The Master Switch

by Tim Wu

  12. Todd Lappin quotes this Radio Broadcast column in “Déjà Vu All Over Again,” Wired, May 1995.

  13. Alfred Goldsmith spoke about the potential cultural benefits of the radio in an interview with Edgar Felix, “Dr. Alfred N. Goldsmith on the Future of Radio Telephony,” Radio Broadcast, May 1922, 42, 45.

  14. Mark Caspar, “Radio Broadcasting,” Radio Dealer, June 1922, 42–45. William Boddy references this article in New Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  15. Lee De Forest recommends radio as a hobby in How to Set Up an Amateur Radio Receiving Station.

  16. An example of the radio station “lists” is Armstrong Perry, “What Anyone Can Hear: Complete List of Broadcasting Stations in U.S.” Radio News, March 1922, 814. An excellent source describing the role of the radio in the history of jazz music is Clifford Doerksen, American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcasters of the Jazz Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

  17. David Sarnoff’s remark is quoted in Kenneth Bilby, The General: David Sarnoff and the Rise of the Communications Industry (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 65.

  18. John Reith’s diaries were edited by Charles Stewart and published in The Reith Diaries (London: Collins, 1975). See also Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 126; Derek Parker, Radio: The Great Years (Devon, UK: David & Charles, 1977). For an inside look at the history of the BBC, see Arthur Richard Burrows, The Story of Broadcasting (London: Cassell and Co., 1924).

  19. Gale Pedrick’s description of Savoy Hill can be found in Briggs, History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, 193.

  20. John Reith expressed his view of the radio in his own book, Broadcast over Britain (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1924).

  21. Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Macmillan Company, 1927).

  22. Reith wrote this in an internal BBC memorandum in November 1925. It has become a rather well-known quote, and is discussed in Burton Paulu, Television and Radio in the United Kingdom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 8.

  23. This statement by Reith comes from Paulu, Television and Radio in the United Kingdom, 300.

  24. Asa Briggs relates this anecdote about George Bernard Shaw in his The BBC: The First Fifty Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

  25. Ibid., 54.

  26. Reith’s assessments of Churchill can be found in various entries in his diaries, which were later edited by Charles Stewart and published in The Reith Diaries. Reith’s opinion of the government was also discussed in a Time magazine article four years after his death: “Britain: Lord Wrath,” Time, October 6, 1975.

  27. This sentiment by Reith’s contemporary at BBC can be found in Briggs, The BBC: The First Fifty Years, 156.

  28. Asa Briggs describes the language advisory committee in History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, 221–22.

  29. Reith confessed this in Stewart, ed., The Reith Diaries, 68.

  30. Reith explains his conception of BBC as a public utility in Broadcast over Britain.

  31. Briggs, The BBC: The First Fifty Years, 49.

  CHAPTER 3: MR. VAIL IS A BIG MAN

  1. For an interesting discussion of Edmund Burch and the development of these early Independent telephone lines, see Michael L. Olsen, “But It Won’t Milk the Cows: Farmers in Colfax County Debate the Merits of the Telephone,” New Mexico Historical Review 61:1 (January 1986).

  2. Scientific magazines and rural newspapers frequently discussed the mechanics of establishing local telephone lines. The two that inspired Edmund Burch, according to Michael L. Olsen’s account cited above, were “A Cheap Telephone System for Farmers,” Scientific American, 1900; and a piece in the Rural New Yorker from June 11, 1903, at 437, quoted in Ronald R. Kline, Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 28.

  3. One early description of the Independent telephone movement can be found in The Independent Telephone Movement: Its Inception and Progress (s.n., 1906).

  4. The Independents described themselves in populist terms, as evidenced by this quote found in W. A. Taylor, “The Art of Cable Splicing,” Sound Waves, January 1907, 61, 64. Their dedication to achieving American industrial independence is referenced in Henry A. Conrad, “An Ohio Company’s Splendid Record,” Sound Waves, March 1907, 107, 108.

