A HEAD OF CURLY BROWN HAIR BOBBED ALONG IN THE RIVER OF older, taller men rushing to work in lower Manhattan. At Wall Street the main flow of commuters forked off in the direction of the New York Stock Exchange while the fifteen-year-old continued south, down a side street.
David Sarnoff made for an unusual sight, and he knew it. Fifteen was young to be starting a full-time job on Wall Street, and he looked closer to twelve, thanks to his stubby stature and the baby fat filling out his round face. Sarnoff hoped the formal business suit he wore was doing its job of disguising his youth, though from the glances of his fellow commuters it seemed possible that it was having the opposite effect, drawing attention to the comic contrast between his age and his attire.
Yet the teenager gave off an air of nonchalance. It was one of the immigrant’s peculiar talents: a knack for fitting in at whatever new world he found himself. Part of that gift was innate, a self-assurance rarely found in adults and invariably absent in undersized teenage boys. The other part of David Sarnoff’s easy adaptability could be traced to hard-won experience. Born in 1891, Sarnoff spent the first nine years of his life in an isolated Jewish village, speaking Russian and Yiddish. Then, one day, his family shipped out for Manhattan, where he had spent the last six years learning English and everything else he could about his new home.
Even as a nine-year-old unable to comprehend the language, Sarnoff was immediately entranced by turn-of-the-century New York. Its four million people. Its electric streetlights. Even New York’s clouds were exciting, thanks to local newspapers’ habit of using them as floating billboards upon which giant spotlights blinked out election results, sports scores, and other big news in Morse code. But to David Sarnoff the real difference between his old village and his new city was more fundamental. In the shtetl where he spent the last decade of the nineteenth century, much of it studying the Torah, his daily life was almost indistinguishable from that of his seventeenth-century ancestors. In twentieth-century New York, stumbling across the unimaginable became a regular and delightful part of David Sarnoff’s life.
His fellow commuters offered one example. When Sarnoff and his family arrived in 1900, he had been floored by the city’s extensive network of elevated steam trains and horse-drawn trolleys. Today, just six years later, he could see his fellow commuters materializing on Wall Street, delivered to the financial district by the new subway system that used electric power to whisk them underground and eliminate the soot and manure of aboveground transportation. Commuters could now travel from Grand Central Station in midtown Manhattan to Wall Street in a mere twelve minutes.
To David Sarnoff, the subway’s nickel fare remained a luxury, especially on a sunny September morning like this one. From the Lower East Side tenement he shared with the rest of his immigrant family, it took about fifteen minutes to walk to Wall Street. Besides, what really fascinated the fifteen-year-old immigrant was not mankind’s newfound ability to move people beneath cities at the speed of a steam train, but its power to move information around the globe at the speed of light.
THE TEENAGER HAD HAPPENED UPON his new obsession at the end of another difficult path. Ever since arriving in New York, Sarnoff’s father, Abraham, had been incapacitated by tuberculosis. David helped support his family by rising before dawn to manage his own newsstand before heading off to school. His father’s death earlier this year ended his schooling, and made him the primary breadwinner for his mother, Leah, and two younger brothers. Having just completed eighth grade, Sarnoff declared his years of part-time work and full-time schooling over and began looking for a job.
After scouting around for a job as a newspaper copyboy, Sarnoff happened to stop by the headquarters of the Commercial Cable Company, which was hiring messenger boys. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the fifteen-year-old found himself in a dream job.
“The Commercial,” as the company was known, was arguably 1906 New York’s hottest high-technology company, if not the world’s. Founded by mining baron John Mackay, the company owned five of the sixteen undersea cables that sent telegrams beneath the Atlantic Ocean. The Commercial also ran one of the two new cables that crossed the Pacific, a ten-thousand-mile-long wire that could zip text messages from California to Japan, China, and the Philippines.
Each cable was an expensive feat of engineering, paid for with silver dug from Mackay’s mines in California and Nevada. The newest of the Commercial’s five Atlantic cables, built for a record $3.5 million, contained 1.4 million pounds of copper insulated with 800,000 pounds of sap from Malaysian perch trees. Another 17 million pounds of armoring made from a blend of brass, iron, and jute protected the very expensive wire from the dangers of the deep: sharp rocks on the ocean floor, ships’ anchors, and teeth of curious sharks attracted by the cable’s electrical current.
