by Tim Wu
Generally, the 1945 FCC order was bad news for the infant FM industry, and the independent elements of AM radio. Its new wattage guidelines made obsolete 400,000 FM radio sets that consumers had already bought and required every FM station to buy a new transmitter. Officially, the FCC estimated that the effects of the order would set FM back four months. But despite the exertions of Armstrong and the fledgling industry to stay afloat, FM would not recover from these blows for decades. The exciting technology developed under the auspices of the industry in 1934, its technical superiority notwithstanding, was effectively dead by 1952.
In 1940, Armstrong had predicted that FM would supplant AM in five years. Actually, it would take until the 1970s for it to catch on, and until the 1980s to reach the popularity of AM.13 It cannot be denied that the emergence of television at the same time took some of the wind out of FM’s sails. It is likewise true that wholly replacing one technology with another does take time. But the studied efforts of the AM industry and the complicit restrictions imposed by the FCC, even if occasionally well-meaning, certainly retarded FM, preventing it from developing into anything more than AM in stereo. Its other remarkable capabilities—especially the potential for many new low-cost radio stations or long distance relays—remain unexploited even to this day. In Lessing’s description of what happened, “the vast concentration of economic power that marked the field of mass communications … had rolled over FM and crushed it into a shape less threatening to their monopolistic pattern of operations.”14
Professor Armstrong would never see his greatest invention reach mass acceptance. But what finally crushed him had less to do with the burdens of championing FM’s struggle than with his more personal battle against RCA and David Sarnoff. RCA had begun changing its tune about FM in 1946, when it saw the technology’s value for providing sound to television broadcasting. Sarnoff, understanding well the merits of Armstrong’s invention, decided to put FM receivers in RCA’s television sets. But instead of seeking the partnership of his old friend, Sarnoff and his firm decided simply to use Armstrong’s technology and wait for him to sue.
RCA’s official position was that in-house engineers had invented and patented a “different” FM. In reality, there was no such thing, and Armstrong, like Alexander Bell in the 1870s, was forced into litigation that would last the rest of his life. Unfortunately, though he was extremely stubborn, Armstrong was facing an opponent that was ready for him. RCA’s lawyers from the firm of Cahill, Gordon did what New York law firms specialize in: turning lawsuits into wars of attrition. It was a fight of man against corporation, with discovery and pretrial motions artfully employed to delay justice until the size of Armstrong’s legal bills alone threatened to determine the contest. The inventor’s deposition alone lasted over a year.15
It was during this litigation that Sarnoff and Armstrong came face-to-face for what was almost certainly the last time. Sarnoff was deposed by his own lawyers with Armstrong at the plaintiff’s table. Then Armstrong’s lawyer asked Sarnoff how the men knew each other, and Sarnoff with perfect sangfroid replied, “We were close friends. I hope we still are.” Later, when RCA’s lawyer asked him who had invented FM radio, Sarnoff expanded on the party line: “I will go further and I will say that the RCA and the NBC,” he testified, “have done more to develop FM than anybody in this country, including Armstrong.”
The denial that Armstrong had in fact invented FM was, if not the last straw, then very nearly the last. A man’s decision to end his life is inevitably a complex one and cannot easily be blamed on any one person or event. Yet it is clear that by the 1950s, whatever faith Armstrong had had in the fairness of the system—of business, of justice, or of life itself—was being chipped away by the travails of FM, which he had made his own. He was nearly bankrupted, as the lawsuit with RCA consumed the once great fortune from his earlier patents. His marriage (to Sarnoff’s onetime secretary) had also fallen to pieces over his refusal to settle. In 1954 it all became too much too bear. On February 1, forty years to the day from the night he and Sarnoff had spent searching for radio signals, he wrote a final note, dressed neatly, and walked out the window of his thirteenth-floor Manhattan apartment.
