AS THE WAR WAS COMING TO A END, GENERAL DAVID SARNOFF CALLED an all-hands meeting of RCA’s top officers. “Gentlemen,” he said, “the RCA has one priority: television. Whatever resources are needed will be provided. This time we’re going to get the job done. There’s a vast market out there, and we’re going to capture it before anyone else.”
As soon as the war was over, Sarnoff went on the road to convince all NBC radio affiliates to upgrade their equipment and air NBC television programs. By then, the FCC, concerned about a stranglehold on competition, had forced RCA to divest half of its broadcast holdings, so Sarnoff had chosen to keep the NBC Red network and to sell for $8 million the NBC Blue network, which was soon renamed the American Broadcasting Company, or ABC.
By the end of 1946, RCA’s production lines were stamping out sets with a ten-inch viewing screen and a retail price of $385. Creative programming began cropping up around the country. In Chicago, the former Farnsworth and RCA employee Bill Eddy hired Arch Brolly, another Farnsworth alum, and began operating WBKB-TV. Eddy produced a puppet show he called Kukla, Fran & Ollie, got a zookeeper named Marlin Perkins to show off his animals, hired young newscasters named Hugh Downs and Mike Wallace, and made a two-year deal with Phil Wrigley to televise Cubs games at no cost.
Starting in the fall of 1947, television caught on even more ferociously than radio did a quarter century earlier. American consumers bought 1 million sets within two years, with 80 percent of the market controlled by RCA. In 1948, Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater debuted on NBC, and CBS responded with a variety hour hosted by Ed Sullivan. The average television family was now watching for more than three hours each day, and early TV owners often had to set up numerous chairs in their living rooms to share their viewing with their neighbors. Restaurants, nightclubs, and movie theaters in major metro areas experienced a sharp drop in business. When an NBC drama series called Kraft Television Theater plugged a new product called Cheez Whiz, Americans bought tons of Cheez Whiz, and the meaning was clear: if television could sell Cheez Whiz, it could sell anything. Advertising dollars quickly shot past the $100-million mark, and RCA’s total television investment to date was rapidly recouped many times over.
On the evening of January 7, 1949, NBC aired “Television’s Twenty Fifth Anniversary Special,” a milestone that must have seemed odd to the lion’s share of viewers who had their televisions only for a year or two at most. The date was selected to commemorate the December 29, 1923, filing of Vladimir Zworykin’s patent application. On the program, David Sarnoff spoke from his office in Rockefeller Center, telling the viewing public his story of how television was invented and how it works. By his side was Zworykin, introduced as the “inventor of television.” That broadcast probably reached a greater number of people in a half hour than all the people who had ever heard or read the name Philo T. Farnsworth over a lifetime.
The following year, Sarnoff lobbied the Radio and Television Manufacturers Association to bestow on him the title “Father of Television.” His effort was successful, and RCA memos informed all employees that these designations were official: only David Sarnoff was to be called the Father of Television, and only Vladimir Zworykin was to be called the Inventor of Television. No one disputed it.
In January of 1948, Phil and Pem flew to Fort Wayne, and Farnsworth received a hero’s welcome from the Farnsworth Corporation’s employees, all of whom wanted to shake his hand. But there was bad news from the company’s president, Nick Nicholas. As Farnsworth already knew, the company had designed a complete line of television sets, from portable tabletop models to handsome console sets for living rooms. It had even acquired a furniture company to produce the wooden cabinets. Samples were ready in late 1946, and the corporation then spent $500,000 advertising them in glossy magazines. But the incredible demand for television sets had surged past available supplies of crucial parts, and some of those parts were radio devices only available from RCA. There were now seventy-five manufacturers of television sets in the United States, and RCA had always managed to put the Farnsworth Corporation at the very bottom of its priority list for those parts. Nicholas had some more bad news. The manufacturing delay was now exacerbated by the fact that the banks were calling in the loans that the company had taken out to retool its plants during the war.
