WITH HIS INTRODUCTION OF TELEVISION AT THE WORLD’S FAIR, David Sarnoff had left RCA exposed to a patent-infringement lawsuit from Philo T. Farnsworth. RCA would have likely lost such a battle given the fact that it had lost all its previous patent fights against Farnsworth. With RCA television sets for sale in department stores and with NBC broadcasting an extensive schedule of baseball, boxing, Broadway shows, and live dramas from Radio City, the risk of an embarrassing and expensive lawsuit was now too high for Sarnoff to endure. Faced with no alternative, he agreed in May 1939 to open serious negotiations to license the Farnsworth intellectual property his engineers were already incorporating into RCA’s products.
The two sides met in a conference room high up in the RCA Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Talks between RCA patent chief Otto Schairer and Farnsworth president Nick Nicholas got off to a shaky start, and discussions dragged on for months. “At first, they seemed so far apart that it looked utterly hopeless,” noted George Everson. “Only the clear underlying fact that neither company could get along without the other kept the discussions alive.” In September of 1939, full-blown war broke out in Europe, thus increasing the pressure on both sides to popularize television before the United States was drawn into a global conflict. By the end of the month, they came to terms: RCA would pay Farnsworth Television & Radio Corporation a fee of $1 million, plus ongoing royalties for every television set it sold.
This was a great victory for Farnsworth. He had refused to sell his television patents outright to RCA, and now he got the type of nonexclusive deal he wanted all along; he was free to license his patents to all other manufacturers as well. For RCA, the deal was unprecedented. Never before had the corporation agreed to pay royalties to anyone. As he signed the contract at RCA headquarters in the presence of executives from both parties, Schairer had tears in his eyes as he reminded the assembled group how unusual this agreement was. At least that is how the Farnsworth executives remembered it. RCA forever denied that one of its corporate officers shed a tear on this occasion.
The licensing pact put Sarnoff and Farnsworth in an odd position. For the first time, they were on the same side, with the same interest in pushing television forward to their mutual benefit. If any other company wanted to enter the television business, they now needed two licenses, to make use of the patents of both. The meaning was clear: Philo T. Farnsworth had denied David Sarnoff the television monopoly he had coveted, but now that their battle was over, they needed to find a way to cooperate.
When the U.S. Senate held hearings on the television standards process in April of 1940, David Sarnoff went on the record with this tribute: “It is only fair that I should mention this,” he said. “An American inventor who I think has contributed—outside RCA itself—more to television than anybody else in the United States, is Mr. Farnsworth, of the Farnsworth Television System. I believe the industry will require the license under the Farnsworth patents was well as the RCA patents if they are to go ahead.”
In the summer of 1940, the Federal Communications Commission took up the issues raised in the Senate, aimed at putting an end to the technical squabbling among rival television manufacturers. All the companies that wanted to produce televisions, or were making them already, had to come together to try and hammer out a standard broadcasting format. Television makers had to agree on a specific frequency for each channel on the dial, the FCC said, and they needed to settle on a specific number of image lines to be displayed on the viewing screen. If the public couldn’t be guaranteed that today’s television sets would be able to receive tomorrow’s programming—no matter who was broadcasting—they would never buy televisions en masse.
The urgency was obvious to David Sarnoff. With the World’s Fair introduction, he had expected to ignite a sudden firestorm of interest in television. Internal projections were for RCA to sell upward of 40,000 sets within the first year, but when the public purchased only a few hundred sets in the first six months, Sarnoff could see that his plan wasn’t working. He blamed Zenith and Philco for the failure, as they were publicly lambasting him for trying to flood the market with televisions before a standard was set. “Philco and Zenith were more interested in getting me than in creating a television industry,” Sarnoff said. “I’ve had plenty of cats and dogs thrown at me, but never like that.”
At the behest of the FCC, the standards effort was coordinated by the Radio Manufacturers Association (RMA), a private trade group that included all the major players. The messy proceedings persisted for months. RCA was pushing for a standard with 441 lines of resolution, while upstart Allen B. DuMont Laboratories showed it could produce sets displaying more than 600 lines. Philco at one point backed out, then jumped back in, while Zenith’s representatives were always enraged at RCA over something. In the middle of it all, CBS caused an uproar when it began demonstrating a low-resolution color system. Although it sported a mere three-inch screen and was based on a spinning, mechanical disk setup that was incompatible with electronic systems and thought to be obsolete, the color setup worked. Most everyone else voted down the CBS system, but it did result in further delays. Philo T. Farnsworth got so frustrated with the fighting that he disengaged himself and assigned another representative to do his company’s bidding.