  5. The circumstances surrounding Vail’s first departure from Bell can be found in Horace Coon, American Tel & Tel: The Story of a Great Monopoly (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1939), 66–67.

  6. This description of the impact of the telephone on farm life was first published in Raton Range, March 10, 1904; quoted in Olsen, “But It Won’t Milk the Cows,” 1.

  7. Ronald L. Klein describes the uses to which the early phones were put in Consumers in the Country, 43.

  8. This campaign is detailed in Paul Latzke, A Fight with an Octopus (Chicago: Telephony, 1906), and sporadically in Sound Waves, infra; the reliability of these sources, of course, can be questioned.

  9. This account can be found in Norton E. Long, “Public Relations Policies of the Bell System,” Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 4, 5, 12.

  10. This quote, along with fascinating Independent perspectives on the early era of telephony, can be found in Sound Waves vol. XIII, no. 1, December 1906.

  11. Sound Waves vol. XIII, no. 4, March 1907.

  12. Latzke, Fight with an Octopus, 12.

  13. For the history of Vail’s interaction with J. P. Morgan, as well as his return to Bell as president of the newly formed AT&T, see In One Man’s Life: Being Chapters from the Personal & Business Career of Theodore N. Vail (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1921); Coon, American Tel & Tel; from Morgan’s perspective, see Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier (New York: Random House, 1999), 563.

  14. “Universal service” in Vail’s mind did not mean serving every home in the country with a telephone, but rather was a slogan calling for the elimination of competition from dual service and the grand unification of telephony under AT&T’s authority. An excellent description of the underlying impetus behind the adoption of this strategy may be found in Milton Mueller, Universal Service: Competition, Interconnection, and Monopoly in the Making of the American Telephone System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 96.

  15. This observation of the effect of price cutting on competition may be found in David Ames Wells, Recent Economic Changes (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1889).

  16. One excellent means of gauging Vail’s industrial philosophy is by consulting records of Vail’s public communications during his lifetime. Most can be found in Theodore N. Vail, Views on Public Questions: A Collection of Papers and Addresses of Theodore Newton Vail (privately printed, 1917).

  17. AT&T’s takeover of Western Union is well documented in George P. Oslin, The Story of Telecommunications (Macon, GA; Mercer University Press, 1992), 262.

  18. Vail’s strategy to establish control over the Independents through carrotlike incentives is described in Mueller, Universal Service, 107.

  19. William Doan, “Manager’s Duty to the Public and to Himself,” Sound Waves vol. XIII, no. 2, January 1907, 69.

  20. The Mesa Telephone Company sellout to Bell is described in Olsen, “But It Won’t Milk the Cows,” 13.

  21. The theory that J. P. Morgan secretly undermined the Traction Kings and the Telephone, Telegraph, and Cable Company of America is in Noobar Retheos Danielian, A.T.&T.: The Story of Industrial Conquest (New York: Vanguard Press, 1939), 47. Danielian himself was drawing on a three-volume FCC document entitled Telephone Investigation: Special Investigation Docket, Report on Control of Telephone Communication, Control of Independent Companies (1936–37).

  22. The settlement is discussed in Mueller, Universal Service, 130.

  23. The government reaction to the agreement is covere
d in Brooks, Telephone, 136.

  24. Bork’s opinion on the irrelevance of corporate intent can be read in Robert H. Bork, The Antitrust Paradox (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 38–39.

  25. This quote is in Theodore Vail, “Some Observations on Modern Tendencies,” Educational Review vol. 51, February 1916, 109, 129.

  26. Mueller, Universal Service, 146.

  CHAPTER 4: THE TIME IS NOT RIPE FOR FEATURE FILMS

  1. For a more detailed account of this initial meeting (and an excellent history of the rise of the American film industry), see James Forsher, The Community of Cinema: How Cinema and Spectacle Transformed the American Downtown (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003), 30–32.