For the new messenger boy, the connections made possible by this ever-expanding worldwide web of cables held a special fascination. At the beginning of the last century, the entire planet had been as isolated as his old Russian village. If two people wanted to exchange information instantly, they needed to move close enough to see or hear each other. Moving information across or between continents meant moving physical objects, usually people or paper, at low speed and high cost. The resulting delays meant that distant continents frequently experienced major events in isolation, as natural disasters, wars, and other crises often began and ended before the rest of the world heard the news. Back-and-forth conversations between distant lands could take months, if not years.
The first hint that a faster form of communication might be possible came in 1822, when Danish physicist Christian Órsted hooked a copper wire to a battery and noticed something odd about a magnetized compass needle that sat nearby. French scientist Louis Pasteur summarized the importance of what happened next: “He suddenly saw (by chance you will say, but chance only favours the mind which is prepared) the needle move and take up a position quite different from the one assigned to it by terrestrial magnetism. A wire carrying an electric current deviates a magnetized needle from its position. That, gentlemen, was the birth of the modern telegraph.”
By the 1830s, thanks to the work of inventors led by William Cooke, Charles Wheatstone, and Samuel Morse, neighboring cities began using Órsted’s discovery to trade instant messages. A sender in one city would send an electric current down a telegraph wire, making a magnet move at the far end. By using a “telegraph key” to interrupt the current, the tempo of dots and dashes tapped out on the key would be mirrored by the movements of the distant magnet. It took another three decades of experimenting—and the genius of the great Victorian scientist Lord Kelvin—before the first transatlantic cable made it possible to jiggle a magnet on the other side of an ocean in 1858. The job of crossing the much wider Pacific Ocean proved far more challenging. David Sarnoff had been in New York for three years when the newspapers he sold announced that on July 4, 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt had made history by sending himself a telegram that traveled clear around the earth.
In turn-of-the-century New York, David Sarnoff’s fascination with the growing global network was unusual only in its degree. To most ordinary people, “the electrical transmission of intelligence” was as close as modern science had come to discovering magic. Former secretary of state Edward Everett captured the general sense of awe after the first Atlantic cable carried an inaugural text message from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan: “Does it not seem all but a miracle of art that the thoughts of living men—the thoughts that we think up here on the earth’s surface, in the cheerful light of day—about the markets and the exchanges, and the seasons, and the elections, and the treaties and the wars, and all the fond nothings of daily life, should clothe themselves with elemental sparks and shoot with fiery speed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, from hemisphere to hemisphere?”
With every milestone, newspapers competed to express the general sense of wonder at the ever-expanding, worldwide web of cables. “The magnitude of the subject transcends the power of language,” the New York Times swooned after the first Atlantic cable went live. “The Atlantic has dried up and we become in reality, as well as wish, one country,” declared The Times (London). The public was equally euphoric. One celebration in Manhattan following the first telegram from Europe got so out of hand that much of city hall ended up in ashes. After President Roosevelt’s 1903 telegram made it around the earth, many commentators took a special glee in noting that twentieth-century science had outdone even William Shakespeare’s Puck, the magic fairy who brags of being able to circle the earth in forty minutes. Teddy’s telegram raced around the world three times that fast.
For David Sarnoff, an extrovert who grew up cut off from the world, working in the Commercial Cable Company’s office, connected to the far points of the globe, had felt like being admitted to the most magical building in the world’s most magical city. It also had magnified the pain and humiliation he felt three weeks before, when his boss fired him for taking a day off work on Rosh Hashanah.
Today marked the first day of his second chance to make it in the global communications business. Unlike the respected, profitable, and well-established Commercial Cable Company, his new employer had never posted a profit and many people on Wall Street suspected the company of being a front for an elaborate stock fraud. The fifteen-year-old Sarnoff had no way of independently evaluating that gossip. Besides, thrown out of the cable industry, for the moment he had no choice but to cast his lot with the rebels. Leaving the cool fall air behind, David Sarnoff walked inside and began introducing himself around the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America.
THE MARCONI COMPANY did have its believers. Optimists viewed the four-year-old company as a high-tech innovator, an upstart that had the potential to replace expensive wires under the sea with cheap waves in the air.