The story of FM radio gives some taste of what television’s inventors were in for, and a sense of David Sarnoff’s genius in the art of industrial combat. He saw not just that FM could replace AM, but that television would more generally replace radio, and by implication, destroy the Radio Corporation of America. He was a man who proved it is possible to defy both Joseph Schumpeter’s doctrine of creative destruction and, as he turned RCA into a television company, the adage that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks.
* As of 2010, the Federal Communications Commission was interested in licensing many more low-power FM stations; yet Congress, under pressure from broadcasters, passed the Radio Broadcasting Preservation Act of 2000, which made licensing of low-power stations much more difficult.
CHAPTER 10
Now We Add Sight to Sound
Before them sat a crudely built machine made of wire and wood, incorporating an old tea chest and a bicycle lamp. At its center was giant spinning disk made of wire and cardboard. This was the scene in January 1926, in London’s Soho district, as a rumpled bespectacled man named John Logie Baird received a group of reporters and scientists in his cramped attic laboratory.1
That Baird had persuaded the press and, even more, scientists from the Royal Institution of Great Britain to come see his contraption was impressive. For Baird was an eccentric inventor with limited formal training—rather reminiscent of “Doc” in Back to the Future. Up to that point, his greatest invention had been a type of hosiery designed to absorb dampness, known as the “Baird undersock.” Less successful was his follow-up effort, pneumatic footwear (a crude precursor to Nike’s “Air” shoes) that had an unfortunate tendency to explode underfoot.2
Baird’s latest was indubitably a great leap beyond inflatable footwear: the world’s first working television. Much as Alexander Bell had coaxed voice out of a wire, Baird, fifty years later, had discovered how images, too, could be sent over a filament with the help of a giant spinning disk.* Lack of training in electronics—as with Bell—sometimes proved an advantage, for he would try things others would deem ridiculous. To improve television scanning, for instance, he once got hold of a human eyeball, hoping to discern some applicable secret of operation. (“Nothing was gained from the experiment,” he would concede in his journal. “It was gruesome and a waste of time.”)3
The world’s first television
Back in his attic laboratory, at Baird’s command, the ghostly image of a face appeared on a screen. As the London Times reported, “the image as transmitted was faint and often blurred, but substantiated a claim … it is possible to transmit and reproduce instantly the details of movement, and such things as the play of expression on the face.”4
As with so many technologies, television resulted from several simultaneous inventions. Almost immediately after Baird introduced his prototype, an American, Charles Francis Jenkins, invited the American press to see his television in Washington, D.C. Jenkins’s “radiovisor” was a handsome machine made of polished wood, and the American press came away favorably impressed, The New York Times promptly declaring Jenkins the “Father of Television.” Attentive readers may remember meeting Jenkins more than thirty years earlier, when, still in his twenties, he had coinvented the first American motion picture projector, only to see his partner sell out to Thomas Edison. (“The inventor gets the experience, and the capitalist gets the invention.”)5
Unfortunately for both men, neither Baird’s nor Jenkins’s prototype worked all that well. Hence the appearance of the third great independent inventor. In September 1928, just two years after Baird and Jenkins had demonstrated their devices, a twenty-two-year-old San Francisco resident named Philo Farnsworth was showing the press a remarkably high-resolution clip of Mary Pickford combing her hair on the screen of his own contraption.*
The “young genius,” as the San Francisco Chronicle described him, had invented the world’s first electronic, as opposed to mechanical, television, having replaced Baird’s spinning disk with a cathode ray gun, for which he would secure a broad patent. “It is a queer looking little image,” said the Chronicle of the Farnsworth electronic television, but “perfection is now a matter of engineering.”6
Among these three men there was nearly every necessary ingredient for yet another saga of disruptive innovation in the great Anglo-American tradition. We have an existing technology, radio, already backed by a large, concentrated industry, vulnerable to being supplanted by fast-moving entrepreneurs and a giant technical leap. All that was wanting was capitalization, and perhaps the right individual to help these inventors hang on to what they had created.