  2. Two interesting histories of French cinema and its early industry dominance are Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), and W. Stephen Bush, “The Film in France,” Moving Picture World, July 12, 1913.

  3. This vivid description of the early theatergoing experience from Moving Picture World magazine may be found in Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema (New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1990), 3–4.

  4. There are conflicting accounts of how much Zukor truly paid for the rights to Queen Elizabeth; some scholars place the figure at $18,000, while others, going by what Zukor claimed in his later years, estimate closer to $40,000—either amount a huge sum at the time. See Forsher, Community of Cinema, 33, for one account. The quote regarding Zukor’s intentions is in Anthony Slide, Early American Cinema, 2nd ed. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 60.

  5. The exchange between Kennedy and Zukor is recounted in Forsher, Community of Cinema, 30–32.

  6. Ibid., 32.

  7. As related in Evan L. Schwartz, The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deceit, and the Birth of Television (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 132.

  8. The history of Carl Laemmle’s entry into the film industry, and this scene in particular, may be found in John Drinkwater, The Life and Adventures of Carl Laemmle (London: W. Heinemann, 1931, reprinted 1978), 63; see generally Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown Publishers, 1988).

  9. Drinkwater, Carl Laemmle, 64.

  10. Ibid., 65.

  11. Laemmle declared his film company “independent” in The Sunday Telegram, April 18, 1909, as described in Drinkwater, Carl Laemmle, 67.

  12. Drinkwater, Carl Laemmle, 69–70.

  13. This observation is drawn from Upton Sinclair, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox (Los Angeles: self-published, 1933), 39.

  14. One excellent history of the Warner brothers in Hollywood can be read in Cass Warner Sperling, Cork Millner, and Jack Warner, Hollywood Be Thy Name: The Warner Brothers Story 2nd ed. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998).

  15. The international alliance to break the film trust is described in Rosalie Schwartz, Flying Down to Rio: Hollywood, Tourists, and Yankee Clippers (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 163.

  16. For a description of Hodkinson’s role, and his belief that producing and distributing higher quality and more expensive films made economic sense, see Morris L. Ernst, Too Big (New York: Little, Brown, 1940, reprinted 2000), 142.

  17. Drinkwater, in Carl Laemmle, 73, describes the founding of IMP, later Universal Studios.

  18. One account of the industry’s first European-style films, and another excellent resource on the history of American cinema, is Joel Waldo Finler, The Hollywood Story (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 115.

  19. Drinkwater, Carl Laemmle, 102–3.

  20. This classic account of the industry’s early lawless years and the growth of the Hollywood empire may be found in Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of American Film: A Critical History, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), 85.

  21. Bardèche, Brasillach, The History of Motion Pictures (New York: W. W. Norton/Museum of Modern Art, 1938), 61–62.

  22. Balio insists that the “hop-skip-and-jump to the Mexican border” tale should be put to rest. In actuality, claims Balio, “Trust producers led the way [to Los Angeles]…. By 1910 most MPPC producers had sent companies to the area where they were shortly joined by such newcomers as Bison, Nestor, Lux, Éclair, Fox, and IMP.” Tino Balio, The American Film Industry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 108–9.

  23. Balio, American Film Industry, 143. Stephen Prince also interestingly catalogs the history of film censorship of violence in Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1968 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003).

  24. Bardèche, 60–61.

  25. Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 309.

  26. Gabler, Empire of Their Own, 23, 60.

  27. Balio, American Film Industry, 150.

  28. Starr, Creation of the Media, 310.

  29. Grimmelmann’s observation was made in the context of the recent Google Books lawsuit and proposed settlement; James Grimmelmann, “The Google Book Search Settlement: Ends, Means, and the Future of Books,” American Constitution Society Issue Brief 5, April 15, 2009.

  30. The full text of the opinion dissolving the trust may be read at U.S. v. Motion Picture Patents Co., 225 F. 800 (E.D. Pa., 1915).

