David Sarnoff

BORN: February 27, 1891 • Uzlian, Russia

DIED: December 12, 1971 • New York, New York

Russian American television executive

David Sarnoff is one of the most famous business leaders in U.S. history. He arrived in the United States as a poor child from Russia in 1900. Over the next thirty years, he worked his way up through the ranks of the communications industry to become president of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). In his four decades at the head of RCA, Sarnoff combined a strong understanding of technology with a clear vision of the future to play a major role in the early development of radio and television broadcasting.

"This miracle of engineering skill which one day will bring the world to the home also brings a new American industry to serve man's material welfare."

Arriving as a poor immigrant

David Sarnoff was born on February 27, 1891, in Uzlian, a Jewish community near Minsk, Russia. His father, Abraham Sarnoff, painted houses and hung wallpaper for a living. His mother, Leah (Privin) Sarnoff, came from a long line of rabbis (Jewish religious leaders). As the oldest of five children in his family, David was expected to continue this tradition. During his boyhood, he followed a strict schedule of religious study and prayer.

In 1900, when David was nine years old, his family immigrated to the United States. Following a difficult month-long journey across the Atlantic Ocean, they settled in a poor Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side of New York City. They lived in a tiny, three-room apartment, and they had to share a single bathroom with several other families who lived on their floor.

Sarnoff's father suffered from tuberculosis (a bacterial infection of the lungs), which left him too weak to support the family. Shortly after arriving in New York, young David had to go to work selling newspapers. The hardworking boy also attended public schools and studied English in his free time. Before long, he was operating his own newspaper stand. By the age of fifteen, Sarnoff had completed the eighth grade and qualified to attend college preparatory school. But his father's health continued to decline, so he was forced to get a full-time job instead.

Getting ahead through hard work and ambition

Sarnoff's experience selling newspapers gave him an interest in journalism, so he went to the offices of the New York Herald to ask for a job. Without realizing it, he walked into the nearby offices of the Commercial Cable Company by mistake. As it turned out, they were looking for a messenger boy, and Sarnoff accepted the position. He earned five dollars per week riding a bicycle around the city delivering messages from Europe that had been carried across the ocean through underwater cables.

Spending time in the cable company's offices, Sarnoff became fascinated by the wireless telegraph machines in use there. He bought his own telegraph key (a device used to tap out telegraph messages) and learned Morse code (a system of telegraph communication using a series of dots and dashes to represent letters and words). Sarnoff's interest in telegraphy soon led him to take a job in the offices of the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America. He introduced himself to Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937)—the great Italian engineer who had invented wireless radio and founded the company—and served as his personal assistant whenever he visited New York.

When Sarnoff was sixteen, Marconi helped him get a job as a junior wireless telegraph operator. Although his father had recently died, Sarnoff's salary in this job enabled him to move his family into a larger apartment in a nicer neighborhood. Over the next few years, he agreed to serve in several remote Marconi telegraph offices in order to earn extra pay. During the hours whenl he was not working, he studied the technical manuals in the office libraries and took high-school courses through the mail.

Reinventing himself

A bright, hardworking, and ambitious young man, Sarnoff moved up quickly in rank and responsibility at the telegraph company. In 1912, he became the manager of a new Marconi wireless station in the John Wanamaker department store in New York City. That April, the luxury ocean liner Titanic hit an iceberg in the northern Atlantic Ocean and sank, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,500 people on board. Sarnoff attracted a great deal of publicity by claiming that he was the sole telegraph operator to receive distress calls from the Titanic. He said that he had remained at his post for three straight days relaying messages about the tragedy. In reality, however, a number of wireless operators had received the distress signals and informed authorities about the sinking ship. Historians have found evidence that suggests Sarnoff either greatly exaggerated or completely made up the story about his role in the incident.

In any case, the Titanic story proved helpful to Sarnoff's career. The incident convinced the U.S. Congress to pass a law requiring all ships to carry wireless radio equipment. Sarnoff then received a promotion to a position in which he installed and inspected Marconi equipment on board ships. The increase in pay allowed him to move his family to an even nicer apartment in the Bronx area of New York City.

