One Summer: America, 1927 (54 page)

Sarnoff was born in a poor village in rural Russia, in what is now Belarus, but moved with his family to the Lower East Side of New York in
1900 when he was nine. He could not have been more of a yokel; before his trip to America he had never seen a paved road. Now he was in the most colossally dynamic city on earth. Sarnoff learned English, quit school at fourteen, and went out to make his mark on the world. He landed a job as an office boy at American Marconi, the telegraph company, and there became an adept wireless operator. Throughout his life he claimed to have been the first person to receive and relay onward the news of the
Titanic
’s sinking, from an office in Wanamaker’s department store. According to Sarnoff’s own version of events—and Sarnoff’s versions of events only ever loosely intersected with what actually happened—he stayed at his post for seventy-two hours and more or less single-handedly coordinated rescue efforts.

In 1919, American Marconi was bundled into a new company called Radio Corporation of America (RCA). Sarnoff—young, ambitious, instinctively opportunistic—quickly became master of the new medium. He made radio popular and profitable—two things that were by no means assured in 1920. Radio at the time was an exciting novelty, but a radio set was also a costly investment and people weren’t at all sure that it was worth the outlay, particularly if the only available programming was provided by a local bank or insurance broker or poultry farm.

Companies that made radios didn’t care what people listened to, or whether they listened at all, once the radios were bought. Sarnoff, remarkably, seems to have been alone in seeing that if there wasn’t anything worth listening to, people wouldn’t buy radios. He realized that to succeed radio needed to be organized, professional, and above all entertaining. As a demonstration of radio’s potential, he arranged to broadcast the Dempsey-Carpentier prizefight on July 2, 1921. Sarnoff reasoned that if people realized that they could listen to exciting events live as they happened, they would flock to radio. To that end, he had loudspeakers erected at various locations where people could listen to the fight for free. Ten thousand listeners packed into Times Square, and other demonstrations were set up elsewhere. As it happened, a technical fault meant there was no live broadcast from ringside. Instead the details of the fight were relayed by ticker tape to a Manhattan studio where an announcer
re-created the fight from sketchy details and a great deal of imagination. That was what the crowds heard. It didn’t matter. They
thought
they were hearing the fight live. The idea of being able to know what was happening as it happened seemed to many an almost impossible miracle.

Radio now took off. At the time of the Dempsey-Carpentier fight, one American home in five hundred had a radio. Within five years, the proportion was one in twenty. By the end of the decade, saturation would be nearly total. Never before had a consumer product gained universal acceptance so quickly.

To improve broadcast standards, and secure RCA’s dominance of the industry, Sarnoff persuaded his masters to join with Westinghouse and General Electric to form a radio network, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). NBC’s successful broadcasts of big events—not least Lindbergh’s arrival in Washington in June 1927—were so impressive that they inspired the creation of a second network, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), which began broadcasting in September 1927. Its principal investor was the Columbia Phonograph Corporation, which wanted to sell more phonograph albums.

Network broadcasting proved to be extremely expensive. Radio was unique among entertainment media in that it didn’t charge for content. Once someone bought a radio, he could listen to all the programs he wanted in perpetuity for free. On top of that, the programming was dismayingly ephemeral. Movies could be shown again, plays could be performed over and over, but a radio play or concert or variety show was broadcast once and then was gone forever. Even if it could be recorded, nobody wanted to hear the same programs night after night, so radio had to constantly generate new material at often quite staggering costs. NBC executives were horrified to discover that their two regular opera programs were costing the network $6,000 a week. It was so hard to make a profit that some insiders wondered whether radio had a commercial future.

The obvious solution, selling advertising, was curiously slow to take hold. In the beginning, programs, if they had any commercial content at all, just mentioned the name of a sponsor, without making
any kind of overt sales pitch. Commercial radio also had to contend with the stout opposition of Herbert Hoover, who as secretary of commerce controlled the airwaves. Hoover believed that radio should apply itself to noble, sober purposes. “If a speech by the President is to be used as the meat in a sandwich of two patent medicine advertisements, there will be no radio left,” he declared, and threatened to take away licenses from the worst abusers. Luckily, however, by the summer of 1927 Hoover was so busy with other matters—the Mississippi flood at first, then getting himself elected president—that he lost the will or ability to follow through.

