IN THE SUMMER OF 1921, WHILE THE FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD PHILO T. Farnsworth was conjuring the idea of electronic television, David Sarnoff was riding the express elevator to his new office at the Radio Corporation of America. The company was headquartered in a suite near the summit of New York City’s Woolworth Building, at 233 Broadway, then the tallest skyscraper in the world. Sarnoff had just been granted the rank of general manager, which came with a salary of $15,000 per year. For the first time, he had the power to hire, fire, initiate, and negotiate.
Just thirty years old, Sarnoff had eyes of cold blue steel that he would use to compel important people into important conversations. His hairline was still dark and youthful, but his middle was beginning to expand due to his hearty appetite for bread, meat, and potatoes and the fact that he had hardly engaged in a moment of physical exercise in his life. His soldierlike walk and his inner air pump of self-assurance seemed to lift his five-foot-eight-inch frame to a loftier height.
Sarnoff was a man of obsessions, and his current fixation was on turning radio into an entertainment device. Until then, wireless was known mainly as a hero of the Great War. German U-boats had cut the underseas cables that allowed the Americans and British to communicate by wire with their naval fleets. To the rescue came the new technology of wireless, which enabled Allied commanders to transmit through the air messages encoded into bleeps and blips. When President Woodrow Wilson took to the airwaves to broadcast his peace proposal, the Fourteen Points, people all over the United States and Europe got the message with unprecedented quickness. After the Armistice, wireless continued as America’s fastest-growing hobby. Tens of thousands of people each year were assembling primitive crystal radio sets. At first, they were content just to pick up bits of Morse code and the occasional live human voice.
Sarnoff sensed a hunger for something more, and he had a plan to deliver it. There was a boxing match set for Saturday afternoon, the second of July. The venue was known as Boyle’s Thirty Acres, an outdoor arena in Jersey City just over the Hudson River across from lower Manhattan. The promoter of the bout, the smooth-talking Tex Rickard, had convinced the press that this was not just a sweaty brawl but a battle of good versus evil. Cast as the role of the villain was legendary heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey. The public loved to hate this man. Known as the Manassa Mauler, he was a scar-faced bruiser, alleged wife beater, and, worst of all, a draft dodger. The valiant challenger was French champ Georges Carpentier, a handsome, graceful ladies’ man and a decorated combat pilot.
Several years after the episode, as Sarnoff rose to prominence, he would begin to tell the press the dramatic story of his master plan to manufacture the first big electronic media event. According to Sarnoff’s tale, his first order of business was a call to Rickard to ask if he could place a microphone at ringside. The promoter agreed. Then Sarnoff set his sights on a powerful new radio transmitter made by RCA’s corporate parent, General Electric. The instrument was supposed to be delivered by rail to the Navy Department in Washington, D.C., but Sarnoff made a call to a loyal friend of RCA, former assistant navy secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the two arranged to have the transmitter diverted to a secret shed near the sports arena.
Sarnoff then persuaded telephone company technicians to connect the microphone to the transmitter, and he enlisted some of his engineers to attach a makeshift transmission antenna to a nearby railroad crossing tower.
To infuse a noble purpose to the broadcast, Sarnoff came up with the idea of turning it into a charity event. He recruited Anne Morgan, daughter of financial baron J. P. Morgan, to help set up parties and gatherings in town halls, theaters, school auditoriums, Elks Clubs, anywhere that large groups could gather. In the New York area, Marcus Loew agreed to contribute the use of all his movie houses. Anne Morgan, with some assistance from Roosevelt, arranged hundreds of listening events, held throughout the Northeast. As a cover charge, attendees would bring cash donations for her charity, a committee for reconstructing war-torn France, as well as Roosevelt’s cause, the Navy Club. According to Sarnoff, all of this was done without the knowledge or consent of RCA’s top brass.
There was a small problem. Back then, radio receivers had earpieces or headphones, not speakers, as they were made for semiprivate communication between two people. Sarnoff located 300 of those old tulip-shaped phonograph horns, bought them for thirty cents apiece, and had his engineers go around rigging the horns to hundreds of radios. This way, big groups could listen.
