by Tim Wu
Meanwhile, by the mid-1930s, Sarnoff’s secret research and development effort had taken Farnsworth’s invention beyond anything Farnsworth himself had managed. The RCA laboratories had overcome the need for strong artificial lighting and now had a TV camera that could work in mere daylight. In short, thanks in part to industrial espionage, RCA now had everything it needed to transform itself into a television company.
BAIRD AND FARNSWORTH UNITE
Given the FCC ban, it became clear to Farnsworth that his best chance to exploit his technology lay overseas. Britain was the world’s leading television market in the 1930s, and in 1932 Farnsworth met with Baird to discuss a joint venture combining Farnsworth’s technologies with Baird’s organization and his contract with the BBC. Here was a partnership with much potential, for Baird Television Limited was at the time the most successful company of its kind anywhere, with more than two hundred employees and the world’s only regular broadcasts via the BBC.
In 1936, Farnsworth visited Baird’s operations in south London’s gigantic Crystal Palace. Inside the massive structure, originally built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, Baird’s company had constructed an astonishing complex combining a laboratory, television station, and production studio. Wedding some of Farnsworth’s technologies with some of Baird’s, the pair produced what were then some of the world’s most advanced electronic television sets.23
Unfortunately, soon thereafter, disaster intervened. Farnsworth had arrived in April, and in late November of that year the entire Crystal Palace was consumed in a massive conflagration of mysterious cause—“the most spectacular night fire in living memory,” as one newsreel put it.* In addition to the magnificent structure of cast iron and glass, also consumed by the flames was any hope for Farnsworth’s technologies getting their start in England. All Baird’s work, too, went up in smoke. Soon thereafter, the BBC would abandon his technologies for an electronic system from another company, EMI, whose technologies were based on RCA’s. His business ruined, Baird returned to the life of a solo inventor. He would spend his last years creating a prototype of color television in high definition (about a thousand lines), television of an order that would not reach the public until the twenty-first century.
NOW WE ADD SIGHT TO SOUND
It was at the 1939 World’s Fair, held in the borough of Queens in New York City, that David Sarnoff would uncloak his scheme to establish RCA as the champion of American television. At the fair, RCA erected a nine-thousand-square-foot pavilion shaped like a giant vacuum tube and dedicated to the “Radio Living Room of Tomorrow.” Its centerpiece, of course, was television. Ten days before the fair opened, Sarnoff held a press conference, among the most effective presentations of its kind in the history of technology and communications. Alone at the podium, surrounded by rows of television sets, a curtain draped over them, Sarnoff would, to borrow a word from the future, reboot the history of television, proclaiming himself and RCA the founders of a new age.24
Baird had demonstrated the first working mechanical television in 1926; Charles Francis Jenkins had begun TV broadcasting in 1928; Farnsworth had patented the electronic television in 1930, starting experimental broadcasts in 1936; and the BBC had been creating television broadcasts of high quality since the mid-1930s. Nonetheless, in 1939, Sarnoff determined to hijack the narrative, rewriting the official story as the public would understand it. He made no mention of television’s history or inventors. Instead, he said:
It is with a feeling of humbleness that I come to this moment of announcing the birth in this country of a new art so important in its implications that it is bound to affect all society. Television is an art which shines like a torch of hope to a troubled world. It is a creative force which we must learn to utilize for the benefit of mankind.… Now, ladies and gentlemen, we add sight to sound!
At that moment, the veils lifted to reveal the rows of television sets, each of them tuned to the spectacle of Sarnoff standing at the podium. It was an image of such power as to overwhelm facts. The news media, having ostensibly forgotten every dazzling demonstration of the technology they had reported over the past thirteen years, fell lazily into line to inform an equally forgetful public that RCA and Sarnoff had invented television—and now were launching it in the United States. The “Talk of the Town” column in The New Yorker put it with laconic knowingness: “Last week, of course, witnessed the official birth of television.” Decades later, that impression would stand unchanged. In 1999, Time magazine, celebrating Sarnoff as the “Father of Broadcasting,” would harken to that “fateful day in 1939” when “Sarnoff gave the world a look into a new life.”25
In a sense, of course, Time was right: Sarnoff had made American broadcasting in his image, though it was less an act of creation than of re-creation. The Independents had had their chance, if not quite a fair one. All the same, ten days after the Sight to Sound speech, Franklin Roosevelt made his first television appearance, and the game was over. From then on, American television, in practice and by common consent, did indeed belong to David Sarnoff, the Radio Corporation of America, and the networks NBC and CBS.
When TV reached consumers after the war, it was, as prophesied, a replica of radio in all respects. The programming was sponsored by advertisers, most of the shows simply adaptations of existing radio programs. Sarnoff had planned it all out in The New York Times in 1928 and, one step at a time, had made it all happen.
THE SEED PATENT
What ever happened to Farnsworth’s patent? We might recall that in the 1870s, Bell had managed to force Western Union’s retreat from telephony by means of a patent lawsuit. By such means, too, Sarnoff himself had pushed AT&T out of the radio industry in the 1920s. Farnsworth might have done likewise to RCA in the 1930s. But in Sarnoff he was facing ruthless genius not to be cowed by any man or law.