Sarnoff was only too happy to take advantage of this. He found, as he suspected, that listeners didn’t mind advertisements at all. By its second year on air, NBC was selling over $10 million worth of ads a year. By the early 1930s, radio advertising was worth over $40 million a year in a market that was shrunken by the Great Depression. Newspaper advertising fell by a third, and magazine ads by closer to a half as radio advertising took off. Nearly 250 daily newspapers folded in the decade after the birth of network radio. Listening to the radio became the thing that every household did, and David Sarnoff could legitimately take the credit for almost all of that. By 1929, just before the stock market crash, RCA’s stock was 10,000 percent higher than it had been just five years before, and David Sarnoff was the darling of the radio industry.

And in the midst of all this, he discovered television. In 1929, Sarnoff attended a conference of radio engineers in Rochester, New York, and there saw a presentation by a clever inventor named Vladimir Zworykin. Like his compatriot Igor Sikorsky, the aircraft designer, Zworykin had grown up rich in Russia but had fled to America following the Russian Revolution. Although Zworykin spoke almost no English on arrival, he landed a job with Westinghouse in Pittsburgh and so impressed the directors that he was soon given his own lab.

Zworykin foresaw the possibility of electronic television in exactly the same way that Farnsworth did. Television was what he talked about in Rochester, and it transfixed Sarnoff. Sarnoff perceived at once the future of television as an even greater potential medium for entertainment
and wealth creation for RCA, and now threw himself behind its development with an almost alarming enthusiasm.

Zworykin told Sarnoff that he could deliver a working system in two years for a cost of $100,000. Sarnoff hired him and provided him with everything he could need. As things turned out, it would cost RCA more than $50 million to get a working system together—an incredible gamble for an unproven technology. Worse, Sarnoff discovered that the most vital patents, and much of the attendant insight, resided with that young man with the improbable name, Philo Farnsworth, in San Francisco.

For Farnsworth, things were not going so well. Broadcasting a clear image of a line was one thing, developing a fully fledged entertainment system was quite another. Even a fairly basic setup would require millions of dollars of investment, which Farnsworth clearly didn’t have. Learning of his progress, Zworykin paid the young man a visit. Farnsworth, thinking RCA wished to license his patents, happily showed Zworykin everything, including how to make an image dissector, the apparatus at the very heart of his system. Thanks to this help, RCA now quickly developed an image dissector of its own. Sarnoff airily informed Farnsworth that RCA didn’t actually want or need his patents—this was a lie—but that it was generously prepared to offer him $100,000 for everything: patents, diagrams, working models, and all the contents of his lab. Farnsworth dismissed the offer as the insult that it was.

Increasingly desperate for funds, Farnsworth sold out to the Philadelphia Storage Battery Company, better known as Philco, and moved east. It was not a happy relationship. Farnsworth hated being a salaried employee. When his infant son died, Farnsworth requested time off to take the boy back to Utah to bury him in the family plot. Philco refused to give him leave, and the two parted ways soon after. Philco meanwhile became convinced that RCA was trying to bribe or blackmail its employees into giving away trade secrets. It filed a suit charging RCA operatives with plying Philco employees with “intoxicating liquors at hotels, restaurants and nightclubs.” The case was settled out of court.

All this made Farnsworth increasingly paranoid and stressed. From the confidently beaming youth of a year or two before, he became a
gaunt and driven-looking figure. Even his hair looked angry. He argued with his original investors and flatly refused to collaborate with any outsiders. Eventually, he ended up with a lawsuit against RCA for patent infringement.

Sarnoff couldn’t bear to come in second at anything and never hesitated to crush those who challenged him. When Edwin H. Armstrong, an electrical engineer, in the 1930s invented FM radio, which provided clearer, stronger signals than AM radio, Sarnoff did all in his power to have it suppressed by getting the Federal Communications Commission to restrict available bandwidth for it. Armstrong sued and found the wrath of RCA coming down on him. RCA’s lawyers tied him up in court for years. The battle cost Armstrong his health and every penny he owned. In 1954, despondent and broke, he committed suicide.