More than 90,000 fans came to Boyle’s Thirty Acres by train on that hot July afternoon. It was the biggest crowd that had ever been assembled for a sporting event. Sarnoff sat at ringside next to his handpicked announcer, J. Andrew White, a boxing buff and the editor of RCA’s own magazine, Wireless Age. White had never done anything like this before—Sarnoff just happened to like his voice. Sitting there, dressed in his typical dark suit, white shirt, and silk tie, puffing on a cigar, Sarnoff didn’t exactly mesh with the shouting, hooting working-class crowd. He was perhaps the only person in the arena that night who didn’t care a whit for boxing or who won. His only concern was that the broadcast should come off without a hitch.
As usual, Dempsey showed no mercy on his opponent. He clobbered Carpentier to the ground in just eleven minutes on the official clock, with White describing every blow to an unseen audience. It was lucky for Sarnoff that the fight was short. The referee’s final count came right before an electrical overload blew out the borrowed equipment.
The broadcast had been received up to 500 miles away, with more than 300,000 people listening, the largest audience that had ever been assembled for anything, and newspaper headlines around the world lauded the event as a watershed for radio. Both Morgan and Roosevelt collected big bounties. Sarnoff’s boss, RCA president Edward Nally, who was away on business, sent a telegram from London that said: “You have made history.” The blessing from above had major ramifications. Sarnoff was now granted permission by Nally to construct a broadcast studio and transmission center in New York. Suddenly, everyone in the United States seemed to want two things: a radio and an opportunity to be on the radio. The Roaring Twenties were now good to go.
There is only one problem with this story. It’s only a story. Yes, Dempsey knocked out Carpentier in the fourth round at Boyle’s Thirty Acres in Jersey City. Yes, it was the first major sports broadcast, and yes, the excitement from that event helped set off the sudden explosion of radio. But David Sarnoff wasn’t the prime mover. Julius Hopp, a man no one remembers, was the real mastermind behind the broadcast that made history. In 1921, Hopp was the manager for concert events at Madison Square Garden, and the actual account of how this historic broadcast came together was published in vivid detail right after the event, in the August 1921 issue of Wireless Age. Sarnoff’s own story wouldn’t start appearing in the press until five years later.
According to the original account, it was Hopp, not Sarnoff, who presented the idea to Tex Rickard. The idea was sparked during Hopp’s attendance of an amateur radio announcers convention in New York several months earlier. He was impressed with the announcers’ skills and the equipment he saw on display there. As in the Sarnoff account, Rickard indeed loved the idea right away. After all, he was a boxing promoter. What’s not to like about magnifying your audience tenfold, a hundredfold, or more? But Rickard placed the task of acquiring the equipment and personnel in the hands of Hopp, not Sarnoff.
Anne Morgan did in fact handle the charity drive for French reconstruction, although no one ever confirmed how much money was really raised, and the transmitter was obtained with the help of Franklin Roosevelt. Sarnoff may have had a role in enlisting their support, but he didn’t conceive or arrange the entire production, as he would later claim.
Scores of people worked along with Hopp to broadcast the fight, so many that the National Amateur Wireless Association issued to each of them a certificate as “a permanent record of invaluable co-operation in making available to the American public a description transmitted by radio telephone of the World’s Championship Boxing Contest.” The certificate went on to honor “the unprecedented undertaking and scientific triumph of simultaneous transmission of the human voice to 300,000 persons without the aid of wires, including audiences in theatres within an area of 125,000 square miles.”
Under an official seal were the signatures of Anne Morgan, Tex Rickard, J. Andrew White, Jack Dempsey, Georges Carpentier, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Sarnoff’s signature was not included. The certificate itself was reproduced in the magazine, along with dramatic photos of the event and the radio equipment, plus a list of all the theaters that held listening parties. The largest gathering, some 1,200 people, was packed into a Loews Theater on Broadway and Forty-fifth Street. There was no mention of David Sarnoff anywhere in this account.
David Sarnoff was indeed at the event. He saw everything and was able to describe it in detail years later. But all evidence points to a much more modest role, perhaps as the supervisor of the ringside equipment, certainly as a middle manager anticipating accolades from his bosses. On the morning after the fight, the New York Times noted at the very end of a long series of articles that the telephones at ringside were operated by a “David Saranoff.”