Finally, the RMA’s National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) appointed an independent electrical engineering expert named Donald Glenn Fink to sort through and evaluate all the rival monochrome broadcasting formats. Fink settled on a standard he deemed an optimal balance in light of what the industry could produce and what was pleasing to the viewer. All televisions, Fink said, should display images with 525 lines of resolution at a rate of thirty frames per second. In April of 1941, this recommendation was accepted by the RMA and officially approved by the FCC, which then assigned channels two through thirteen to the very high frequency (VHF) band and set aside a portion of the ultrahigh frequency (UHF) band for channels operating above 300 megahertz. Channel one was reserved for police and fire department radio. With this, commercial television could begin at last.
The FCC-approved format has turned out to be incredibly resilient, enduring wave after wave of technological change, most notably the introduction of electronic color image scanning and transmission in the 1950s, as well as the advent of cable, videotape, big-screen TVs, and DVDs. The NTSC standard has staved off demand for so-called high-definition television for decades and remains today the most pervasive media format ever devised.
Yet it didn’t have a chance to catch on right away. Just seven months after the FCC approved commercial television, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Soon after, the U.S. government officially banned the production of consumer electronics altogether, diverting all parts, labor, and manufacturing capacity to the effort to win World War II. Most commercial television broadcasting was also suspended during the war.
With television now on hold, David Sarnoff became as determined to win the war as he was determined to win the television battle. He saw his military involvement as an honor of the highest degree and as tangible proof that he was an American patriot who had shed his immigrant heritage. In the early 1920s, he had joined the U.S. Army Reserves as a member of the Signal Corps, and RCA chairman James Harbord used his own military connections to win for Sarnoff the rank of lieutenant colonel, even though Sarnoff lacked the required experience. On weekends, Sarnoff would attend army seminars and functions. “No one,” said Harbord, “ever wore the uniform more proudly.” By the time the United States entered the war, Sarnoff was fifty years old and had been promoted to a full colonel.
On December 7, 1941, Sarnoff dispatched a telegram to President Roosevelt: “all our facilities are ready and at your instant service. we await your commands.” Thereafter, Sarnoff converted RCA into a military contractor, producing everything from radar tubes, sonar systems, and radio transmitters for the Allied communications effort. At its newly opened campus in Princeton, New Jersey, RCA Laboratories became devoted almost exclusively to wartime research and development, with a staff of 1,300 scientists and engineers.
In March of 1944, Sarnoff was summoned for an active-duty assignment, and was told to report directly to General Dwight D. Eisenhower in London. Without revealing the full details of the secret plan to storm the beaches of Normandy and free Europe from the Nazis, Eisenhower told Sarnoff to construct a powerful broadcasting station that could centralize all electronic communications in one place and relay information across the entire continent, an assignment that also brought Sarnoff into personal meetings with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. On D-day, June 6, 1944, the Allied Forces Network that Sarnoff put in place worked as planned; Allied generals used the network to coordinate history’s most massive military operation, and military journalists reported the news of the invasion to the rest of the world with unprecedented quickness. After France was liberated, Sarnoff played a key role in reconstructing war-torn French Radio, linking Paris once again with London and New York.
Upon his return to the States, Sarnoff spent several weeks in Washington, D.C., attending military briefings and pushing for a reward for his services. On December 7, 1944, Sarnoff received his desired prize when FDR appointed him an honorary brigadier general of the U.S. Army. Back in New York, he let the word spread through RCA that he was no longer Mr. Sarnoff; he was now to be called General Sarnoff, or simply General.
Shortly after the war ended, RCA chairman Harbord resigned and died, and Sarnoff added RCA chairman to a list of titles that still included RCA president and NBC chairman. Sarnoff packed his board of directors with former military officials and moved to boost his reputation even further when he made a job offer to Eisenhower himself after the triumphant five-star general received his ticker-tape parade in Manhattan. Under the terms of the offer, Eisenhower would be paid a generous salary to become the figurehead president of RCA. Eisenhower declined and accepted a less controversial job as the head of Columbia University, but the fact that the offer was taken seriously spoke volumes about General Sarnoff. His already lofty stature as a commanding authority figure of national importance had been increased tenfold.
Philo T. Farnsworth was only thirty-three years old when he achieved his patent-licensing victory over RCA. It was around this time that he was selected, along with Bill Paley of CBS, the actor Spencer Tracy, Nobel laureate Ernest Lawrence, and Yankee first-baseman Lou Gehrig, as one of the “Outstanding Young Men of 1939,” an annual list of prominent men in their thirties, created by the biographer Durward Howes, that was always reported far and wide in the press. For a short time, this list made the name Philo T. Farnsworth known across the United States.