Sarnoff continued to develop a reputation for having strong technical knowledge and marketing skills. In 1914, he was promoted to the position of contract manager, which allowed him to investigate new technologies and negotiate business deals. He soon became interested in the idea of using wireless radio transmission technology to broadcast music and entertainment programs to American homes. Sarnoff claimed that he sent a memo to his bosses at Marconi in 1915 encouraging them to pursue commercial radio broadcasting. "I have in mind a plan of development which would make radio a household utility in the same sense as the piano or phonograph. The idea is to bring music into the house by wireless," he wrote, as quoted in Tube. "The receiver can be designed in the form of a simple 'Radio Music Box.'" If he really composed this famous memo in 1915, Sarnoff would have been among of the first people to envision radio as a medium of mass communication. But some historians believe that he actually sent the memo in 1920, when a number of other people were pursuing the same idea.

Joining RCA

During World War I (1914–1918), the U.S. Navy controlled all American wireless radio facilities for the purposes of national security and defense. Once the war ended, the U.S. government decided to take steps to ensure that this important technology remained under American control. It forced the Marconi company, which was based in England, to sell its American operations to General Electric (GE). In 1919, GE turned American Marconi into a new division called the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). A short time later, GE formed a partnership with two other powerful electronic equipment companies, Westinghouse and American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). These companies received part ownership in RCA in exchange for giving RCA control over all of their major communications inventions.

By 1917, Sarnoff had become the head of a department at American Marconi, overseeing the work of more than seven hundred employees. He also married Lizette Hermant that year, and they eventually had three sons. When American Marconi became RCA, Sarnoff was promoted to commercial manager of the new company. In this position, he continued to push his bosses to enter commercial radio broadcasting. He also came up with an idea to make radio more appealing to the American people. Sarnoff suggested that RCA broadcast entertainment programs nationally by linking hundreds of local radio stations together to form a network.

In 1926, RCA followed through on Sarnoff's plan and formed a commercial broadcasting division called the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). NBC built and operated two radio networks, Red and Blue. NBC's first commercial broadcast included live coverage of a star-studded event in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. Featuring leading singers, orchestras, and humorists of the day, the program was heard by millions of people in the city and surrounding areas. In 1927, Sarnoff joined the RCA board of directors, and the following year he became acting president of the company. In this position, he oversaw the creation of the RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum) motion picture company and helped introduce radio receivers as standard features in automobiles.

Investing in television

Sarnoff had been interested in television since the first time he heard mention of the possibility of using radio waves to transmit live, moving images across a distance. By the time he took charge of RCA, he was convinced that television represented the future of mass communications. In 1929, Sarnoff invited a Westinghouse engineer named Vladimir Zworykin (1889–1982; see entry) to RCA headquarters for a meeting. A few years earlier, Zworykin had applied for patents (a form of legal protection for an invention) on a television camera he called the Iconoscope and a television display screen he called the Kinescope. In a famous exchange, Sarnoff asked the engineer what it would take to develop an electronic television system that could be sold to the public. Zworykin estimated that he would need a year and a half and $100,000 to perfect the system. Instead, it ended up taking a decade and costing RCA $50 million before the company made TV available to the public.

In 1930, at the age of thirty-nine, Sarnoff became the president of RCA. A few months later, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the company. The government charged that RCA was a monopoly (a powerful company that holds complete control over a business or industry) that unfairly limited competition in the communications industry. Sarnoff made a deal with the government that resulted in RCA being separated from GE, Westinghouse, and AT&T. As an independent company, RCA kept its radio manufacturing plants and broadcasting stations, as well as its communications inventions. The deal also gave Sarnoff greater freedom to pursue his interest in television technology without worrying about how anyone else would view his plans.

Determined to make RCA the leader in the new technology, Sarnoff hired Zworykin to develop an electronic television system for RCA. He also purchased the patents for TV technology held by several other inventors over the next few years. In 1935, Sarnoff established a three-part plan for RCA to follow in order to increase public demand for TV technology. This plan involved mass-producing TV sets to make them more affordable for consumers, expanding entertainment programming on NBC to make TV ownership more appealing, and organizing public demonstrations of television to expose more people to the possibilities of the exciting new technology.

Before Sarnoff could follow through on his plans, however, RCA had to clear up some legal issues. The U.S. Patent Office had granted an important patent to an independent inventor named Philo T. Farnsworth (1906–1971; see entry), giving him the exclusive legal rights to produce and market several key components of electronic television systems. After losing a long legal challenge against Farnsworth's patents, RCA was forced to pay Farnsworth a licensing fee, or royalty, in order to use his patented components in its TV sets. This marked the first time that RCA, which was famous for its own research and development, had ever paid to use someone else's technology since the company's founding in 1919.