The Dempsey broadcast was just one of several episodes that David Sarnoff selectively edited, embellished, positioned, sharpened, backlighted, and recast with himself in the spotlight. But how did he do it? And more important, why did he do it?
The actual facts of his life story seemed dramatic enough. Like Philo T. Farnsworth, Sarnoff was the eldest child in a poor family of a religious minority. He too was born in a remote, rural area, in the humblest of houses, without any modern conveniences. His birthplace, however, was halfway around the world. The town was but a speck in the vast pale of Russia. Called Uzlian, it was a shtetl in the province of Minsk. For decades, the czars relegated their third-class Jewish subjects to these bleak villages with their long, white winters. Uzlian was one of many ghetto enclaves where Yiddish was spoken and the Talmud was studied. Life in this particular shtetl was so isolated that it wasn’t even interrupted by the pogroms, the waves of unwelcome and violent visits from cruel Cossacks or drunken peasants.
David’s parents had high hopes for him. They fully expected him to be a rabbi. At age five, he was sent off to live in the village of Korme with his granduncle, a learned rabbinical scholar, to study the Torah and memorize the entire Jewish liturgy. Located more than 100 miles from home, this new place was even more secluded than Uzlian. During his four years there, David was all but completely separated from normal childhood pastimes as basic as playing games and laughing, which probably led to his workaholic discipline. But the more David was forced into rote memorization, the less he was interested. Later, he would completely reject his orthodox background in favor of the reformed, Americanized rendition of the religion.
While David was off studying, his father left for the United States to work odd jobs and save enough money to send for his family. In the year 1900, word arrived that it was time to pack up and go.
At the age of nine, David embarked on a trip not unlike Farnsworth’s early journey from Utah to Idaho. On horse-drawn carts laden with bundles of clothing, linen, and kosher foods, he rode with his mother and two brothers to Minsk. It was the first time he had ever seen paved roads and streetcars and buildings higher than one story. David also witnessed Cossacks charging on horseback against a large gathering of demonstrators demanding political freedom. As the cavalry advanced on the crowd, he clung to his mother’s skirt and recoiled in horror. “I saw them lashing out with their whips, trampling women and children with their horses’ hooves,” he later wrote. “It trampled out of me any lingering feeling I might have had for Russia as my homeland.”
Like millions of others in the immigrant tide, Sarnoff would board a steamship and pass over the Atlantic not knowing a word of English. At one point at the outset of the long journey, the family’s bin of food was mistakenly mixed up with other luggage and tossed down into the cargo hold. Seeing this, David leaped a dangerous distance from the ship deck to snatch it back. Fortunately, he landed on something soft. A crew member, witnessing this, said: “Boy, you’re going to do all right in America.”
It’s quite possible that these little childhood tales are also apocryphal, as Sarnoff’s own accounts are all that survive, but they certainly ring true to Sarnoff’s future. He arrived with little more than a revulsion for Russia and an idealized vision of what was then still referred to as the New World. Almost as soon as he stepped onto U.S. soil, he felt newly baptized as an American. He would soon grow determined to fill the empty void of his past with an entirely new self, created from scratch.
His family ended up wedged into the most cramped section of Manhattan’s dangerous, filthy, and crowded Lower East Side tenements. In many ways, this was worse than the conditions in Russia. At least the shtetl didn’t rumble around the clock from adjacent elevated trains. At least the shtetl didn’t reek from rotten rubbish and squalid sewage. Escaping this new ghetto would be like a second immigration.
In America, though, he had the freedom and opportunity to use the shabby setting as a springboard to success. Sarnoff’s assimilation was a dive into the pool of concrete capitalism on the streets of the city. He mastered English quickly, then peddled penny newspapers to help support the family, usually rising at 4 A.M. to deliver copies of the Jewish Daily Forward. Legend has it that he soon owned his own newsstand, in Hell’s Kitchen on the west side of the city, before deciding that he wanted something with more of a future.