Fired up by the challenge, a reinvigorated Farnsworth went to work while Pem set up a new home in Fort Wayne. Pretty soon, Farnsworth had television sets rolling off the assembly lines, and Nicholas got the banks to give them a one-year reprieve. To promote sales to high-end customers, Farnsworth Television signed on as the sponsor for ABC’s Metropolitan Opera program, shown in sixty-two cities on Sunday afternoons. In September of 1948, Pem gave birth to their fourth son, Kent, and it seemed as if Philo T. Farnsworth had embarked on a new beginning.
But it was really the end of his television efforts, as this final burst of activity came too late. When the one-year bank deadline was up, the company was in even deeper trouble. As a last-ditch effort to cover the loans, Nicholas offered to sell perpetual usage of all the remaining Farnsworth patents to RCA, GE, and Zenith for onetime royalty payments. All three firms accepted the offer, yielding a total of about $3 million, which put the Farnsworth Corporation just short of paying off its debt. With no more options, Nicholas moved to put the company up for sale, and since Farnsworth now owned only a sliver of shares, he was forced to go along.
In the spring of 1949, the New York–based industrial conglomerate International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT) swooped in to buy the remaining assets for $1.4 million in stock, a fire-sale price that included the provision that Farnsworth himself stay on as vice president of research. ITT never intended to remain in the television business, and that was made clear when it phased out production by the mid-1950s. What the ITT executives had really purchased was the brain of Philo T. Farnsworth.
ITT dubbed its new Fort Wayne division the Farnsworth Electronics Company, and the bosses put its namesake to work designing various electronics components for scientific, commercial, and military use. But at home at night, Farnsworth began to focus on a new invention, and this was the quest that would occupy him for the rest of his life.
At one point during his television work, Farnsworth had seen a strange and unexplained blue glow in one of his Multipactor tubes, and he had wondered ever since whether it was a spontaneous emission of energy. He came to believe strongly that there must be a totally safe way to harness the atom for peacetime purposes, and around the time he had refused to join the Manhattan Project, he had begun to devote more and more time to thinking about nuclear fusion.
Whereas the atomic bomb employed the process of nuclear fission, in which the atom is split by bombarding radioactive nuclei with extra neutrons, fusion is the opposite process, that of combining, or fusing, atoms together. Both fission and fusion reactions throw off excess energy—in an amount described by Einstein’s equation E=mc2—but whereas fission also yields hazardous radioactive waste by-products, fusion yields safe by-products such as helium. Both fission and fusion produce energy with astonishing efficiency, but the radioactive fuel required for fission—uranium, for instance—is extremely scarce, whereas the fuel required for fusion is plentiful; the hydrogen atoms that are needed can be extracted from seawater.
Achieving fusion is difficult because any two hydrogen atoms have the same electrical charge and thus repel each other. To overcome that force of repulsion, the atoms need to be heated to fantastic temperatures. The sun is fueled by fusion, and the hydrogen bomb achieves fusion only because it is combined with a fission bomb which is triggered first. Farnsworth wanted to find a low-temperature or perhaps a split-second way to achieve fusion safely. That would render the current nuclear reactors on the drawing boards obsolete, because they employed the potentially hazardous fission process. In short, Farnsworth was dreaming of the ultimate invention, devising a completely safe way to generate an endless supply of virtually cost-free energy. He was after one of the holy grails of modern science.
One day in the late 1940s, while Farnsworth was in New York for a corporate meeting, he and Pem paid a visit to a friend named Frank Rieber, whom they had met through patent attorney Donald Lippincott. Rieber was a wealthy geological scientist who lived in a luxurious town house on the Upper West Side, and hanging on his wall was a portrait of Albert Einstein, painted by Rieber’s mother, an accomplished artist and friend of Einstein’s. Farnsworth remarked how much he admired the work, and Rieber said he believed it to be the only time Einstein ever sat for a painted portrait.
Farnsworth also mentioned how much he admired Einstein himself and that he longed to see what Einstein thought of his latest invention idea. “Why wait?” Rieber asked, offering to telephone Einstein right away. Farnsworth was stunned by this development and gave his quick approval. Rieber went to the phone in his bedroom and reached Einstein at his home on Mercer Street in Princeton. When he emerged from the bedroom, Rieber explained that Einstein already knew of Farnsworth and his reputation as a brilliant inventor. “I’ve got Einstein on the phone,” Rieber said, “and he’d be delighted to talk to you.”