Once RCA gained access to Farnsworth's patents, Sarnoff finally introduced television to the public at the 1939 World's Fair in New York. He marked this historic occasion with a televised speech called "The Birth of an Industry." As quoted in Time, Sarnoff announced that "now we add radio sight to sound. It is with a feeling of humbleness that I come to this moment of announcing the birth in this country of a new art so important in its implications that it is bound to affect all of society. It is an art which shines like a torch of hope in the troubled world. It is a creative force which we must learn to utilize for the benefit of all mankind. This miracle of engineering skill which one day will bring the world to the home also brings a new American industry to serve man's material welfare."

Becoming "The General"

Despite Sarnoff's efforts, television technology did not catch on immediately. By the time the United States entered World War II in 1941, only twenty-three television stations existed nationwide, and only a few thousand TV sets had been sold. During the war, both the production of television sets and most TV broadcasting came to a halt. The U.S. government needed a large supply of electronic parts and communications equipment for the war effort, so many television and radio assembly plants were converted in order to produce materials for national defense.

Sarnoff made RCA's manufacturing facilities available for military purposes during the war. He also contributed to the war effort by serving as a special assistant for communications under U.S. general Dwight Eisenhower (1890–1969). In this position, Sarnoff helped build a radio broadcast station that could reach all American forces in Europe. In appreciation for his wartime service, Sarnoff received the rank of brigadier general. From this time on, he preferred to be called "General Sarnoff."

Television finally fulfilled Sarnoff's predictions in the postwar years. According to the TV History Web site, annual sales of television sets increased from around 200,000 units in 1947 to 7.4 million units in 1950, and RCA controlled 80 percent of the market. The company employed 54,000 people and earned a profit of $46 million in 1950.

Around this time, Sarnoff engaged in competitive battles with the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), a rival television network. Consistently more interested in technology than programming, Sarnoff was not always popular among the entertainers who appeared on NBC radio and television shows. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, CBS president William S. Paley (1901–1990; see entry) managed to lure away a number of NBC's most talented performers. Paley's ability to recognize and reward talent helped CBS overtake NBC to become the most-watched television network.

During the 1950s, RCA entered a race against CBS to develop color television technology. CBS produced the first working system, but it was not compatible with existing black-and-white TV sets, which meant that anyone who had already purchased a black-and-white TV set would see only static during color broadcasts using the CBS system. Nevertheless, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the CBS system in 1951, over Sarnoff's strong objections. Two years later, however, the FCC reversed its earlier decision and approved a newly developed RCA color TV system that was compatible with existing black-and-white sets.

CBS Engineer Peter Goldmark

Inventor Peter Goldmark worked as an engineer for the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) for thirty-five years, from 1936 to 1971. During this time, he invented the first working color television system, the long-playing (LP) record album, and an early type of videocassette recorder (VCR).

Peter Carl Goldmark was born on December 2, 1906, in Budapest, Hungary. He showed an interest in science and technology from an early age. He built a laboratory in the bathroom of his family's home, for instance, and he experimented with various new technologies, including radio sets and motion picture projectors.

Goldmark received a doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna, Austria, in 1931. After graduating, Goldmark spent two years working as a television engineer for a British radio company before immigrating to the United States in 1933. In 1936 he got a job as the chief engineer of the newly formed television research department at CBS. The following year, he became a U.S. citizen.

Goldmark first became interested in adding color to television in early 1940, when he saw the movie Gone with the Wind and was amazed by the brilliant color in the film. Upon returning to his lab at CBS, Goldmark spent the next six months working hard to develop a color television system. The method he came up with became known as a field-sequential color system. It involved two mechanical spinning wheels with red, blue, and green filters—one behind the lens of a TV camera, and one in front of the picture tube inside a TV set. The spinning wheel in the camera scanned the image in color, and the spinning wheel in the receiver set reproduced the colors in sequence as they appeared in the original scene.

Goldmark's color system was a hybrid, or combination, of the two main types of TV systems that had been developed up to that time (mechanical and electronic). It used a mechanical spinning wheel to insert color into an electronic television system. By the 1940s, most experts viewed mechanical TV systems as a less advanced form of technology than electronic TV systems. In addition, the CBS color system faced strong opposition from the powerful Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which had invested a great deal of time and money in the development of black-and-white TV sets. For these reasons, Goldmark's early color TV system never became available to the public.