By the time he was fourteen, it was clear than his father was dying of tuberculosis. The support of the family fell to the teenager, so he dropped out of school after eighth grade and went looking for full-time work. He ended up in the lobby of the New York Herald Building, which jutted to the sky from the square at Thirty-fifth and Broadway. It was the city’s tallest at the time, before the Woolworth Building would take the title for the next few years. Sarnoff marched into an office on the ground floor to inquire whether the company needed a messenger boy. It turned out that the people inside were indeed in the market for one, but Sarnoff had entered the wrong office. This wasn’t the Herald but a sister firm called the Commercial Cable Company, which made its money sending, receiving, and delivering communiqués via telegraph.
After just a few months on the job, the manager fired Sarnoff when he refused to work during the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but by now, he’d been bitten by the telegraph bug and had learned how to send and transcribe messages. Within a few weeks of being fired, he had heard of the potential for a somewhat similar job. He showed up, with telegraph key in hand, at the Wall Street offices of the American Marconi Company, which was engaged in the radically new business of overseas wireless communications.
Not long after Sarnoff joined the firm, Guglielmo Marconi himself paid a visit to the office. What happened next was later corroborated by the famous Italian inventor. Sarnoff went out of his way to shake the hand of Marconi and then managed to strike up a lengthy conversation with him. In place of his real father, a weak man with a hacking cough, a man he hardly knew and didn’t especially admire, Sarnoff had secretly idolized Marconi and would come to regard him as a surrogate father. Marconi was already being mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate for his 1896 discovery of how to transmit information signals through the ether to an aerial. He was a dogged self-promoter, and the press fawned over him as “the sorcerer of the airwaves.”
The young Sarnoff was struck by the elegant way the trim Marconi dressed, held his cigarette, and moved around with a gold-plated walking stick, graciously greeting all the employees. He identified with the fact that Marconi had only a grade-school education. He would come to believe the popular myth that Marconi invented radio. It wasn’t quite true. Marconi invented the wireless telegraph, the precursor to what became radio. Yet millions of people believed that Marconi did it all, and Sarnoff later would help perpetrate that legend.
On the spot, Sarnoff offered to act as Marconi’s personal messenger. As luck would have it, his hero happened to need one at the time. The assignment was more interesting than Sarnoff even imagined. Marconi was by then an international sex symbol and was in high demand among the young ladies of New York’s upper crust. The Italian could not resist playing the part, and so Sarnoff found himself busily bicycling boxes of chocolates and bouquets of roses to plush apartments all over town. On subsequent visits to New York, Marconi began treating Sarnoff not just as a messenger but as a protégé of sorts, answering Sarnoff’s many technical questions and offering the teenager access to company files and papers. Sarnoff thus became the sorcerer’s apprentice.
From his indelible exposure to Marconi and from reading in his American grade school about Lincoln, whom he also came to identify with, Sarnoff began to believe more and more strongly in what was known as the Great Man Theory of History. “The history of the world is but the biography of great men,” wrote the Victorian philosopher Thomas Carlyle. “In all epochs of the world’s history, we shall find the great man to have been the indispensable savior of his epoch.” Opponents of this theory, most notably Lev Tolstoy, argued that history was the result of much broader social and economic forces, with prominent individuals acting merely as instruments of those changes. But Sarnoff was squarely in Carlyle’s camp on this one.
Sarnoff began to infuse his own life with a sense of destiny, as if every move he made was a step toward his final goal, and that goal was greatness. He began to see the birth of broadcasting as not just a once-in-a-lifetime event but a transformation that would only come along once in human history. He became determined to be the great leader of the most important company in the world’s most dynamic industry. Not just a businessman, but a Great World Figure and a prophet of the electronic age.
Sarnoff’s first big step on his march to greatness supposedly came after he was promoted at American Marconi, to the position of wireless telegraph operator, for the wage of $7.50 per week. He was stationed on top of the Wanamaker department store, at the corner of Ninth and Broadway. It acted as a sister station to a larger installation on top of the store’s main building in Philadelphia. Mainly, this New York operation served as a publicity showcase both for American Marconi and for the purpose of attracting more customers to the store. Visitors would take the elevator up to the top floor to peer into the future of communication.
The job was relatively easy. The twenty-year-old operator would explain the wonders of wireless to semicurious shoppers and chat with amateur ham operators in and around the city. The regular business hours of the job enabled him to take an intensive evening course in electrical engineering at Pratt Institute. Out of a class of sixty students, Sarnoff later claimed, he was only one of eleven to complete the program, and the other ten all had high school or college degrees. However, neither Pratt nor Sarnoff were ever able to produce evidence of his graduation.