Now RCA waged much the same sort of battle against Farnsworth. It maintained that Farnsworth could not have conceived of electronic television in 1922 on the grounds that a fifteen-year-old schoolboy could hardly have come up with an idea that had eluded the most brilliant minds of science and technology for years. Luckily for Farnsworth, his old chemistry teacher, Justin Tolman, was able to produce his original sketch in court. That, and the fact that Farnsworth possessed the relevant patents, left the court in no doubt. In 1935, it ruled that Farnsworth was “the undisputed inventor of television”—a stunning victory for the lone inventor.

RCA essentially ignored the ruling. At the 1939 New York World’s Fair it demonstrated a working television that was entirely dependent on Farnsworth patents, for which it had neither made payment nor secured permission. After years of further wrangling, RCA finally agreed to pay Farnsworth $1 million and a royalty on every television sold. However, Farnsworth’s most valuable patents ran out in the late 1940s, just as TV was about to take off, so he never got anything like the full measure of wealth to which he was rightly entitled.

In 1950, Sarnoff secured a promise from the Radio and Television Manufacturers Association of America that it would refer to him henceforth as “the Father of Television” and to Vladimir Zworykin as “the Inventor of Television.” Farnsworth was effectively expunged from the record.

Farnsworth retired to Maine and descended into alcoholism. He died in March 1971, drunk, depressed, and forgotten. He was sixty-four years old. The
New York Times
, in its obituary, referred to him not as the inventor of television, but as a “pioneer in the design of television.” Sarnoff died later that same year at the venerable age of eighty.

After television, Vladimir Zworykin helped invent the electron microscope. He survived Sarnoff and Farnsworth by eleven years, dying in 1982 the day before his ninety-third birthday. In an interview in 1974, he claimed never to watch television because it was so mindless, and said that his greatest contribution to television technology was the invention of the off switch.

In fact, the off switch was invented by Philo Farnsworth and was part of his earliest patent.

28

Most of us, given a pad of paper, a pencil, and a few minutes to think, could come up with a reasonably respectable list of writers who were at work in the 1920s: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, Ezra Pound, and so on.

It is unlikely, however, that many of us would think to include the name of Harold Bell Wright. Yet Wright was more popular than any of the authors on the list above and may well have had greater lifetime sales than all of them put together. In 1925, when the first printing of his novel
A Son of His Father
came off the presses in Chicago, it filled twenty-seven railroad boxcars. His 1911 book,
The Winning of Barbara Worth
, was so beloved that fans named a hotel, a road, and a school after it. Wright’s books were sentimental and predictable—they invariably concerned a person who has been buffeted by life’s travails, but then finds happiness and success through hard work and Christian fellowship—but people couldn’t get enough of them.

Much the same could be said of a great many other writers whose names have long since slipped into obscurity. Cosmo Hamilton, Arthur Somers Roche, Coningsby Dawson, T. S. Stribling, Hervey Allen, Francis Stark Young, Hermann Keyserling, Warwick Deeping, Thyra Samter
Winslow, Knut Hamsun, Julia Peterkin, Gene Stratton-Porter, Zona Gale, and Mazo de le Roche all enjoyed greater sales, and often greater fame, than any of the better-remembered authors of the 1920s.

None, however—not even Harold Bell Wright at full, emotive throttle—could begin to compare with the success of two other American authors whose books sold and sold for decades. They were Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and they were almost certainly the two most popular authors on the planet in the twentieth century.

They had a good deal in common. Both were from the Midwest, both came comparatively late to professional writing—Grey at thirty, Burroughs at thirty-six—and even later to success, and both were by almost any measure pretty terrible writers. The wonder is not that they are no longer widely read, but that they ever were. Of Grey, the critic Burton Rascoe wrote: “It is difficult to imagine any writer having less merit in either style or substance than Grey and still maintaining an audience at all.” Burroughs was largely spared such insults because as a pulp writer he wasn’t deemed worthy of even scornful notice. But the world devoured their output. Nobody knows how many books they sold—estimates range, rather wildly, from twenty-five million apiece up to sixty million or so if translations, posthumous works, and book-length magazine publications are counted in. Whatever the actual total, for both it was unquestionably a gratifyingly large number.