David Sarnoff

Early life and career David Sarnoff was born to a Jewish family in Uzlian, a small town in Minsk Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Belarus), the son of Abraham Sarnoff and Leah Privin. Abraham emigrated to the United States and raised funds to bring the family. Sarnoff spent much of his early childhood in a cheder (or yeshiva) studying and memorizing the Torah. He emigrated with his mother and three brothers and one sister to New York City in 1900 at the age of 9, where he helped support his family by selling newspapers before and after his classes at the Educational Alliance. In 1906 when he was 15 years , his father became incapacitated by tuberculosis, and Sarnoff went to work to support the family. He had planned to pursue a full-time career in the newspaper business, but a chance encounter led to a position as an office boy at the Commercial Cable Company. When his superior refused him leave for Rosh Hashanah, he quit to join the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America on September 30, 1906, and started a career of over in electronic communications.

Over the next , Sarnoff rose from office boy to commercial manager of the company, learning about the technology and the business of electronic communications on the job and in libraries. He also served at Marconi stations on ships and posts on Siasconset, Nantucket and the New York Wanamaker Department Store. In 1911, he installed and operated the wireless equipment on a ship hunting seals off Newfoundland and Labrador, and used the technology to relay the first remote medical diagnosis from the ship's doctor to a radio operator at Belle Isle with an infected tooth.

The following year, he led two other operators at the Wanamaker station in an effort to confirm the fate of the Titanic. Always the self-promoter, Sarnoff later exaggerated his role as the sole hero who stayed by his telegraph key for three days to receive information on the Titanics survivors. Schwartz questions whether Sarnoff, who was a manager of the telegraphers by the time of the disaster, was working the key although that brushes aside concerns about corporate hierarchy. The event began on a Sunday when the store would have been closed.

Over the next two years, Sarnoff earned promotions to chief inspector and contracts manager for a company whose revenues swelled after Congress passed legislation mandating continuous staffing of commercial shipboard radio stations. That same year, Marconi won a patent suit that gave it the coastal stations of the United Wireless Telegraph Company. Sarnoff also demonstrated the first use of radio on a railroad line, the Lackawanna Railroad Company's link between Binghamton, New York, and Scranton, Pennsylvania; and permitted and observed Edwin Armstrong's demonstration of his regenerative receiver at the Marconi station at Belmar, New Jersey. Sarnoff used H. J. Round's hydrogen arc transmitter to demonstrate the broadcast of music from the New York Wanamaker station.

This demonstration and the AT&T demonstrations in 1915 of long-distance wireless telephony inspired the first of many memos to his superiors on applications of current and future radio technologies. Sometime late in 1915 or in 1916 he proposed to the company's president, Edward J. Nally, that the company develop a "radio music box" for the "amateur" market of radio enthusiasts. Nally deferred on the proposal because of the expanded volume of business during World War I. Throughout the war years, Sarnoff remained Marconi's Commercial Manager, By the spring of 1922, Sarnoff's prediction of popular demand for radio broadcasting had come to pass and over the next few years, he gained much stature and influence.

In 1926, RCA purchased, from AT&T, its recently formed Broadcasting Company of America subsidiary, which included its New York City station, WEAF, and associated "WEAF Chain" network operations. This was reorganized to launch the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the first national radio network in America. Four years later, Sarnoff became president of RCA. NBC had by that time split into two networks, the Red and the Blue. The Blue Network eventually became ABC Radio.

RKO Sarnoff negotiated successful contracts to form Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO), a film production and distribution company.

Early history of television

When Sarnoff was put in charge of radio broadcasting at RCA, he soon recognized the potential for television, i.e., the combination of motion pictures with electronic transmission. Schemes for television had long been proposed (well before World War I) but with no practical outcome. Sarnoff was determined to lead his company in pioneering the medium and met with Westinghouse engineer Vladimir Zworykin in 1928. At the time Zworykin was attempting to develop an all-electronic television system at Westinghouse, but with little success. Zworykin had visited the laboratory of the inventor Philo T. Farnsworth, who had developed an Image Dissector, part of a system that could enable a working television. Zworykin was sufficiently impressed with Farnsworth's invention that he had his team at Westinghouse make several copies of the device for experimentation.