Farnsworth again was surprised, but perhaps he shouldn’t have been. “Einstein’s explanation of the photoelectric effect,” wrote biographer Ronald Clark, “had already helped to prod forward television from experiment to reality,” so it made sense that Einstein would have been tracking the progress of electronic television from afar, and that he knew of Farnsworth’s work.
Farnsworth entered the bedroom and picked up the phone, while Rieber closed the door on his way out. The telephone conversation between Philo T. Farnsworth and Albert Einstein lasted nearly an hour. When Farnsworth broached the subject of fusion, Einstein expressed his reservations on the subject, indicating that he himself was headed down the same path of research until the events of August 1945. The detonation of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and then Nagasaki had left Einstein deeply troubled and guilt-ridden over the fact that he had played a key role in the events leading to the bomb’s development. Afterward, he abandoned all thoughts of atomic energy because he feared it would lead to further disaster, instead opting to dedicate himself to the so-called unified field theory of the universe.
Still, Einstein said that his own reservations were personal, and that he saw no reason why Farnsworth shouldn’t pursue the idea. Einstein listened to Farnsworth’s mathematical approach to creating the necessary nuclear equations, and he encouraged Farnsworth to publish his ideas and pursue the invention of a controlled fusion reactor.
When Farnsworth emerged from the bedroom, his face radiated a positive glow, according to Pem. This was the shot in the arm that he needed. With some of the same old zeal that he had summoned for his television work, Farnsworth from that point on plunged deeply into fusion, immersing himself in the science and math of the problem. No one else at ITT understood Farnsworth’s concept of isolating a fusion reaction inside a cloud of electrons, so the company was reluctant to fund the work, but the executives relented and authorized a small budget when they saw how determined Farnsworth was.
As Farnsworth turned toward fusion, David Sarnoff intensified his television efforts, marshaling the combat for color broadcasting. CBS said its color system was ready, and that buying black-and-white sets was a waste of money, but in January 1947 Sarnoff won an FCC decision to prevent CBS from broadcasting in color on the grounds that it would disrupt the market for monochrome television. CBS brought up charges of foul play when six months later a key FCC commissioner accepted a job as an NBC vice president. In 1950, the FCC reversed its decision and ruled that CBS had every right to proceed. Sarnoff appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1951 affirmed the rights of CBS.
By drawing out the fight, though, Sarnoff bought a crucial block time, a ploy that had worked for him in the past. “We’ve lost a battle,” he said, “but not the war.” At RCA Laboratories in Princeton, Sarnoff had launched a crusade to devise a system for color that was even better than CBS’s, in order to control the all-important standard for transmission. Sarnoff demanded that all engineers were to work sixteen-hour days, and all other projects were to be shelved. In the end, RCA would pour $130 million into what was until that time the largest and most costly electronics development project ever. The CBS format employed a spinning disk to separate red, green, and blue hues; Sarnoff mandated that RCA’s color cameras be all-electronic, with no moving parts, adhering to the same total faith in the electron that Farnsworth and Zworykin had always evangelized.
As the color war was being waged, RCA was seeding the market with millions upon millions of its black-and-white sets. At every turn, Sarnoff repeated his “compatibility” argument. Only RCA color broadcasts could be viewed on the RCA monochrome sets that people were buying. “Every set we get out there makes it that much tougher on CBS,” he said. If viewers wanted to watch CBS color broadcasts on their black-and-white sets, they had to buy a special adapter for $100.
Sarnoff took a harsh beating in the press for his tactics, and his actions led to yet another major investigation from the U.S. Justice Department, this time under Eisenhower. Once again, a president whom Sarnoff supported and befriended had turned against him. There was even a report that a particularly zealous government attorney wanted to put Sarnoff in jail for the abusive way he was using his black-and-white television monopoly to trample competitors and hold back rival color technology.