The tale of the Pratt degree was hardly tall compared to the other one he told from that time. At 10:25 P.M. on Sunday night, April 14, 1912, Sarnoff was said to be operating the apparatus atop the Wanamaker. “Leaning forward suddenly,” an RCA publicity release stated years later, “he pressed the earphones more closely to his head. Through the sputtering and static. . .he was hearing a message: S.S. Titanic ran into iceberg. Sinking fast. For the next seventy-two hours, Sarnoff sat at his post, straining to catch every signal that might come through the air. That demanded a good operator in those days of undeveloped radio. By order of the President of the United States, every other wireless station in the country was closed to stop interference. Not until he had given the world the name of the last survivor, three days and three nights after that first message, did Sarnoff call his job done.”
The original distress signal came from the RMS Olympic, a sister ship more than 1,000 miles away from the Titanic. The two ships were in touch via each of their on-board wireless stations. How fantastic this must have been for Sarnoff, to be the one and only person to pick up this urgent piece of news. If it really happened.
RCA’s corporate version was culled from Sarnoff’s own account, as told fourteen years after the tragedy to a reporter at the Saturday Evening Post:
I have often been asked what were my emotions at that moment. I doubt if I felt [anything] at all during the seventy-two hours after the news came. I gave the information to the press associations and newspapers at once, and it was as if bedlam had been let loose. Telephones were whirring, extras were being cried, crowds were gathering around newspaper bulletin boards. Everybody was trying to get and send messages. Some who owned sets had relatives or friends aboard the Titanic, and they made frantic efforts to learn something definite. Finally, President Taft ordered all stations in the vicinity except ours closed down so that we might have no interference in the reception of official news. . . . Word spread swiftly that a list of survivors were being received at Wanamakers, and the station was quickly stormed by the grief-stricken and curious. Eventually, a police guard was called out and the curious held back, but some of those most interested in the fate of the doomed ship were allowed in the wireless room. Vincent Astor, whose father John Jacob Astor was drowned, was among those who looked over my shoulder as I copied the list of survivors. . . . Much of the time I sat with the earphones on my head and nothing coming in. It seemed as if the whole anxious world was attached to those phones during the seventy-two hours I crouched tense in that station. I felt my responsibility keenly, and weary though I was, could not have slept. At the end of my first long tryst with the sea, I was whisked in a taxicab to the old Astor House on lower Broadway and given a Turkish rub. Then I was rushed in another taxicab to Sea Gate [at the southern tip of Brooklyn], where communication was being kept up with the Carpathia, the vessel which brought in the survivors of the ill-fated Titanic. . . . Here again I sat for hours—listening. Now we began to get the names of some of those who were known to have gone down. This was worse than the other list had been—heartbreaking in its finality—a death knell to hope. I passed the information on to a sorrowing world, and when messages ceased to come in, fell down like a log at my place and slept the clock around.
Sarnoff told and retold the story—how he was the sole link between the sinking ship and the rest of the world—to illustrate how radio first came to prominence in the public mind. Of course, he also aimed to show that his own destiny was intertwined with the fate of broadcasting itself. “The Titanic disaster brought radio to the front,” he would say, “and also me.”
Like a game of telephone, the account would grow more and more embellished, distorted, and heroic as it was retold. When it was printed in Fortune magazine in 1932, the tale was repeated as if factual, with no mention that Sarnoff was the source, and by the time the fable had made its way into official biographies, it became officially true. The story wouldn’t be refuted during Sarnoff’s lifetime.
At best, Sarnoff was one of many useful wireless operators scrambling as well as he could amid the crisis. He was not the solitary hero he made himself out to be. And common sense tells us that other facts may have been embellished, if not completely fabricated.
