It's Time to Tell-A-Vision
2003 Boaz Rauchwerger
The old joke goes like this: If Thomas Edison had not been persistent, conducting almost 10,000 experiments to invent the light bulb, we'd be watching television in the dark.
Speaking of television, the man who was greatly responsible for the creation of the medium spent his early years studying to be a rabbi. Now people worldwide watch his creation religiously. He was David Sarnoff, better known as General Sarnoff, the president of RCA and literally the father of broadcasting. This is a great story of determination, perseverance and especially vision.
Born in a poor Jewish settlement near the Russian city of Minsk, on February 27, 1891, Sarnoff immigrated to the United States in 1900 at the age of nine. With his father ailing, he immediately went to work to help feed his parents and siblings. Sarnoff's first job was to sell Yiddish newspapers on the streets of New York's Lower East Side.
By the time he was ten, he had learned English by studying discarded American newspapers. By the age of thirteen, he had saved $200 and was able to buy his own newsstand. He was also going to elementary school during the day and taking night classes at the Educational Alliance, an East Side settlement house. When his father's health deteriorated, Sarnoff was forced to work full-time by the age of fifteen.
He found work as a messenger boy at Marconi Wireless, developed skills as a telegraph operator and read all the technical journals he could find. He became a junior telegrapher at age sixteen. When he was twenty-one, on April 14, 1912, he made a name for himself by sending and receiving wireless messages for seventy-two hours during the sinking of the Titanic.
Ambitious for both money and power, Sarnoff presented an idea to his bosses at Marconi that dealt with a radio music box. It was rejected. Although radio, at the time, was mainly used in shipping and by amateur wireless enthusiasts, Sarnoff believed his devise could make radio as common a household item as a piano or a phonograph.
Sarnoff's opportunity came in 1920 when General Electric provided the startup funds to create the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which absorbed Marconi's U.S. assets. GE agreed to front $2,000 for RCA to develop a prototype of Sarnoff's radio music box.
He believed that, for RCA to sell radios nationwide, it had to have programming – news, sports, music. Modern day radio was born on July 2, 1921, as Sarnoff correctly predicted the public's huge interest in the heavyweight championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier. He arranged for the fight to be broadcast live by RCA. Hundreds of thousands tuned in and, within three years, the RCA Radiola (the new name for the radio music box) accounted for sales of over $83 million.
Sarnoff envisioned that, by creating a network of hundreds of radio stations nationwide, RCA could reap great profits by providing programming for these stations. Thus, as the now general manager of RCA, Sarnoff formed the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) in 1926 as a subsidiary.
While all this was happening, a man named Vladimir Zworykin got a patent in 1923 for the iconoscope, a prelude to modern-day television. From 1928 until 1940, Sarnoff experimented with the process through a special NBC station called b2xbs. NBC started to broadcast commercial television signals in 1941 from station WNBT in New York City.
During World War II, Sarnoff served as a communications consultant for General Dwight Eisenhower, who named him a brigadier general. Thus, from then on, Sarnoff was known as "The General."
After the war, as he overcame a challenge from the new CBS television network to advance the technology of the medium, Sarnoff was named CEO of RCA in 1947. In the 50's and 60's, he led NBC toward color television, the first videotape telecast and the first made-for-television movie. He saw television as a beneficial, creative force.
With his mental channel always tuned to the future, Sarnoff predicted in the mid 50's that the future would see electronic messages sent instantly worldwide through the air. He had envisioned the Internet long before anyone had heard of the word.
David Sarnoff worked well into his seventies, continuing to push RCA and its engineers. His company invested considerable money and time in computers and aerospace technology. The man who came to America at the beginning of radio, lived to see photographs from space delivered electronically to Earth by RCA satellites.
At the age of seventy-nine, in 1970, Sarnoff retired from RCA. He passed away in 1971. Arriving a penniless immigrant, without the language, Sarnoff's force of will ignited a revolution that has had an unparalleled effect on our society. He didn't look at how things were. He looked at how things could be.
What kind of effect could you have on your future, and the lives of other people, if you simply focused on your strongest talents and tuned in to your potential? Is there a picture of something you've always wanted to do? Let's tune into that channel and take some action today.
A Daily Affirmation of Vision
I'm clarifying my vision for my future and taking some action today.
Article reproduced with permission from Boaz Rauchwerger. You may reprint any of these articles in any publication or Web site so long as you credit Boaz Rauchwerger as the author and include this Web site address, www.Boazpower.com.