The drawn-out standards process at the FCC along with the coming of the war convinced Farnsworth that his controlling patents would expire before his vision of television would be realized. This sent him into a deeply depressive state at a time when depression wasn’t treated like the disease it is. He began drinking not just at night but during the day. After Pem insisted that he go get medical help, he saw a doctor who suggested that Farnsworth take up smoking cigarettes to calm his nerves, and so he did.
The Farnsworth Television & Radio Corporation had already been relocated to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and was profitably making high-quality radios and phonographs as well as broadcasting programs via radio and an experimental television station. Phil and Pem finally moved out there in November of 1939, but this only made Phil even more depressed. “He found it difficult to adapt to the new environment,” wrote Pem, “where the priorities revolved around manufacturing instead of invention, where the principal objective was making money instead of progress.”
One day in early 1940, Farnsworth came home looking terribly ill, and he informed his wife that he just couldn’t keep on living this way. His mind was still actively conjuring inventions all the time, while his body always felt tired and worn. “It’s come to the point,” he told Pem, “of choosing whether I want to be a drunk or go crazy.” He was having a severe nervous breakdown yet refused to go see a doctor, relenting only when Pem threatened to pack up, take the kids, and leave him. The doctor prescribed some sort of liquid medication, which seemed to brighten Farnsworth’s spirits and ease his pain for a few days, but pretty soon he was just staying in bed, sleeping, and refusing food.
Finally, Pem received a referral to see a renowned doctor at the Brigham Hospital in Boston. Now weighing just 100 pounds and seemingly near death, Farnsworth was carried like a sick child by a friend to the train. When Phil and Pem arrived at the hospital in Boston, the doctor identified the drug Farnsworth had been taking as chloral hydrate, a highly addictive sedative that did far more harm than good. Phil made steady progress toward normal health after three months of rest and treatment at the hospital, but he was still depressed about television, and he refused to talk about the subject or even mention the word.
Phil and Pem spent the war years at their place in the woods of Maine. As he regained his strength, Phil worked with his brother Carl on building extensive additions to the house, including a large study, a new wing of bedrooms, a second floor, extra bathrooms, and closets, and they installed oil-fueled furnaces and an indoor swimming pool. After selling a large chunk of his company stock, which was now listed on the New York Stock Exchange, Farnsworth used the proceeds to buy eighty additional acres of adjacent land. He assembled a crew to build a farm for raising animals for food, and he supervised the construction of a small laboratory, where he, Cliff Gardner, and two other men resumed their television research.
Farnsworth received two important visitors during the early part of the war. One was Donald Lippincott, who was now serving as a colonel in charge of patents for the Army Signal Corps. Lippincott suggested that the military be allowed free use of Farnsworth’s patents in its effort to create advanced radar tubes, and Farnsworth agreed wholeheartedly. Lippincott then met with David Sarnoff in New York and got him to agree to the same.
The other visitor was David L. Webster. The head of the physics department at Stanford University, Webster had hired former Farnsworth employee Russell Varian, who developed at Stanford his pioneering radar tube. Webster asked Farnsworth to join a secret research project, which was based at the University of Chicago and led by Enrico Fermi. From what he could glean of the sketchy details, Farnsworth suspected that the military was developing an atomic weapon. In his ominous 1939 letter to FDR, Albert Einstein had initiated what later became known as the Manhattan Project by warning of a German effort to build the bomb, but Einstein himself refused to be personally involved in creating a weapon of mass destruction. Like Einstein, Farnsworth also refused to take part in the secret project.
Farnsworth’s company, however, was totally consumed by wartime production. Staffed by hundreds of men and women, its factories in Fort Wayne fulfilled millions of dollars of electronics contracts for the Pentagon.
Shortly before the war ended, Phil and Pem received some amazing news: their son Philo III scored so well on college preperatory exams that he was admitted to MIT at the age of fifteen. After the war ended, however, the family was struck by a spell of tragedy. Phil’s brothers Lincoln and Carl crashed while flying a private airplane. Lincoln survived, but Carl died. Not long after that, a raging forest fire swept through western Maine and consumed the entire town of Brownfield, including Farnsworth’s house, laboratory, and farmlands, just days before a scheduled appointment to properly insure their property. Phil and Pem were able to escape with little more than their lives, the clothing on their backs, and the original lab journals from Green Street.
Finally, in 1947, the day Farnsworth had been dreading arrived. His seventeen-year patents on the television camera and television receiver expired. Farnsworth still held more than 100 other television-related patents, some of which were quite valuable, and many had up to ten years of life remaining, but the two golden ones had now lapsed into the public domain, and all promises of royalty payments for them ceased, just weeks before the sudden breakout of a nationwide television obsession that seemed at first like a fad but grew only more intense over time.