Yet, as sometimes happens, this is exactly the point when the natural course of the narrative breaks, when the needle, as it were, is yanked from its groove disrupting the song of Schumpeterian disruption. Enter the force that perennially has bedeviled the smooth operation of Schumpeter’s basic theory: the reluctance of the obsolete to go gently. Despite its vulnerabilities, the radio industry was deeply unimpressed by predictions of its demise, indeed would ferociously resist usurpation.
If any man was equal to yanking the needle, to turning the tide of history toward his own purposes, it was radio’s emperor, David Sarnoff, president of RCA and the founder of NBC. Sarnoff could see plainly that television was coming—there was no burying this innovation—and so he determined that when it did appear, television would be under the firm control of his company and his industry. Television was not to evolve, in response to ambient forces, à la Darwin; rather, it would be created as though by the God of the Old Testament, in the image of the creator, in this case radio. For Sarnoff, the paramount objective was that television not pose a threat to radio’s hold on the attention of Americans in their homes, their attention to the advertising that was now the industry’s lifeblood. In this purpose, he was endowed with superhuman means: the technical and financial resources of an industrial leviathan. And as if that were not enough, he would, as in other circumstances, also enlist the aid of the federal government in his struggle to survive the onslaught of creative destruction.
To say that television shaped American popular culture and social norms in the twentieth century, to the point of virtually creating them, is to state the obvious. If for no other reason, then, it is worth understanding just how it began.
In the early 1930s, it was by no means obvious what television would be. It might have emerged as an independent new industry to challenge the NBC-CBS duopoly and its advertising models. It might for some time have languished as an industry while thriving as an open, amateur medium, a hotbed of diverse content and points of view, such as radio was in the 1920s or Internet video in the early years of the twenty-first century. Or it might arise as something more like today’s cable television or Hollywood, a producer of more elaborate programming not dependent on advertising. It was, in any case, never preordained that television would be the lackey of AM radio.
The story of television’s founding presents a stark contrast to that of the heroic inventor-founder of American mythology. It is a dispiriting case of what happens when Kronos finishes everyone on his plate. The direct cultural consequences would be profound: two (later three) networks defining the medium that would define America, offering programming aimed at the masses, homogeneous in sensibility, broadly drawn and unprovocative by design, according to the imperatives of “entertainment that sells.”
AN INDUSTRY IS BORN
Within a year of 1926, Jenkins’s and Baird’s primitive televisions had sparked a contest to found an industry. As The New York Times wrote, “One of the strangest and most exciting races that the world ever witnessed is now in progress. Eight inventors, working individually and in teams, are reaching out to clutch a prize as rich as any ever won by Edison, Bell or Marconi.” It very much seemed, then, as if another of those great American (or Anglo-American) sagas of invention and progress was under way. Who, indeed, would be the next Bell or Edison? In the United States, Jenkins was the clear front-runner. In the summer of 1928, Jenkins opened the world’s first television station, W3XK, in Washington, D.C. With programming five days a week, he soon bragged of over 25,000 viewers, though the claim is hard to evaluate. By 1929 he’d opened a second station, in New Jersey, and now with two had planted the seeds of the first television network.7
Jenkins’s success soon began to attract competition from larger firms. Among others, units of both General Electric and AT&T developed their own versions of the mechanical television. In 1928, General Electric (Thomas Edison’s old company) opened a station in upstate New York and began broadcasting three times a week (ironically forcing Jenkins once again to compete against an Edison version of something he had invented). While its technology was not as advanced as Jenkins’s, GE had a certain flair for flashy programming that grabbed headlines. In the summer of 1928, for instance, using a portable unit, GE managed to broadcast Alfred Smith accepting the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. A month later it would broadcast what it heralded as the first television drama, a one-act performance that left The New York Times spellbound. “For the first time in history,” declared the front-page report, “a dramatic performance was broadcast simultaneously by radio and television. Voice and action came together through space in perfect synchronization.…”8