Zworykin pitched the concept to Sarnoff, claiming a viable television system could be realized in two years with a mere $100,000 investment. Sarnoff opted to fund Zworkyin's research, most likely well-aware that Zworykin was underestimating the scope of his television effort. Seven years later, in late 1935, Zworykin's photograph appeared on the cover of the trade journal Electronics, holding an early RCA photomultiplier prototype. The photomultiplier, subject of intensive research at RCA and in Leningrad, Russia, would become an essential component within sensitive television cameras. On April 24, 1936, RCA demonstrated to the press a working iconoscope camera tube and kinescope receiver display tube (an early cathode-ray tube), two key components of all-electronic television.

The final cost of the enterprise was closer to $50 million. On the road to success they encountered a legal battle with Farnsworth, who had been granted patents in 1930 for his solution to broadcasting moving pictures. Despite Sarnoff's efforts to prove that he was the inventor of the television, he was ordered to pay Farnsworth $1,000,000 in royalties, a small price to settle the dispute for an invention that would profoundly revolutionize the world. However this sum was never paid to Farnsworth.

In 1929, Sarnoff engineered the purchase of the Victor Talking Machine Company, the nation's largest manufacturer of gramophone records and phonographs, merging radio-phonograph production at Victor's large manufacturing facility in Camden, New Jersey. The acquisition became known as the RCA Victor Division, later RCA Records.

On January 3, 1930, Sarnoff became president of RCA, succeeding General James Harbord. On May 30, the company became involved in an antitrust case concerning the original radio patent pool. Sarnoff negotiated an outcome where RCA was no longer partially owned by Westinghouse and General Electric, giving him final say in the company's affairs.

Initially, the Great Depression of the early 1930s caused RCA to cut costs, but Zworykin's project was protected. After nine years of Zworykin's hard work, Sarnoff's determination, and legal battles with Farnsworth (in which Farnsworth was proved in the right), they had a commercial system ready to launch. Finally, in April 1939, regularly scheduled, electronic television in America was initiated by RCA under the name of their broadcasting division at the time, The National Broadcasting Company (NBC). The first television broadcast aired was the dedication of the RCA pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fairgrounds and was introduced by Sarnoff himself. Later that month on April 30, opening day ceremonies at The World's Fair were telecast in the medium's first major production, featuring a speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the first US president to appear on television. These telecasts were seen only in New York City and the immediate vicinity, since NBC television had only one station at the time, W2XBS Channel 1, now WNBC Channel 4. The broadcast was seen by an estimated 1,000 viewers from the roughly 200 television sets which existed in the New York City area at the time.

The standard approved by the National Television System Committee (the NTSC) in 1941 differed from RCA's standard, but RCA quickly became the market leader of manufactured sets and NBC became the first television network in the United States, connecting their New York City station to stations in Philadelphia and Schenectady for occasional programs in the early 1940s.

According to the book Global Communication Since 1844 by Peter J. Hughill, Sarnoff was part of a group of Russian Jewish scientists in the 1930s who wanted their research to advance military technology with the possibility of a forthcoming war with Germany. The account, credited to British government scientist Brian Callick, is supported by other contemporary evidence. The group, also comprising Simeon Aisenstein, Vladimir Zworykin and Isaac Shoenberg, knew each other well from Russia and saw possible military applications for their work on television. The group is said to have raised one million pounds sterling (about $5 million at the time) from US donors. The specific work took place at EMI-Marconi in the U.K. and resulted in Britain becoming significantly advanced in television development and able to launch a public service on 2 November 1936. The military applications helped the development of radio-location (later named radar). In addition the design and production in quantity of television equipment and sets allowed the similar military technology (cathode ray tubes, VHF transmission and reception and wideband circuits) to be advanced. A former British defence minister, Lord Orr-Ewing, referred to the work in a 1979 BBC interview and stated “that’s how we won the Battle of Britain”.

Meanwhile, a system developed by EMI based on Russian research and Zworykin's work was adopted in the United Kingdom and the BBC had a regular television service from 1936 onwards. However, World War II put a halt to a dynamic growth of the early television development stages.

