His first instinct was to buy the Farnsworths out, but he soon discovered they had investors – bankers that reportedly owned 60% of their company, and who weren’t going to sell cheaply. But eventually it would improve and then he would pounce, using RCA’s might to shut Baird out of the North American market, appropriating the Scotsman’s technology for itself, and taking all the credit (and the profits).Īnd so, when Sarnoff looked at his newspaper and saw that an American couple, Philo and Pem Farnsworth, had demonstrated not only a working television system but an all-electronic television system using the cathode-ray tube on both the transmission and receiving sides, and without the annoyances of its mechanical cousin – it was quieter, and the screen was brighter and larger – he quickly realised he had a problem. But Baird’s system was mechanical, low definition and hard to see, and Sarnoff didn’t think it was practical. To say television was on Sarnoff’s radar would be a gross understatement indeed.
Scottish inventor John Logie Baird had demonstrated the first working “television” (the term coined in 1900 by Russian engineer Konstantin Perskiy – vision meaning “to see” and tele signifying “over a distance”) in 1926, and Sarnoff deduced quite accurately that if the public had gone crazy over being able to hear a boxing match, they would go completely insane if they could actually see it. However Sarnoff wasn’t content.ĭavid was aware of recent experiments regarding the transmission of moving images. He would guide and grow the world’s first radio network for four years, before becoming the president of RCA. Having adequately demonstrated an application of radio – live event coverage – that was unavailable to any other medium, David’s bosses at RCA had no choice but to journey with Sarnoff down his rabbit-hole, and in 1925 RCA purchased its first radio station in New York, launching the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and placing Sarnoff at its helm. In 1921 he helped to privately organise a “live” broadcast of a heavyweight boxing match between Georges Carpentier and Jack Dempsey and afterward, the public demand for radio receivers was palpable. Going down that road would just waste the company’s time and money.īut Sarnoff was undeterred. And newspapers did news – that’s what they were for! David’s “receiver” would never catch on. Why would anyone want to listen to an arbitrary sequence of songs over the radio when they could play whatever recordings they wanted? They could go to the music hall for that sort of thing. After World War I ended, General Electric bought American Marconi, and Sarnoff revived his idea, which once again was discounted. Why would they congest the airwaves with rubbish like that, wasting valuable space that could be used for two-way communication? The radio, after all, was going to eventually replace the telephone, wasn’t it? Time went on. He wondered if new radio technologies could transmit music with any clarity, and so in 1915 he did a demonstration of his own, from a station in New York, broadcasting music to anyone who could – and wanted to – listen.ĭavid wrote a memo to his superiors proposing the idea of a receiver-only radio set, one that would allow an owner to listen to music broadcasts passively, but his superiors scoffed at the idea and ignored him. But there were the occasional “broadcast” messages, like weather reports, and that combined with news of voice transmission tests piqued Sarnoff’s interest. You had a conversation, and when you were done, others took your place, like a telephone. The utility of the “wireless” had, to that point, been commonly seen as a point-to-point, two-way technology – you talked to the remote station, and they talked back. Farnsworth.ĭavid Sarnoff had already had some pretty big ideas. However, David wasn’t merely content to ride the radio wave of the present – rather, he was always looking toward the future, even then. He served at Marconi radiotelegraph stations on ships and on shore, soon becoming a manager of the telegraphers, then chief inspector and contract manager. David was a Russian immigrant who started as a mere office boy in 1906 at the age of 15, learning about electronics and wireless communications on-the-job. Sarnoff, the president of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) had spent his entire adult life rising up through the ranks of the American Marconi wireless telegraph company. GLANCING AT HIS MORNING PAPER, DAVID SARNOFF QUICKLY REALISED HE HAD A BIG, BIG PROBLEM.