His Dream Brought Communications Home

Rupert Murdoch may get the credit for using sports to build News Corp. into a global media colossus. But David Sarnoff was the first to grasp the power of such programming, using sports in the earliest days of broadcasting to prove radio’s potency and to launch an illustrious career.

To convince skeptical bosses at the Radio Corp. of America of the merits of a “radio music box” for the home, Sarnoff borrowed a Navy transmitter for a blow-by-blow broadcast of the 1921 heavyweight championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier. Staged when radio transmissions were used mainly for messaging at sea, the experiment by RCA’s 30-year-old general manager created such a sensation among the nation’s 200,000 amateur wireless operators that the company began manufacturing radios the next year, making $11 million from their sale.

Sarnoff was elected vice president, and eventually president, leading RCA into the technological vanguard over a 40-year period that ended with his retirement in 1970, at age 78. Credited with introducing the world’s first home radio, the radio-phonograph console and both black-and-white and color TV, Sarnoff was crowned the father of television and arguably was the most influential figure in communications in the 20th century.

A dreamer as well as a doer, Sarnoff was rambling in his prophecies, predicting decades in advance the miniaturization of electronics and the development of video cameras, VCRs and satellites that would allow billions of people worldwide to watch the same program.

Owen D. Young, the first chairman of RCA, once described Sarnoff’s passion for technology as “the most amazing romance of its kind on record.”

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Born in Russia in 1891, Sarnoff came to the United States when he was 9 and supported his family after the death of his father by selling Yiddish newspapers in New York. He poured over technical manuals in his youth and bought a telegraph at age 15, becoming a radio operator that year for the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. of America, where he picked up the signals in 1912 from the Titanic, bringing the nation its only news of the disaster over a 72-hour period.

When RCA was formed after World War I by combining interests of General Electric and Marconi Wireless, the new company committed $2,000 to test Sarnoff’s “radio music box,” which Marconi management had dismissed six years earlier as “harebrained.”

To fuel sales of radio sets, Sarnoff in 1926 convinced RCA to pay a group of stations to play music, forming the National Broadcasting Co. as a subsidiary and the nation’s first broadcast network.

To douse complaints from the phonograph industry that radio was killing sales, RCA bought the manufacturer of the Victrola in 1929 and married the two components in one home console.

The emerging radio technology made Wall Street crazy for RCA, driving up the stock to a high of $573.75 a share before the crash of 1929 sent the value plummeting to $2.25. When Sarnoff became president the next year, in the depths of the Depression, he cut costs to sustain research on television, which he had first outlined for the RCA board in 1923.

The payoff came years later at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, where Sarnoff unveiled RCA’s pavilion before a television camera and called the television “a new art” that would affect all of society. Sarnoff soon set up a special NBC station to experiment with TV and in 1941, along with William Paley’s rival CBS, started commercial telecasting in New York.

Development of television was slowed during World War II, but in 1946 RCA began selling the first mass-produced TV set for about $375. By the late 1940s the number of television stations across the country began to rise steadily, and in 1951 NBC was broadcasting regular network service nationwide.

With television a postwar winner, RCA began investing in color, plowing $130 million into research despite widespread doubt and protests from shareholders.

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If Sarnoff was a master technologist and manufacturer, Paley’s genius was programming. CBS had distinguished itself in wartime as the pioneer of network news.

After the war, Paley decimated NBC’s talent pool by raiding Sarnoff’s biggest stars, including Jack Benny, Amos ‘n’ Andy, Groucho Marx, George Burns and others. That helped CBS pull ahead of NBC in programming and advertising.

In later years, some critics even blamed Sarnoff for surrendering the American consumer electronics industry to the Japanese by licensing the technology to foreigners rather than selling RCA sets internationally.

Upon Sarnoff’s retirement in 1970, his son, Robert, rose to power, and Sarnoff died a year later.