cynthia's daughter); and Adam, Toby and Felicia (Serena's children).
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."
In 1959 Sarnoff was a member of the Rockefeller
Brothers Fund panel to report on U.S. foreign policy. As a member of that panel and in a subsequent essay published in
Life as part of its "The National Purpose" series, he was critical of the
tentative stand being taken by the United States in fighting the political and psychological warfare being waged by
Soviet-led international Communism against the
West. He strongly advocated an aggressive, multi-faceted fight in the ideological and
political realms with a determination to decisively win the Cold War.[2]
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.
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.
Museum
- A museum and Libray containing many historical items from David Sarnoff's life is open to the public at the Sarnoff Corporation location in Princeton
Junction, NJ. The David Sarnoff Radio club composed of local Amateur Radio
operators also meets there.
Notes and references
See also
External links
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