The Wanamaker store in New York kept business hours, so the wireless station would almost certainly have been closed so late on a Sunday night, when the Olympic’s relay signal was sent. And if the event brought David Sarnoff to fame at this young age, as his official biographer would later note, there would have been some evidence of this in the media at the time. But the New York Times and several other newspapers that covered the tragedy extensively did not mention Sarnoff or the Wanamaker store. Many wireless stations were indeed told to shut down to reduce interference, but contrary to Sarnoff’s account, the Wanamaker station in New York was actually one of those that did shut down for a time soon after the ship went down, as verified by a notice in the Boston American.
This was also the only newspaper known to have mentioned David Sarnoff during the entire episode. The American was a Hearst publication, which already had an exclusive agreement with Wanamaker to publish whatever news its Marconi stations gathered. The April 16 edition of the paper did indeed report, in just a few paragraphs on an inside page, on the activity at the Wanamaker station, but it in no way singled out Sarnoff. The story made it clear that Sarnoff was only one of three skilled operators on the job at the station; the other two were Jack Binns and J. H. Hughes. “Faint signals were heard from the Olympic,” the paper said, “but owing to the terrific confusion and disruption of static conditions, Mr. Hughes was unable to pick up the strands of direct communication.”
What’s more, there’s no evidence that President Taft was involved in the episode in the way that Sarnoff later claimed. In fact, Taft claimed bitterly that officials at American Marconi were actually ordering operators aboard the Carpathia to hold back information about the hundreds of survivors in order to string the story out, bring more attention to the role of wireless, and perhaps auction off the complete account later. Marconi himself, who happened to be holding a ticket for the Titanic’s now-canceled return trip to England, later admitted that this was indeed true.
The Herald covered this story on April 21, under the headline: “Keep Your Mouth Shut; Big Money for You,’ Was Message to Hide News.”
While the world was waiting three days for information concerning the fate of the Titanic, for part of the time at least, details concerning the disaster were being withheld by the wireless operator of the steamship Carpathia under specific orders from T. W. Sammis, chief engineer of the Marconi Wireless Company of America, who had arranged the sale of the story. This was admitted yesterday by Mr. Sammis, who defended his action. He said he was justified for getting for the wireless operators the largest amount he could for the details of the sinking of the ship, the rescue of the passengers and the other information the world had waited for.
This little revelation produced only a small scandal and was of course totally overshadowed by the Titanic tragedy itself. Instead of being punished, Marconi and his company were richly rewarded. The role of wireless in ship-to-shore safety and in the transmission of important notices was now brought into sharp relief, and orders to install and upgrade equipment flooded the company. In the months after the Titanic went down, American Marconi’s stock skyrocketed. Yes, 1,517 people were dead. But the electronic news business was on its way.
David Sarnoff’s own account of this episode started to surface ten years later. The Titanic tale, along with the Dempsey broadcast and other exaggerated episodes of his early career, were planted in the press for a very good reason. Beginning in 1922, Sarnoff was suddenly thrust into a very high-profile and unpopular role as the patent policeman for RCA. His mythology was intended to counterbalance negative portrayals, and he needed these yarns to impress upon the public that he was first and foremost a great visionary, not the hard-nosed businessman he was becoming.
The company’s sudden patent dilemma was rooted in the formation of RCA itself. The corporation was born in 1919 not as an entrepreneurial venture but as a government proclamation. With its success during the war, wireless was deemed too important to be left to a foreign power, even a friendly one. The Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company pioneered the proliferation of wireless, but the company was headquartered in Great Britain. The U.S. Navy and later the U.S. Congress decided that all the patents of its American subsidiary must be controlled by Americans.
Due to its leadership building the most powerful radio transmitters, General Electric was granted that opportunity. By congressional mandate, GE engulfed the assets, including the entire staff, of American Marconi and pooled the Marconi patents with its own. GE’s respected general counsel, Owen Young, was named chairman of the new firm. Edward Nally, a top American Marconi executive, was appointed president, and Nally’s assistant, David Sarnoff, was named RCA’s commercial manager, a title he held for less than two years before his next promotion.
RCA was thus born as a monopoly, but Sarnoff thought it wasn’t the right kind of monopoly. It was Sarnoff who convinced Young that the biggest opportunity for radio would be not as an overseas communications tool but as a domestic entertainment medium. In January of 1920, he had sent a twenty-eight-page memo to Young proposing the creation of what he called a Radio Music Box, an idea that he said he had been honing for the past five years. Hugo Gernsback’s magazines had been filled with predictions of radio as an entertainment device for at least that long, but Sarnoff was now in a unique position to make it all happen. In his memo, he forecasted that RCA could sell a million such radios within three years—but only if the company were to move quickly.