Though the company’s new office boy possessed no real scientific training, the gear he saw being used to send wireless messages remained rudimentary enough for him to quickly pick up a basic understanding of how it worked. The first scientist to shoot dots and dashes through the empty air (instead of a copper wire) had accomplished the feat in 1887, four years before David Sarnoff was born. At the time, Professor Heinrich Hertz, a German academic, had hoped to impress his fellow physicists by confirming a theory dreamed up by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in the 1860s. Using fancy mathematics, Maxwell had predicted the existence of invisible and intangible waves made from equal parts electricity and magnetism, but until Hertz came along, no one had been able to prove that Maxwell’s waves existed in the real world.
Hertz dreamed up a novel way to test the theory by mimicking a lightning bolt. While religion often attributed lightning to the divine (“God’s burning finger,” Herman Melville called it), Benjamin Franklin and other scientists studied it for clues to the true nature of electricity. Before Hertz’s experiments, one of lightning’s most intriguing and baffling powers was the way a bolt from the sky announced itself with a visible flash of lightning, an audible clap of thunder—and also in a third voice that almost always went unnoticed. Occasionally, lightning strikes caused metal objects to quiver or throw off tiny sparks at the exact moment lightning flashed in the distance. Professor Hertz saw this as a sign that the bolts were emitting the invisible electromagnetic waves Maxwell’s equations predicted.
To re-create the invisible, intangible waves in his lab, Hertz hooked up a simple device that fed electricity into a piece of metal until the charge leaped through the air to a nearby piece of metal in the form of a visible, airborne spark. These miniature lightning bolts did indeed release a burst of electromagnetic waves, which Hertz detected on the far side of his lab using a simple wire loop. (Hertz found that a circle of wire, with a small gap on one side, would emit its own much smaller spark every time the spark appeared on the far side of his lab.) While Hertz’s academic colleagues hailed his achievement, the rest of the world paid it no notice. As even Professor Hertz acknowledged, waves that no one could see or touch were obviously “of no use whatsoever.”
Fifteen years later, the wireless telegraph transmitters that David Sarnoff saw around the Marconi Company were more powerful but otherwise identical versions of Hertz’s original “spark gap” wave generator. The messenger boy watched as Marconi operators tapped out a message using a standard telegraph key, each touch summoning a spark in the air. To make dots and dashes the wireless operator would press the key in a staccato pattern, summoning a spark that disappeared almost instantly (a dot) or one that hung in the air a split second longer (a dash).
The equipment Sarnoff found the operators using to catch the waves represented a vast improvement over the wire loop Professor Hertz used as his original receiver. New magnetic detectors nicknamed “Maggies” took advantage of the basic relationship between electricity and magnets Hans Órsted discovered nearly a century earlier. An incoming electromagnetic wave would be caught on an antenna, producing a faint electrical current that moved a magnet. The Maggies did an excellent job of taking those tiny movements and using them to switch an audible signal off and on. A Marconi operator could sit with a pair of headphones plugged into the Maggie and hear the Morse code tapped out by a distant operator.
Despite the steady advance in wireless technology, when skeptics looked at the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America they saw a company designed not to connect continents with each other but to separate investors from their money. While no one questioned the ability of spark gaps and Maggies to send messages a few hundred miles, the company’s promises to offer a commercial service sending telegrams all the way to Europe had yet to materialize. The skeptics’ case had been strengthened by the recent exposure of several of Marconi’s smaller competitors as precisely that, fraudulent companies that sold stock based on wireless technology that turned out not to exist. Stock in Sarnoff’s employer, which had been sold to the public in 1902 for sixty-seven dollars a share, now traded in the midthirties.
In the first few weeks of his new job, David Sarnoff turned up a few clues that only deepened the mysteries of the Marconi Company. One of the first things to jump out at the new office boy was the odd quiet that pervaded the company offices every morning. At the Commercial Cable Company, the workday started with a bang. At exactly 10 A.M., the New York Stock Exchange opened and a flurry of buy and sell orders began zipping beneath the ocean, a frenzy that lasted for exactly one hour—even though the New York Stock Exchange remained open for another five.