  31. This explosion of film diversity is well explored by Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 61.

  32. Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844 (1997).

  CHAPTER 5: CENTRALIZE ALL RADIO ACTIVITIES

  1. Statement by the secretary of commerce at the opening of the radio conference of February 27, 1922, reprinted in, among other places, Fred Friendly, “Retrieving a Lost Rocket: How Television Went Haywire and What We Can Do About It—Part II,” Life, March 24, 1967, 70–83.

  2. Hoover described his governance ideas in American Individualism (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1923); see also Vincent Gaddis, Herbert Hoover, Unemployment, and the Public Sphere: A Conceptual History 1913–1933 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005).

  3. “Report of the Department of Commerce Conference on Radio Telephony,” III.E, Radio Service Bulletin, May 1, 1922, 23–30. A complete description of the first conference can be found in Hugh Richard Slotten, Radio and Television Regulation: Broadcast Technology in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 15–17. McQuiston’s quote is in Radio News, August 1922, 232, 332–34.

  4. This advertisement is reprinted in many places, including James Twitchell, Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 83–84. “Whether it is actually the first radio advertisement is open to question, yet its significance lies in the fact that it was the first AT&T advertisement, and therefore the seed for all that followed.

  5. For these statistics on AT&T’s National Broadcasting System in 1924, see Douglas P. Craig, Fireside Politics: Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920–1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 28.

  6. The full advertisement, along with a description of AT&T’s plan for commercially sponsored broadcasts, can be found in Gleason L. Archer, Big Business and Radio (New York: Stratford Press, 1939), 54. For another source on AT&T and radio broadcasting, see Leonard S. Reich, “Research, Patents, and the Struggle to Control Radio: A Study of Big Business and the Uses of Industrial Research,” Business History Review 51: 2 (Summer 1977), 208–35.

  7. The Gillette advertisements discussed evolving fashions in facial hair and the benefits of a safety razor. For more information about early radio advertising, see Marc Weinberger et al., Effective Radio Advertising (New York: Lexington Books, 1994), 3–4.

  8. The early sponsored programs are well described in Erik Barnouw, A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933, vol. 1 (Oxford: O
xford University Press, 1966), and also John Dunning, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1, 159, 235.

  9. For more information about the development and operation of radio broadcasting in different parts of the world, including the use of radio under the Third Reich, see Walter B. Emery, National and International Systems of Broadcasting: Their History, Operation and Control (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1969).

  10. A. H. Griswold gave this speech in 1923, at a meeting for AT&T executives across the country. The quote is reprinted widely; see, e.g., Michele Hilmes, Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 19.

  11. The author has a copy of the original manual of the AT&T (actually Western Electric) radio on file. On the presenting of President Coolidge with a radio unit in 1924, see Barnouw, A Tower in Babel, 161.

  12. For a full explanation of the creation of the RCA, see Archer, Big Business and Radio, 4–7, and Christopher H. Sterling and John M. Kittross, Stay Tuned: A History of American Broadcasting, 3rd ed. (London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 57–58.

  13. Sarnoff played a leading role in the rise of radio broadcasting; see Kenneth Bilby, The General: David Sarnoff and the Rise of the Communications Industry (New York: Harper & Row, 1986). Sarnoff’s writings were published in Looking Ahead: The Papers of David Sarnoff (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968).

  14. Sarnoff had, in fact, trained in his youth to become a rabbi. See Daniel Stashower, The Boy Genius and the Mogul: The Untold Story of Television (New York: Random House, 2002), 32.

  15. This quote, which evidences the obvious tension between AT&T and Sarnoff, can be found in Bilby, The General, 77.

  16. Essentially, AT&T agreed that it would not manufacture radio sets. See Archer, Big Business and Radio, 118.

  17. The classic account of the 1924 arbitration and following compromise is Archer, Big Business and Radio; see also Sterling and Kittross, Stay Tuned.