As a first order of business, RCA’s patent portfolio needed to be expanded. In particular, it did not own the rights to the “audion” tube, a cornerstone invention that enabled modern radios to receive signals from great distances. The audion had been invented by Lee De Forest, a minister’s son from Alabama. Hugo Gernsback, among others, often referred to De Forest as the real “father of radio broadcasting,” because his achievement was more important than Marconi’s when it came to building tube radios for households, but De Forest, strapped for cash, had since sold his patent to AT&T, and Sarnoff knew that RCA couldn’t dominate radio without it. Sarnoff urged Owen Young, the chairman of RCA, to obtain the rights to the audion and many other key patents from AT&T in return for 10 percent of RCA stock. The deal was done.
A similar agreement was struck with Westinghouse, which was rapidly expanding into broadcasting. The household appliance maker set up the world’s first regular broadcasting station, KDKA of Pittsburgh, and built several other radio stations on the top of its manufacturing plants. By 1920, KDKA made history by broadcasting live returns of a presidential election, telling listeners that Republican Warren Harding had defeated Democrat James Cox and his running mate, Franklin Roosevelt.
What’s more, Westinghouse owned several crucial transmission circuit patents that it had purchased from Edwin Howard Armstrong, who ranked with De Forest as another key inventor of modern radio. The son of a middle-class New York family, Armstrong was already growing wealthy from the proceeds his inventions yielded. Most important, Armstrong invented “regeneration,” a circuit that greatly amplified signal strength and made long-range transmission possible. For exclusive rights to its patent portfolio, Westinghouse received about 20 percent of RCA stock. In return for an additional 4 percent of RCA, Sarnoff obtained key antenna patents from United Fruit, which had developed valuable antennae to communicate with its Latin American banana boats. After the stock-for-patent swaps, GE still retained the largest block of RCA shares, about 30 percent. The remaining 36 percent was distributed to executives and brokerage houses.
RCA now controlled everything on the board, from Baltic Avenue to Boardwalk, creating a true radio monopoly, and Sarnoff was the man who had instigated RCA’s position in this fledgling industry. RCA thus became more than just a corporation. It was built like a trust, in the old-style tradition of the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, and the Vanderbilts. Critics called it a “combine.” It was a capitalist machine that controlled more than 2,000 patents and had no competition anywhere in sight.
Everything was neatly planned, with RCA acting as the coordinating body and sales agent for radio receivers, transmitters, and other gear. AT&T, GE, and Westinghouse would share in the manufacturing. Bureaucratic by design, the radio combine came complete with coordinating committees and governing boards.
In the months following the Dempsey fight in 1921, demand for radio sets materialized with an unexpected ferocity. It took decades for the electric light, the telephone, and the automobile to reach millions of households, but with radio, there was no need for new infrastructure, such as roads or wires to people’s homes. It seemed to catch on at the speed of sound.
Even with their methodical planning and negotiating, Sarnoff and RCA were caught off guard in 1922. It took months to ramp up production of RCA’s new Radiola sets and get them to dealers. Meanwhile, new vacuum tube sets with speakers were introduced by RCA rivals, and they began flying off the shelves at department stores and electronics dealers. More than 200 set makers and 5,000 parts distributors sprung up practically overnight. Suddenly, there were new radio brands, the most notable of which were from the Philadelphia Storage Battery Company, or Philco, and a Chicago electronics firm named Zenith. Technically, none of these companies were operating legally, since RCA held all the patents. But what could it do in the face of such chaos?
Radio wasn’t just a business; it was a craze. Getting into broadcasting seemed too cheap and easy for one corporation to control it. Transmitters were too affordable to buy, and operating them was too simple. A cover of Hugo Gernsback’s Radio News magazine captured it perfectly, when it depicted a cartoon monkey wearing headphones, operating a giant transmitter. The U.S. Department of Commerce had approved licenses for dozens of new stations. Audiences in New York City, Schenectady, Pittsburgh, Springfield (Massachusetts), Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles were exploding. Program schedules were appearing in local newspapers across the country.