This part of the business was no puzzle to Sarnoff. While ordinary people imagined the world’s undersea telegraph cables ferrying news reports, diplomatic proposals, and military orders, his days as a messenger boy had acquainted him with the cables’ main customers and their peculiar business. Since the first transatlantic telegraph began offering commercial service in 1865, the undersea cables had created an industry built on the newfound ability to spot identical goods selling for different prices on different continents. “International arbitrageurs” would buy shares of stock in London and then, a few minutes or a few seconds later, sell the same shares for a bit more in New York. When the price gap swung in the other direction, so did their trades—but either way a profit was guaranteed as long as both trades could be quickly executed before the price difference disappeared. In London, the hectic hour of stock arbitrage began at 3 P.M. (when the New York Stock Exchange opened) and ended an hour later, when the London exchange closed for the day. After that, cable traffic dropped off significantly, though messages continued to ping between arbitrage firms buying and selling bars of gold, bales of cotton, bonds issued by railroads, and any other type of easily traded asset they could find selling for different prices on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
Although Sarnoff’s bosses often spoke of the Marconi Company as a cable rival, the new office boy saw no Marconi telegraph operators sending buy and sell orders across the ocean—nor any other type of transatlantic messages, for that matter. A trip to the Marconi Company’s newest wireless station, on Coney Island, was only slightly more reassuring. The station had wireless operators, but from what Sarnoff could see, their days were painfully slow. Every hour or so they would put on their headsets and begin tapping out brief text messages to a ship entering or leaving New York’s harbor. As far as he could tell, the only way they could send a message all the way to Europe was by hopscotching it across a series of ships—and that cumbersome process would only work when a group of Marconi-equipped ships happened to line up across the Atlantic.
WORK COULD BE UNPLEASANT for Sarnoff. Other Marconi employees had taken to calling the messenger boy “Davey” and, on occasion, “Jew boy.” Sarnoff bore the insults silently, and resolved to work his way up to a position where he would not be forced to tolerate such derision.
Like many tech-minded teenagers, David Sarnoff dreamed of landing a job as a telegraph operator. Operators with a good “fist” could move forty words per minute, while a “copperplate fist” could transmit close to fifty. Sarnoff immediately devoted himself to improving his own sending speed, buying a used two-dollar telegraph key and practicing for hours a night after work. Experienced fists had an endless list of insulting nicknames for poky amateurs—“Rattle brain,” “Jay,” “Swell head,” “Crank”—which Sarnoff was determined to never have stuck on him.
Around the main Manhattan office, Sarnoff found other company records that offered new clues about his controversial employer. John Bottomley, the chief executive of American Marconi, had taken to bragging that thanks to the new Seagate station in Coney Island, his company now offered an “unbroken string of stations” from New York Harbor to Newfoundland. Still, the ship-to-shore business those six stations did was disturbingly infrequent. According to the last numbers the company made public, the Marconi Company was sending an average of forty-one wireless telegrams per day, a total of just 557 billable words. Even that exaggerated the true volume of business, since American Marconi split the revenue from each message with the separate company that owned the wireless gear on ships, and often had to cut in the land-based telegraph companies whose wires carried the messages from the shore stations back to New York.
The company’s latest financial statement avoided any mention of profit or loss, but it didn’t take formal finance training for David Sarnoff to work out that the company had been burning cash since its founding. The company’s primary source of income was selling its own stock, including $117,000 in 1903 and another $293,000 in 1904. The following year it hadn’t sold any stock, allowing its operating losses to rapidly erode the company’s remaining cash. The one bright spot on the Marconi Company balance sheet was its patent portfolio, which had been built up through the acquisition of patents from famous scientists with names like Edison, Lodge, and Fleming. If the company’s accountants were to be believed, these patents were worth a rich $5.5 million.
The Marconi Company’s cash shortage was an open secret. On several paydays his boss sent David racing across the city to pick up an emergency loan to keep the company’s paychecks from bouncing.
DAVID SARNOFF’S GROWING curiosity about his new employer began to focus, naturally enough, on the mysterious character whose name was on the door but whom Sarnoff had never seen around the office.
Guglielmo Marconi—or at least the Guglielmo Marconi of David Sarnoff’s imagination—was equal parts inventor, businessman, and showman. After a few months on the job, David Sarnoff caught wind of the Italian inventor’s upcoming visit to New York. For the rest of his life, David Sarnoff would remember hiding out in the Marconi Company office, hoping for a moment alone with his new idol. The inventor seemed charmed, or at least bemused, at the sight of the small, bold messenger boy popping out from behind a row of equipment and introducing himself with all the seriousness he could muster.