by Tim Wu
It works! You can now enjoy radiovision programs.… Television is here! It is ready for the experimenter, service man, and dealer! Television programs are steadily improving. Now is the time to get into television. Experience the thrills of pioneer broadcast days all over again!
Forward-looking magazines like Popular Mechanics took the bait. A 1929 article pictures a smiling American family sitting in front of a Jenkins radiovisor. They are riveted by the device that is unrecognizable to us, with its small circular screen and its huge cabinet shaped like a table. The caption optimistically proclaims, “Already Television Has Reached the Stage Where the Whole Family Can Enjoy It.”14 It was just the toehold Jenkins needed in America, especially considering the backwardness of things in Great Britain. Unfortunately for him, others were already plotting against him.
SARNOFF ON MECHANICAL TELEVISION
“It would be easy to cry ‘television is here,’ ” wrote David Sarnoff in the Sunday New York Times in 1928. “It would be easy, and it might be profitable, but it would not advance the day when sight is added to sound in an adequate service to the home in radio communication.”15
The mechanical television, in Sarnoff’s view, was a shoddy product that should not be sold to the public just so a few could make a quick buck. No less calculated is his implicit insistence that television’s legitimate arrival could only be as an adequate addition to the service provided by nation’s greatest (and only) radio network, NBC. Having sole proprietorship of the nation’s ears, Sarnoff was laying his forbidding claim to their eyes as well, such as would follow adding “sight to sound.” “We have created a nation-wide service for listeners-in,” wrote Sarnoff, referring to the radio, “We must establish a similar service for lookers-on, once the road of transmission through space has been cleared.”
David Sarnoff was a true visionary, but not of the progressive kind. He could foresee even in the 1920s, as he founded NBC, that television had the potential to destroy both the broadcast network and its parent company, RCA, increasingly dependent on broadcast revenues. And so as early as 1928 he was establishing a clear, consistent message: television is not ready for prime time. He was, of course, entitled to his opinion, just as any private citizen would be in expressing himself vis-à-vis a technology with which he was not enamored. (Many I know, for instance, quite disliked Twitter when it appeared, and discouraged friends from using it.) But Sarnoff was no ordinary citizen, having the ear of the Federal Communications Commission.* And his campaign of technological carping was disingenuous, his real aim being to persuade the FCC to freeze the television industry until RCA and the rest of the radio industry were ready to make it theirs.
From the late 1920s, Sarnoff, RCA, NBC, and later CBS repeatedly lobbied the FCC to adopt their view that television was simply an outgrowth of radio, and one that only the established radio industry could be entrusted to bring to proper fruition. An RCA submission to the FCC from the 1930s, for instance, argues, “Only an experienced and responsible organization such as the Radio Corporation of America, should be granted licenses to broadcast material, for only such organizations can be depended upon to uphold high ideals of service.”16
Unfortunately for Jenkins and the rest of the infant television industry, the commission proved receptive to such cajoling. While never coming out against mechanical television as Sarnoff had, the commission would tend to agree that in such form the technology was inadequate for marketing to the public. And so, in the name of progress and a brighter future, the FCC halted television in its tracks, just as it had done to FM radio to avoid unsettling AM.
The commission’s motivations were perhaps not as conspiratorial as they might seem. True, it was staffed largely by men who had once worked for either Bell or the radio industry, in which contexts they would have absorbed the thinking that television was simply radio with pictures. But the FCC, at the time, was obsessed with the perceived benefits of “planning”—of setting out America’s technological future in an orderly manner. Just as the Soviet Union was launching its own Five Year Plan, the FCC was busily and, one might argue, less efficiently working out the future of broadcasting. It therefore had its own ideological reasons for accepting RCA’s self-serving claim that television, if it got off on the wrong foot too early, might “fix” on an inferior standard.
Consider for a moment the oddness of this phenomenon in a putatively free-market economy. The government was deciding, in effect, when a product that posed no hazard to public health would be “ready” for sale. Consider, too, how incongruous this was in a society under the First Amendment: a medium with great potential to further the exercise of free speech was being stalled until such time as the government could agree it had attained an acceptable technical standard. Rather than letting the market decide what a technology in its present state was worth, a federal agency—not even a democratically elected body—was to forbid its sale outright. One can see the logic of such oversight in the case of, say, an experimental cancer treatment—but a television set?
This is not to deny the utility of thinking ahead in general and in smaller contexts (as the Boy Scout motto advises), but central planning undertaken at a national level is quite another thing, its limitations evident in the experience of every controlled economy, even the universally dazzling example of China today. As Friedrich Hayek would later argue, how can the government possibly have enough information to know when something as unpredictable as technology is “ready”? What fate might have befallen the telephone, the radio, motion pictures—or, more recently, a strange new device like the iPod or a site like eBay, if going to market required one first to gain federal permission?