Pretty soon there were hundreds of applicants for new radio licenses, plus hundreds more that operated without a license on pirated wavelengths, often leading to airwave wars and legal battles. The government and the courts were backlogged. Anyone who could sing a few notes, play a few tunes, or read aloud formed lines out the doors of studios, often spilling into the streets. The airwaves were supposedly owned by the public, and in Chicago, mobs formed demanding airtime. Everyone except mimes wanted in on the action.
Someone had to bring order to the industry. Someone had to subdue the mob that was running away with the radio business. Someone had to enforce the patents. Sarnoff, already the head of RCA’s patent committee, was the logical choice to assume the role, and he jumped at the chance. In the spirit of the most wildly unpopular law of the day, Sarnoff would institute a prohibition in the radio industry.
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By this time, Sarnoff was married, and his mother had been the matchmaker. At her neighborhood synagogue, she met the mother of a French immigrant family, and the two schemed to bring together their son and their daughter. Lizette Hermant was blonde, slim, and fair-skinned, and when they met for a blind date, David was instantly attracted to her French accent, her quick wit, and her relaxed temperament. She knew nothing about radio, and he knew no French. “So what else could we do?” Sarnoff later said. They were married on the Fourth of July in a Bronx synagogue and moved into a house in leafy Mount Vernon, just north of the city. Shortly after receiving his promotion, Sarnoff rolled into their driveway behind the wheel of their first car, a Lincoln.
The suburban lifestyle was not for him. In his new, more intense role at RCA, Sarnoff was spending almost all of his waking hours, including most weekends, at the office. He came to begrudge the time wasted commuting by train back and forth. Besides, he didn’t particularly enjoy the outdoors or the peace and quiet, so selling the house made perfect sense. The couple moved back to Manhattan into a spacious apartment on the Upper East Side.
At the office, Sarnoff orchestrated his patent clampdown. He couldn’t sue everyone at once. Besides, most radio companies were fly-by-night operations that wouldn’t be around to pay up even if they lost. He had to pick his targets carefully. In a federal court, he launched a lawsuit against A. H. Grebe, one of the biggest radio brands at the time. He also put a squeeze on distributors and dealers. RCA would now refuse to sell tubes and parts to dealers that didn’t carry RCA’s entire line of radios, and anyone who wanted a replacement tube had to return the used, burned-out tube for credit. It was a way of trying to shutter the black market for parts to build infringing sets.
The judge took one look at the RCA lawsuit against Grebe, and he immediately slapped an injunction on the smaller company. The case was clear. RCA had the patents, and Grebe didn’t. The injunction made it impossible for Grebe to continue, and the company almost went out of business. The bosses at RCA liked what they saw. Sarnoff had committed his first public execution.
Immediately, a group of independent radio makers formed an association to fight back in the press and to lobby Washington to take action against the RCA patent pool. The president of Zenith, Eugene McDonald, spearheaded the effort. His criticism of RCA as a monopolist and a predator often veered to personal attacks on Sarnoff that were tinged with anti-Semitic euphemisms of the era, such as his references to Sarnoff’s “Russian tricks.” The attacks stung and created a huge public relations crisis. The RCA radio combine, according to the New York Times, served “to intimidate the trade and to make the evasion of anti-trust laws possible.”
This is when Sarnoff began spending more and more time cultivating his image. To head off the emerging caricature as the repressive bully of broadcasting, he began granting interviews and speaking at important functions. He told everyone who would listen about his immigrant background, about his heroic role in the Titanic episode, and about how he engineered the Dempsey broadcast. He especially delighted in dusting off a copy of a memo that he claimed he wrote in 1915, but the original document was never found. In that memo, he predicted all the things about radio that were now coming true. He said the only thing he got wrong was that the radio was catching on even faster than he had forecasted.
The message to Sarnoff’s enemies and potential rivals couldn’t be clearer. Here was a man who could foresee and then mold the future according to his will. At the same time, he could rewrite the past to the way he wanted it to be remembered. He became the personification of the radio combine itself. If you got on the wrong side of Sarnoff, he could steamroll right over you and see to it that no one looked back on your remains.