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Thread: David Sarnoff

  1. #1
    radiojane Guest

    David Sarnoff

    I just watched the great american broadcast the other night, and the documentary afterward talked a lot about this guy. Fascinating stuff.

    DAVID SARNOFF



    1891 - 1971

    David Sarnoff was born in Uzlian, a small Jewish village near the city of Minsk. Sarnoff spent much of his early childhood in a cheder studying and memorizing the Torah. He immigrated with his mother and three brothers and one sister to New York City in 1900, where he helped support his family by selling newspapers. He joined the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America on September 30, 1906, and thus started a career of over sixty years in electronic communications.
    Over the next thirteen years 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 various libraries. He also served at Marconi stations on ships and posts on Siasconset, Nantucket and the New York Wanamaker Department Store. The following year, he led two other operators at the Wanamaker station in an effort to confirm the fate of the Titanic. Learning early the value of self-promotion and publicity, Sarnoff falsely advanced himself both as the sole hero who stayed by his telegraph key for three days to receive information on the Titanic's survivors and as the prescient prophet of broadcasting who predicted the medium's rise in 1916.
    Regarding the Titanic story, some modern media historians question whether Sarnoff was even at the telegraph key at all. As the profile done for the Museum of Broadcast Communications correctly points out, by the time of the Titanic in 1912, Sarnoff was in management, and no longer a telegrapher; plus, the event occurred on a Sunday, when the store would have been closed.

    Sarnoff 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. Thoughtout the war years, Sarnoff remained Marconi's Commercial Manager, including oversight of the company's factory in Roselle Park, New Jersey.

    He contributed to the rising postwar radio boom by helping arrange for the broadcast of a heavyweight boxing match between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier in July 1921. Up to 300,000 people heard the fight, and demand for home radio equipment bloomed that winter.

    In 1926, RCA purchased its first radio station (WEAF/New York); and RCA and launched the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the first radio network in America. Four years later, Sarnoff had become president of RCA and NBC had split into two networks, the Red and the Blue. The Blue Network later became ABC Radio. Sarnoff would be later described by others as the founder of both RCA and NBC, but he was neither. These misconceptions were perpetuated because Sarnoff's later accomplishments were so plentiful that any myth was believable.
    Sarnoff became president of RCA on January 3, 1930, succeeding General James Harbord. On May 30 the company was involved in an antitrust case concerning the original radio patent pool. Sarnoff's tenacity and intelligence were able to negotiate an outcome where RCA was no longer partly owned by Westinghouse and General Electric, giving him final say in the company's affairs. RCA quickly became the market leader of manufactured sets and NBC became the first Television network in the United States.
    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. 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. After the war, monochrome television production began in earnest. Color television was the next major development and NBC once again won the battle. CBS also had their electro-mechanical color television system approved by the FCC on October 10, 1950 however, 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 finally won the day. CBS was now unable to take advantage of the color market, due to lack of manufacturing capability 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 television system and became the leading manufacturer of color Television sets in the United States.
    In 1959 Sarnoff was a member of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund panel to report on U.S. foreign policy. He strongly advocated an aggressive, multi-faceted fight in the ideological and political realms with a determination to decisively win the Cold War.



    Sarnoff was married to Lizette Hermant for 54 years. The couple had three sons: Robert W. Sarnoff, Edward Sarnoff, and Thomas W. Sarnoff. Robert succeeded his father as RCA's Chairman in 1971; and the youngest of these sons, Thomas, became NBC West Coast President.
    Sarnoff was the maternal uncle of screen and scriptwriter, Richard Baer.






    The David Sarnoff Mausoleum
    Last edited by radiojane; 02-14-2009 at 07:22 PM.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Oct 2008
    Location
    Des Moines Iowa
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    300
    Great thread!!! Thanks!!! Sarnoff was an interesting guy in the media field...and a innovator.
    It's hard to ride at night...on your bicycle with no lights to guide...just take a chance and ride. Olson and Louris

  3. #3
    Guest Guest
    I can imagine him playing judges in old black and white films.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Oct 2007
    Location
    Canada
    Posts
    6,302
    Him and people like William Paley (CBS) were early pioneers of
    TV.
    I wonder what they would think of the shows and channels we
    have on today.

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