Reprising his strategy against FM radio, Sarnoff was willing to simply break the law, gird his lawyers, and force Farnsworth to seek redress. In fact, he went further, ordering his lawyers to challenge Farnsworth’s patents and claiming audaciously that all the relevant ideas had been Zworykin’s. Like the founders of the film industry, Sarnoff understood full well that obtaining justice can be expensive and time-consuming, and, with enough adroitness, one could found an industry on law-breaking.
Forced into litigation, Farnsworth did eventually prove the validity of his patents in 1934, and late in 1939, after the World’s Fair, he did force Sarnoff to license his technologies, nonexclusively, for approximately $1 million plus royalties.26 In this sense Farnsworth’s patents did pay off. But he was never able to accomplish the greatest power move of a patent holder and force RCA out of television altogether. He needed the cash, and in a deeper sense, was not ambitious enough perhaps, or simply lacked such aggressive lawyers as Bell had summoned in the 1870s. It’s hard to know, exactly, what Farnsworth wanted; certainly he wished to be credited as an inventor, and to be paid his royalties, but did he, or anyone else in his company, have the dream of domination of the Schumpeterian “private kingdom”? Absent any evidence to that effect, one tends to see him as that variety of inventor ill equipped to be a founder, and one who furthermore failed to find a champion up to doing battle with the radio industry. There was no great warrior on Farnsworth’s side, no Hubbard or Vail, and no one with the foresight to realize that the inventor had everything necessary to defeat Sarnoff.
Not just Sarnoff but luck, too, went against Farnsworth. The combination of the FCC’s stultifying policies, the Depression, and World War II virtually ensured he would run out of time. Once his patent expired in 1947, and with it RCA’s exclusive license, Farnsworth did market his own television sets, but by then, even as the acknowledged inventor of the modern television, he had no comparative advantage over RCA, General Electric, or any other firm. With his technological breakthrough, he’d had the potential, for a time, to be a disruptive founder, but now he was just a minor manufacturer. Mired in debt and short of parts, his firm soon went bankrupt.
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br /> Personally, too, it had all been too much. Farnsworth’s drinking would grow more serious, and he would fall into a deep depression that nearly killed him before he abandoned the television industry altogether. In the end, he would be acknowledged on the medium he invented only once, in 1957, when a quiz show panel failed to come up with his name as the man who had invented electronic television.
By then, the medium was well on its way. The two networks, NBC and CBS, enjoyed a comfortable duopoly, aided in part by the FCC’s policy of issuing just two licenses per community. Television sets were manufactured primarily by the old radio industry, dominated by RCA. And there was no debate over advertising or what the content of television should be. Unlike the telephone, radio, the Internet, and other technologies, electronic television in America simply skipped any amateur or noncommercial phase.*
WHO LOST TELEVISION?
Industry structure, as I have suggested, is what determines the freedom of expression in the underlying medium. Sarnoff did not aim to be a censor in the classic sense. And though he did, in 1938, propose a voluntary radio code modeled on the Hollywood Production Code (“It is the democratic way in a democratic country,” he wrote), this was no doubt a typically calculated accommodation to the cultural climate—that is, a business decision—rather than any vision of the good.27 Actually it is not clear that he had any particular opinions about programming. But that ultimately was the problem. Even more than Hollywood, Sarnoff and his cohort cared little about anything but profit and retaining control of their industry. With no need to fix what wasn’t broken, there was only the slightest bit of experimentation in the early days of television, and very little reflection on what television could become. Rather, the unexamined vision of the commercial radio networks would continue to dominate, as it had from the start: light amusement produced by advertising firms, Huxley’s soma for the masses.
The 1940s and ’50s were mostly given over to awe at the new technology, and in the relatively untransgressive cultural climate in which television grew, and which it would help to sustain, it would be a long time before anyone began to question whether the medium had lived up to its potential for good. It was not until the late 1950s that industry figures such as Fred Friendly, head of CBS News, or media critics such as Walter Lippmann, began to meditate on what they saw as the great lost opportunity that was television. The tipping point of this accumulation of doubt came with the revelation, in 1957, that the networks’ popular quiz shows were fixed; in response, Lippmann published a now-famous column entitled “The TV Problem”:
“There is something radically wrong with the fundamental national policy under which television operates,” he wrote. “The principle of that policy is that for all practical purposes television shall be operated wholly for private profit.” By that logic, Lippmann reasoned, it was worth defrauding the public with the quiz shows if that was what it took to “capture the largest mass audience which can be made to look at and listen to the most profitable advertising.” He concluded—exposing the transaction to which the general public were oblivious—“while television is supposed to be free, it has in fact become the creature, the servant, and indeed the prostitute, of merchandising.”28
Such was the ignominious birth of the most influential medium of the postwar era. Under the suspiciously un-American banner of planning and progress, the indubitably American ideals of free exchange and merit rewarded were forgotten. Above all, the early history of the television shows us that the Cycle, at least respecting industrial destruction, is not, after all, inevitable. For the combined forces of a dominant industry and the federal government can arrest the Cycle’s otherwise inexorable progress, intimating for the prevailing order something like Kronos’s fantasy of perpetual rule.