One of Goldmark's other inventions, however, had a tremendous impact on American popular culture. A big fan of classical music, Goldmark grew frustrated by the methods that were available in the 1940s for people to play recorded music at home. Phonographs of that time played ten-inch-wide vinyl records that spun on a turntable at 78 revolutions per minute (RPM). These records could only hold a few minutes' worth of music. In order to listen to an entire symphony, Goldmark had to flip over or change records many times. He became determined to develop a new technology that could hold more recorded music.

In 1948 he introduced the long-playing (LP) record album—a twelve-inch-wide vinyl disk that spun at 33 RPM and could hold forty minutes' worth of music. In addition to holding more music, the LP also provided listeners with improved sound quality. The technology contributed to the popularity of rock 'n' roll music in the 1950s and 1960s and remained the main system of home audio until the introduction of the compact disc (CD) in 1982.

Goldmark also invented a number of other important technologies over the years. During World War II (1939–45), for instance, he developed a device that allowed U.S. troops to disrupt enemy radar tracking systems. Goldmark also came up with one of the earliest types of videocassette recorder (VCR) technology. His device, called an Electronic Video Recorder, could record a television program on film enclosed in a small plastic cartridge.

In 1971 Goldmark left CBS to form his own company, Goldmark Communications. In 1973 he published a book about his long career with the company, called Maverick Inventor: My Turbulent Years at CBS. Goldmark was killed in an automobile accident on December 7, 1977, just two weeks after he received the prestigious National Medal of Science from President Jimmy Carter.

During the 1960s, RCA entered such diverse lines of business as computers and book publishing. Sarnoff stepped down as chief executive officer of RCA in 1965, but he retained his position as chairman of the board of directors. His son Robert became president of the company at this time. Following a serious illness in 1968, Sarnoff no longer participated in the daily management of RCA. He retired as chairman in 1970, and he died in his sleep of a heart attack the following year. RCA continued to diversify its business interests after the death of its legendary leader. In 1986, the company was taken over by GE, the company that had formed RCA six decades earlier.

Sarnoff is remembered as a leading supporter of research in the field of electronic communications. The technologies developed at RCA under his guidance led to countless innovations in related fields, including computers. Sarnoff is also credited with the idea of organizing radio and later television broadcast stations into networks. "The uniqueness of David Sarnoff lies in his combination of a visionary and determined builder and hardheaded industrial leader," Jerome B. Wiesner noted in his foreword to Looking Ahead: The Papers of David Sarnoff. "He was among the first to recognize the role that science could play in modern industry and to stake his future entirely on its promise."

For More Information

BOOKS

Bilby, Kenneth. The General: David Sarnoff and the Rise of the Communications Industry. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.

"David Sarnoff." Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 9: 1971–1975. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994.

Fisher, David E., and Marshall J. Fisher. Tube: The Invention of Television. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2002.

Goldmark, Peter, with Lee Edson. Maverick Inventor: My Turbulent Years at CBS. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1973.

Lewis, Thomas S. W. Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio. New York: Edward Burlingame Books, 1991.

Sobel, Robert. RCA. New York: Stein and Day, 1984.

Wiesner, Jerome B., ed. Looking Ahead: The Papers of David Sarnoff. Princeton, NJ: David Sarnoff Research Center, 1968.

PERIODICALS

Brewster, Mike J. "Peter Goldmark: CBS's In-House Genius." Business Week, August 25, 2004.

Carsey, Marcy, and Tom Werner. "Time 100 Most Important Builders and Titans of the Century: David Sarnoff." Time, March 29, 1999.

"David Sarnoff of RCA Is Dead: Visionary Broadcast Pioneer." New York Times, December 13, 1971.

WEB SITES

"David Sarnoff." Museum of Broadcast Communications. http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/S/htmlS/sarnoffdavi/sarnoffdavi.htm (accessed on June 5, 2006).

Donnelly, David. "Radio Corporation of America." Museum of Broadcast Communications. http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/R/htmlR/radiocorpora/radiocorpora.htm (accessed on June 5, 2006).

"History of Television: The First 75 Years." TV History. http://www.tvhistory.tv/facts-stats.htm (accessed on June 5, 2006).