Acting in what it believed to be the public interest, the commission arrested the marketing of television from its invention in the late 1920s until the 1940s. It issued only a few licenses to men like Jenkins, and specified that they were for experimental purposes only—all forms of commercial television were banned. And this ban on commerce was strict enough that when Jenkins aired an announcement of his $7.50 television kits, the FCC sanctioned him.17
To be sure—unlike, say, the iPod—television technology depended on access to the radio frequency spectrum, which since the Communications Act of 1934 was subject to the management of the executive branch. In this sense, some measure of regulation by the government was, of course, to be expected. But even this fact cannot justify a total freeze on commercial television lasting nearly two decades. The contrast with early radio is instructive. When Hoover headed the agency, virtually anyone was welcome to run a primitive station, an environment that the Internet pioneer Vint Cerf would later term “permissionless innovation.” To run a television station, however, one had to apply to the FCC for an experimental license, subject to strict standards for obtaining it and for keeping it. A licensed broadcaster had to file regular reports, and show, among other things:
That he intended to engage in bona fide experimental operations related to television; …
That he had adequate financial responsibility, engineering personnel and sufficient equipment and facilities to carry out a research program.18
It was based on these standards that the FCC rejected John Logie Baird’s plans for entering the U.S. market via a joint venture with WMCA in New York. The FCC’s theory was that American radio stations could fulfill the experimental mandate just as effectively as Baird, and hence there was no reason to extend a license to a foreigner. And so the Baird Television Corporation never got its start in the United States, a missed opportunity that both slowed television’s penetration in America and helped doom an independent variant of the medium.
Apart from keeping out foreigners, the most stultifying effect of the FCC’s television freeze was to inhibit potential investors, compounding the capital scarcity created by the Depression. As we have already seen, time and time again, it is investors as much as inventors who decide what our future will look like, and what we call genius might better be described as smarts coupled with
capital. Unable to make money or attract funding, potential American manufacturers of mechanical television would all collapse or abandon their efforts within a few years. There was simply no business model or means of support after the initial novelty wore off. Bluster alone could not save even Jenkins, and so, by February of 1932, his reign as the master of television was over. With his bankrupt company in receivership, the radiovisor was no more. Jenkins himself died a quiet death two years later, having tried and failed twice to found his own information empire.
What was at stake here? What difference would it make that the FCC slowed down television to let RCA and Sarnoff get their ducks aligned, as opposed to giving the Independents their head? While not so obvious, the greater consequences may have been not for television per se but for the cause of innovation more broadly defined. Yes, Sarnoff would eventually bring television to market himself. Yet, as usually happens, the radio industry was led to television in the first place by the exertions of the independent strivers—it did not get there on its own. But if government makes clear that the game is rigged, that there is little room for the independent inventor to score, it removes the potent incentive for becoming a Jenkins, a Bell, or an Edison. As the Hush-A-Phone affair makes plain, the conditions facing entrepreneurs determine how much innovation happens.
There are yet more subtle social costs to a rigged game. Sarnoff’s RCA was, like Zukor’s Paramount studios, an integrated business. RCA both sold radios and owned the nation’s main broadcast network, NBC. Naturally, then, as part of its plan to take over the emergent industry, Sarnoff wanted to see television, both as technology and as content, tailored to NBC’s formula of “entertainment that sells.” It was his intention (one he ultimately achieved) that, when the time came, all radio programming would migrate to television. Conversely, television would be nothing more than visible radio. And so we see the now familiar effect of a vertically integrated industry subsuming a new information medium, wresting control of it from a disorganized industry that in all likelihood would have nurtured more experimentation and more diverse ideas of what television should be. There can be little doubt that on the Procrustean bed of NBC’s business model, television’s growth as an expressive medium would be stunted.
Even if we accept the genuineness of its benign intentions, the FCC was oblivious or indifferent to the consequences of its planned future for freedom and variety of expression. It did not consider, or perhaps didn’t recognize, that simply to hand over to the radio industry a medium with the potential power of television would be to determine who was to be heard (and seen) and who not. It did so, I would argue, out of a preoccupation with facilitating commerce, convinced that the NBC model represented the perfection of broadcasting. As with radio, the FCC, since its founding, had tended to accept NBC’s view that independent TV stations were irresponsible organs of propaganda (in the value-neutral sense), and that only commercial networks like NBC could provide what the public needed. It is to our sensibilities an unlikely alignment of corporate and public interests, all the more in that NBC had never acceded to responsibilities of public trust as AT&T had in exchange for the blessings of authorized monopoly. While the telephone had been regulated with a full awareness of the power of the medium, television came into industrial being with little more than an extension of the philosophy underlying mass production as inspired by the automobile: Henry Ford’s dictum, “the business of America is business.”
In the end, it is perhaps incalculable whether the Depression, the insufficiencies of the mechanical version, or the hand of the FCC was most responsible for killing off America’s first television industry. The Depression, although global, did not prevent other countries from launching their own television industries during this period, usually with government support. Since its inception, BBC television, for one, grew in quality and quantity, until by the mid-1930s it had begun to broadcast in what would become the standard resolution for electronic television. By 1935, Nazi Germany, too, would begin limited electronic broadcasts, and would be on the air all day with the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.19
We fancy having in the United States the most open of markets for innovation, in contrast to the more controlled economies of other nations. In truth, however, the record is decidedly uneven, even given to excesses that would shame a socialist, with the federal government, at the behest of an entrenched industry, putting itself in charge of the future. Fortunately for the Free World, while the Nazis may have beaten us to television, we nicked them out for the Bomb.