Yet Sarnoff emerged triumphant. When the FCC reversed itself once more and made RCA color the official transmission standard in December 1953, Sarnoff took out full-page newspaper ads declaring his “great victory.” Initially, RCA’s pricey color TV sets were a flop, but Sarnoff was adamant about keeping at it until the marketplace came around. In 1958, RCA entered into a landmark consent decree with the Justice Department, agreeing to license its color TV patents to any American set maker at no cost.
David Sarnoff’s victories over CBS were mostly confined to the technology arena. When it came to the art of programming, Sarnoff was often blindsided by the hidden dimensions of the new medium. In the late 1940s, Bill Paley conducted a well-publicized talent raid of NBC stars, making lucrative deals to lure Jack Benny, Groucho Marx, Edgar Bergen, Al Jolson, Red Skelton, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and the Amos ‘n’ Andy Show over to CBS. Paley also signed Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and later, Jackie Gleason. The biggest TV sensation of the decade, I Love Lucy, was also carried by CBS. Sarnoff never appreciated—indeed, he resented—the immense star-making power of broadcasting. The supremacy of talent remained Sarnoff’s blind spot for the rest of his career. Insisting that it was beneath his dignity, he simply refused to cater to the whims of mere entertainers, while Paley enjoyed nothing more. CBS vaulted ahead in the new audience measurement system called the Nielsen ratings and stayed number one for the rest of Sarnoff’s life.
One thing Sarnoff seemed to understand was the political ramifications of the new medium. When General Eisenhower announced his run for the presidency of the United States in 1952, General Sarnoff signed on as his unofficial broadcasting strategy consultant. The first national political ads to appear on U.S. television networks were twenty-second spots for Ike. When Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson countered by buying a half hour of prime time to broadcast a long-winded speech, he was bombarded with hate mail for interfering with an episode of I Love Lucy. Eisenhower beat Stevenson not once but twice.
Yet Sarnoff failed to act when his leadership was needed most. Television conquered the country in an era of caution and timidity, at a time when Senator Joseph McCarthy was spouting demagoguery, and the resulting anti-Communist hysteria terrorized not only ordinary citizens but the rich and powerful as well. The lunacy went on for years until CBS finally summoned the courage to act. Only when Edward R. Murrow aired a special edition of his See It Now program in 1954 that featured McCarthy hanging himself with his own absurd statements was McCarthyism finally chased from the national stage.
Politically, Sarnoff simply wanted to cozy up to the winners in order to preserve his own self-interest. In 1960, he backed Richard Nixon for president, based in part on how smooth Nixon had been alone in front of the TV camera in his successful Checkers speech and how well Nixon had handled the stiff Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in their historic televised matchup. When Nixon was faced with the tough choice of whether to take part in what would be the first televised presidential debate, Sarnoff was the last person to speak to Nixon before the Republican announced his decision to do it. By now, television had suddenly found its way into 90 percent of American homes, so the stakes were enormous.
It was the day that changed politics [wrote author David Halberstam]. John Kennedy had gone in, if not exactly an unknown, certainly the underdog, and he had come out looking a winner, while Richard Nixon had in one brief appearance squandered the advantage of eight years of the vice-presidency, and had come out looking a loser. The effect was so great that it was sixteen years before two presidential nominees again debated, though the entire nation wanted more debates. There was simply too much to lose. The big winner that night in 1960, of course, had been television, more specifically the networks. Television was legitimized as the main instrument of political discourse.
Afterward, when virtually every Republican in the country was lamenting the profound stupidity of putting Nixon on television next to Kennedy, there were reports that Sarnoff had put him up to it. “I’m not the son of a bitch,” Sarnoff protested. “If he asked me whether to debate, I’d have said debate, but it didn’t come up.” In any case, Sarnoff didn’t exactly ingratiate himself with the eventual winner. Sarnoff’s move to support Nixon so enraged the Democratic candidate’s father, Sarnoff’s old friend Joe Kennedy, that he refused to forgive this betrayal, and the two men never spoke to each other again.