* Known as a Niptow disk.
* As Farnsworth took the Pickford image from the film The Taming of the Shrew, the first public demonstration of electronic television was almost certainly an infringement of copyright. Later Farnsworth would use for his demonstrations Walt Disney’s talking cartoon Steamboat Willie, also presumably without a license.
* The Federal Radio Commission was renamed the Federal Communications Commission in 1934. In this chapter, for simplicity, I refer to both as the FCC.
* Dramatic film footage of the fire can be seen on the Internet.
* Right at the birth of television, there was one other chance for the industry to open up. As television gained popularity across the United States, a broad range of interests clamored to start their own stations. The film industry, notably Warner Bros., among others, applied to the FCC for television licenses. In some other version of history, Hollywood might have started a decidedly different brand of television in the 1940s, drawing on its vast stockpiles of content.
The Rebels, the Challengers, and the Fall
IN THE SMALL CRACKS of the twentieth century’s empires, challengers were slowly born over the decades of dominance. Interestingly, each of these would come to life as a tiny irrelevancy, a speck off the map. Small-town entrepreneurs invented the community antennas that would become cable television. A failing UHF broadcaster from Atlanta, Ted Turner, pioneered the idea of the cable network. Filmmakers until then excluded from all but the most obscure theaters would remake Hollywood, damaged by television and the antitrust division of the Justice Department. And an impractical, highly abstract academic project became, eventually, the first universal network: the Internet.
Part III tells the story of how information monopolies disintegrate. An industry is dominated by one ruler, an oligarchy or trust of some sort. What forces can break such hegemony?
CHAPTER 11
The Right Kind of Breakup
Toward the end of World War II, before the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Sandia National Laboratories were founded in New Mexico. Situated near the better known Los Alamos labs, Sandia was to extend the basic work of the Manhattan Project into more sophisticated weapons development. The labs’ ongoing mission was to serve as the “steward” of the United States’ nuclear arsenal. What may seem surprising is that this top-secret effort should have been overseen not by the Department of Defense or some other government agency but, as late as 1992, by the telephone company. It all began when President Truman wrote a letter to AT&T subsidiary Western Electric. “In my opinion,” Truman wrote in 1949, “you have here an opportunity to render an exceptional service in the national interest.”1
Perhaps no other arrangement more clearly bespeaks the trust and intimacy that existed for decades between the U.S. government and the nation’s great communications empires than the privilege enjoyed by the authorized telephone monopoly. Nor was Sandia Laboratories AT&T’s only contribution to the Cold War. AT&T built a system of towers across the top of Canada and Alaska designed to warn of approaching ICBMs, a secret radio network to provide communications for Air Force One, and at least sixty hardened underground bunkers housing emergency equipment. Indeed, so essential to the common defense did AT&T seem that the Defense Department would intervene forcefully to prevent the company’s breakup by antitrust suit in 1956, citing a “hazard to national security.” Fittingly, during the 1950s, AT&T, for its part, adopted the notably Orwellian slogan “Communications Is the Foundation of Democracy.”2
AT&T’s relationship with the federal government may have been a uniquely intimate entanglement of interests. But, in fact, the blessing of the state, implicit or explicit, has been crucial to every twentieth-century information empire. We have seen how it influenced the course of radio (initially for military reasons) and later of television. In the case of Hollywood, and the government’s decades-long acceptance of that industrial concentration, there may have been no national-security imperative beyond the morale of weary soldiers lifted by celluloid apparitions of Betty Grable. But as long as the studios had friends in Washington, their empire was secure. In every information industry, the government mediated what would have otherwise surely been a more tumultuous course
of the Cycle.
Theorists of industrial evolution, Schumpeter foremost, have always understood the alternation of birth and destruction to be a natural inevitability of markets. Nothing, the theory goes, can stop an idea whose time has come. But what if in an otherwise free-market setting, an industrial entity enjoys a special forbearance or favor of the state. What if, as with AT&T, that favor amounts to its being a virtual organ of government? Can the natural ecology of the market still function, or is industrial creativity arrested? The power of state patronage or sufferance to any degree would seem to be more than any would-be competitor, even one armed with a technical breakthrough, can overcome. Herein lies the greatest complication to Schumpeter’s idea of how capitalism works.
You cannot expect creative destruction to proceed normally in such circumstances: unseating such a monopolist thus becomes less a question of market dynamics than of politics. After the Second World War, the state would twice abandon its habit of tolerance and sponsorship, intervening in communications industries to break up dominant players. In 1984, it would have another run at Bell, this time finishing the job it had aborted in 1956. But even before the first attempt to break up Bell, in 1948, the government would take action against another information empire, forcing the Hollywood studios to sell their theaters and thus precipitating the collapse of the carefully designed studio system.