David Sarnoff was silent during the years that saw the rise and fall of mechanical television, but he was not inactive. Having seen the future, he was discreetly planning to get there first. As early as the late 1920s, Sarnoff had secretly ordered RCA’s laboratories to channel all efforts into developing a working electronic television. The FCC’s suppression of the mechanical television industry (at his urging) ensured that neither Jenkins nor Baird would be in any position to challenge RCA once the next iteration came into the American market. But between Sarnoff and his goals stood one more obstacle: the last of the loners, Philo Farnsworth, the most formidable of television’s inventors, and the holder of the seed patent.
THE THIRD INDEPENDENT
“S.F. Man’s Invention to Revolutionize Television” was a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle on September 3, 1928, just a week before David Sarnoff’s editorial denouncing early television. The article went on, “Two major advances in television were announced yesterday by a young inventor who has been quietly working away in his laboratory in San Francisco and has evolved a system of television basically different from any system yet placed in operation.”20
Farnsworth’s invention was a radical improvement on mechanical television. The old technology, with its spinning disk full of holes to scan and transmit an image, offered poor resolution and a picture that was always slightly warped. It is true that Baird Television had gone a long way toward improving the product, but in the end there was no overcoming the fundamental limitations of the technology. Enter Farnsworth’s “image dissector,” later simply called a “TV camera,” which performed a line-by-line conversion of the photons making up an image into electrons, and line-by-line re-created the image on the receiving end. Compared to mechanical television, it offered a resolution that was, in principle, unlimited.21
Like most of the key inventors in this book, Farnsworth, who conceived electronic television at the age of twenty-two, was an outsider. Born in 1906, and raised a Mormon in Idaho, he made his first experiments as a teenager in a farm shed. He was also perhaps the first tech entrepreneur to base himself in the Bay Area. Farnsworth would patent his scanning technology in 1930 and have working models by the early 1930s. He was, then, in a perfect position to be the “first mover” in the electronic television market—if it were not for the subtle and not so subtle ways that Sarnoff, the radio industry, and the FCC set about neutralizing him.22
Sarnoff, to his credit (as an industrialist if not a moralist), realized that Farnsworth owned a technology that could be the foundation of a true television industry, and a dagger to the heart of radio and the RCA. He had a bit of help reaching this insight from his unwitting and naïve adversary. As Evan Schwartz, author of The Last Lone Inventor, documents, Sarnoff was tipped off by Farnsworth’s demonstrations that revealed far too much about how his product worked. Even more foolishly, in 1929 Farnsworth gave a three-day tour of his laboratories to Sarnoff’s top television scientist, Vladimir Zworykin, who gained admittance on the pretense of scientific curiosity and through playing on Farnsworth’s hope that RCA might be considering an investment. Of course, Farnsworth needed publicity as well as investors, but he did not anticipate that Sarnoff would seek to displace him, not fund him. The most Sarnoff would ever offer him was a measly $100,000 for everything Farnsworth owned.
With word of Farnsworth’s invention growing, Sarnoff started putting it about that in fact the young man had nothing of any interest to RCA or
the market. He was bluffing: Schwartz and others have shown that from the late 1920s onward, RCA labs were feverishly trying to reverse-engineer Farnsworth’s machine based on the information gleaned from Zworykin’s visit. For while RCA had by now developed its own patented technology, Zworykin’s kinoscope, the demonstrations of Farnsworth’s image dissector showed his technology to be superior. Indeed, it would ultimately prove the starting point for modern television.
And so, as the 1930s began, Sarnoff and his allies were simultaneously trying to discredit the Farnsworth television and to reproduce it—such was the perverse genius of the Sarnoff plan. The talk campaign was similar to the one he’d lodged against FM and Edwin Armstrong: Farnsworth’s invention, while of some scientific interest, did not work, and so his patents were invalid. The key audience for this disinformation was, of course, the investment community, and in 1935 RCA intensified the effort to keep them away from Farnsworth by means of what we now call a “vaporware” strategy. In 1935, Sarnoff announced that the company was commiting millions to build its own television, with its mighty industrial laboratories and its own resident genius, Zworykin. In the face of the imminent release of a “real” version of the television, covered by its own patents, only a fool would invest in Farnsworth.
Combined with the credit scarcity of those years and the FCC’s ban on commercial television, the Sarnoff squeeze made survival quite a struggle for Farnsworth’s “Television Laboratories.” His machine, although it worked, still required powerful lighting, which problem he needed to address in development while he tried to build his own industry. He would find money to do neither, and one can well imagine the frustration of a man who in 1935 owns a working television camera and television sets of the highest quality anywhere, yet who is legally and financially constrained from bringing his surefire product to market. Little wonder that Farnsworth, despite his Mormon upbringing, turned to the bottle. As the years flew by, he would be stuck doing endless public demonstrations—one in 1934 a ten-day affair at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. He could still attract media attention, but without capital, he had nothing to build a company on.