Philo T. Farnsworth crossed paths once again with David Sarnoff in 1953, when both men had their signatures engraved, along with those of other technology luminaries, on a three-foot-high, silver trophy presented at a conference in Chicago to the father of science fiction, Hugo Gernsback, in honor of Gernsback’s fifty years of service to the electronics industry. It was also that year that the annual awards bestowed for the best science fiction writing were named the Hugo Awards.
Farnsworth never had an award named after him, but his invention did. When former Farnsworth employee Harry Lubcke became president of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, he was fishing around for a name for the awards given for the best work in the field. He decided to name the awards the “Immy” after the ubiquitous Image Orthicon camera, which was based largely on Farnsworth’s patents but built by RCA. After the trophy was designed, that nickname was modified to “Emmy” to refer to the statue’s female figure holding an atom.
By the mid-1950s, Farnsworth had disengaged himself from television to such an extent that he had eight television sets in his house yet none of them worked. One day, his son Kent came home from school crying, telling his parents that no one in school would believe his father invented television because he was the only one who didn’t watch. So Farnsworth hooked up a set for his son and then turned into one of TV’s earliest critics.
“Like any father of an eight-year-old, he thinks there are too many darned cowboy movies at the dinner hour,” noted a story in the local newspaper, the Fort Wayne News Sentinel. “At the Farnsworth house, young Kent occasionally talks his parents into a TV dinner in the living room. . .and Dr. Farnsworth has just as much trouble as you or I in guarding against TV becoming a monster, devouring all of the time that should be set aside for reading and conversation.”
In 1957, Farnsworth accepted an invitation to appear as the mystery guest on a CBS game show called I’ve Got a Secret. It was the only time Farnsworth would appear on national television during his lifetime, and footage of the broadcast shows a gaunt, withdrawn man who looked older than his fifty years. After the studio audience was let in on the “secret” that the guest invented electronic television when he was fourteen years old, a panel of celebrities began asking Farnsworth questions to figure out who he was. In recognition of an honorary doctorate he received, Farnsworth was identified to the panel only as “Dr. X,” which threw the celebrities off track, as they assumed his contribution was to the medical field. “Does what you do cause pain?” asked actress Jayne Meadows. “Sometimes it does, yes,” replied Farnsworth, stringing out the joke for the audience.
When host Garry Moore finally revealed Farnsworth’s identity, the panelists honed in on the irony. “Now tell me, truthfully,” asked comic Henry Morgan, “are you sorry you did it?” Farnsworth said he was proud of the accomplishment, and “generally speaking,” he said television was a blessing to humankind. As his prize for stumping the panel, Farnsworth collected a carton of Winstons, a check for eighty dollars, and Moore’s undying thanks: “We’d all be out of work if it weren’t for you.”
As hinted by Henry Morgan’s question, these years were a time of great national ambivalence toward television. The quiz show scandals of the late 1950s unleashed a tidal wave of cynicism over television programming, and when Edward R. Murrow spoke at an industry convention in 1958, he attacked television for its “decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world,” then offered up a challenge: “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate, it can even inspire,” Murrow said, “but it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it is merely wires and lights in a box.” Pretty soon, Paley forced Murrow out of his job. By 1961, FCC chairman Newton Minow denounced television as “a vast wasteland,” and Murrow joined Minow as a member of the Kennedy administration.
Even Vladimir Zworykin became disillusioned by how the invention was being put into use. Asked in an interview what specifically about television was he most proud of, Zworykin replied in his thick Russian accent.
“Da svitch,” he said.
“Excuse me?” said the interviewer.
“Da svitch,” repeated Zworykin, “so I can turn the damn theenk off!”
Despite Zworykin’s disillusionment, despite Farnsworth’s alienation, and even despite Sarnoff’s own privately expressed disappointment about the overcommercialization of the new medium, television became an unqualified financial success, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last time marketing and image would trump engineering and science. On the strength of color broadcasting and color television sales, RCA’s stock took off on a trajectory it hadn’t seen since the Roaring Twenties. Profits swelled, and RCA vaulted to number twenty-six on the Fortune 500 list of industrial giants. At the annual shareholders meeting in 1965, Sarnoff paused to take a brief look back, and he declared, “This is the year of fulfillment of our long struggle.”