World War II Sarnoff receiving his brigadier general's star from Major General Harry C. Ingles, chief signal officer of the US Army.

At the onset of World War II, Sarnoff served on Eisenhower's communications staff, arranging expanded radio circuits for NBC to transmit news from the invasion of France in June 1944. In France, Sarnoff arranged for the restoration of the Radio France station in Paris that the Germans destroyed and oversaw the construction of a radio transmitter powerful enough to reach all of the allied forces in Europe, called Radio Free Europe. In recognition of his achievements, Sarnoff was decorated with the Legion of Merit on October 11, 1944.

Thanks to his communications skills and support he received the Brigadier General's star in December 1945, and thereafter was known as "General Sarnoff." The star, which he proudly and frequently wore, was buried with him.

Sarnoff anticipated that post-war America would need an international radio voice explaining its policies and positions. In 1943, he tried to influence Secretary of State Cordell Hull to include radio broadcasting in post-war planning. In 1947, he lobbied Secretary of State George Marshall to expand the roles of Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. His concerns and proposed solutions were eventually seen as prescient. In 1947, he became chairman of RCA.

Post-war expansion After the war, monochrome TV production began in earnest. Color TV was the next major development, and NBC once again won the battle. CBS had their electro-mechanical color television system approved by the FCC on October 10, 1950, but Sarnoff filed an unsuccessful suit in the United States district court to suspend that ruling. Subsequently, he made an appeal to the Supreme Court which eventually upheld the FCC decision. Sarnoff's tenacity and determination to win the "Color War" pushed his engineers to perfect an all-electronic color television system that used a signal that could be received on existing monochrome sets that prevailed. CBS was now unable to take advantage of the color market, due to lack of manufacturing capability and color programming, a system that could not be seen on the millions of black and white receivers and sets that were triple the cost of monochrome sets. A few days after CBS had its color premiere on June 14, 1951, RCA demonstrated a fully functional all-electronic color TV system and became the leading manufacturer of color TV sets in the US.

CBS system color TV production was suspended in October 1951 for the duration of the Korean War. As more people bought monochrome sets, it was increasingly unlikely that CBS could achieve any success with its incompatible system. Few receivers were sold, and there were almost no color broadcasts, especially in prime time, when CBS could not run the risk of broadcasting a program which few could see. The NTSC was reformed and recommended a system virtually identical to RCA's in August 1952. On December 17, 1953, the FCC approved RCA's system as the new standard.

Later years

In 1955, Sarnoff received The Hundred Year Association of New York's Gold Medal Award "in recognition of outstanding contributions to the City of New York."

In 1959, Sarnoff was a member of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund panel to report on U.S. foreign policy. As a member of that panel and in a subsequent essay published in Life as part of its "The National Purpose" series, he was critical of the tentative stand being taken by the United States in fighting the political and psychological warfare being waged by Soviet-led international Communism against the West. He strongly advocated an aggressive, multi-faceted fight in the ideological and political realms with a determination to decisively win the Cold War. In 1966, David's son Robert was named president and chief operating officer of RCA and two years later also became chief executive officer.

Family life On July 4, 1917, Sarnoff married Lizette Hermant, the daughter of a French immigrant family of Jewish descent who settled in the Bronx as one of his family's neighbors. succeeded his father at the helm of RCA in 1970. Robert's third wife was operatic soprano Anna Moffo. Thomas W. Sarnoff, the youngest, was NBC's West Coast President.

Sarnoff was the maternal uncle of screenwriter Richard Baer. Sarnoff was credited with sparking Baer's interest in television. in the Renovation Lodge No. 97, Albion, NY.

Honors In 1938, he received an honorary degree Doctor of Commercial Science from Oglethorpe University. He was an honorary member of Omicron Alpha Tau Knight of the Cross of Lorraine (France), 1951. Sarnoff was posthumously inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1984. Sarnoff was posthumously inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1989. Sarnoff's Law, Metcalfe's Law and Reed's Law are frequently used in tandem in discussions of the value of networks.

Portrayals Geoff Dunsworth (2012) - Titanic: The Aftermath (Documentary)