Meanwhile, in Britain, John Baird formed Baird Television Limited in 1929 and secured the BBC’s permission to broadcast one half-hour of television, twice a week, at midnight. British television was far behind its American counterpart in becoming a mass medium: asked, after his very first BBC broadcast, to speculate on the size of the audience, he answered, “Twenty-nine.” Nevertheless, like Jenkins, he had proved something—it was, as the Daily Herald wrote, “a British triumph.”9
If their programming schedules and content were modest, Jenkins, GE, and Baird had big plans. Jenkins in particular, with his two stations and claims of substantial audiences, impressed would-be investors. In 1929 he made an initial public offering and raised $10 million in cash to fund his expansion. Baird, meanwhile, would be obliged to come to America to raise cash. Striking a deal with radio station WMCA for joint operation of an affiliated television station, he promised one million sets for the American market, at $25 apiece.10
Just what was the early technology like? Mechanical television was somewhat similar to photography. A disk is perforated with holes arranged in concentric rings, so that when an image from some lens is projected onto it, the disk as it spins successively “scans” the image, the light captured by each ring of holes representing a “slice” of the image that passes through to a photosensitive cell. At the other end of the wire, the process is repeated. There were inherent limitations: the image was always somewhat distorted, its resolution limited by the number of rings of holes. The first broadcasts managed between 30 and 60 lines of resolution, compared to 525 for standard television in the 1940s—as against the more than one thousand lines required now for “high definition.” Inevitably, therefore the televised images would seem like novelty add-ons to the sound, still the primary element of the broadcast.11
Many historians assume that mechanical television was inherently too primitive to succeed as a consumer product. But while it doubtless would have been replaced by electronic television, to insist that mechanical television was doomed seems an overstatement. By the mid-1930s, Baird Television had developed to the point of over 400 lines of resolution, reasonably comparable to the standard resolution of later televisions. And it is hard, if not impossible, to predict what will be a technology’s threshold of consumer acceptability. Looking at today’s PlayStation, who would guess that Pong had once been a transfixing game? Or, for that matter, that in the age of hi-def, YouTube, with poorer resolution than television of the 1940s, could have caught on as it has? In fact, the primitive
prototype is typical in the founding stage of a new industry, as are the “early adopters” prepared to take a chance on it. Recall that Bell’s telephones, when they were first sold, hardly worked—it took Thomas Edison to create a truly functional device.
The reason such prototypes are sustainable, however briefly, and ultimately important is not their capacity to do what the technology is meant to do; rather, their value is in exposing a working model to more minds that might muse upon it and imagine a more evolved version. And so the clunky first telephones could inspire Theodore Vail and the Independents to envision a network reaching every citizen, just as the first personal computers, virtually useless, nevertheless set minds dreaming of future wonders. So it was with the television, too, the mechanical version stirring not frustration but imagination. “When perfection has been attained,” wrote a reporter for the Daily News in 1926, television will transmit to London “the jostling crowds of Broadway, the millions of electric colored lights at night.…” So what if not every vision would come to pass, such as those of the otherwise successful inventor Archibald M. Low, who in 1926 predicted that there “may come a time when we shall have ‘smellyvision’ and ‘tastyvision.’ When we are able to broadcast so that all the senses are catered for …”?12
Yet even with the most imaginative early adapters, an industry must meet some basic requirements to take flight. The TV had to be transformed into, if not a perfect consumer product, at least a workable device for hobbyists, and to attract adequate capital, whether from public or private sources. Jenkins, like his colleagues a veteran of the radio pioneer days, understood the importance of a device targeting ordinary consumers, and in the beginning, he sold a kit for $7.50, before going on to sell the first ready-to-operate television set, which he called the “Jenkins Radiovisor.”13 Not knowing which name would catch on, he fudged it in his ads: