Executives: Man of the Future

William S. Paley, chairman of the board of CBS, last week said that he would “always think of David Sarnoff as broadcasting’s most imaginative prophet.” Paley, admitting that he has “the scars to prove” years of fierce competition with the RCA board chairman, was speaking to 1,500 friends at a Waldorf-Astoria dinner honoring Sarnoffs 60 years in the communications industry. “To all of us,” said Paley, “David will always be broadcasting’s Man of the Future.”

Six decades ago, all David Sarnoff had was the future. Up from steerage, out of grammar school and supporting an immigrant family of six at 15, Sarnoff learned early to run hard. By 17, he had taught himself Morse code and snared a job pounding a telegraph key for the American Marconi Co. He first tasted fame on a night the world would remember—April 14, 1912. Sarnoff picked up a message from the British steamship Titanic. “Hit an iceberg,” it read. “Sinking fast.” For 72 hours, he stayed at the key, guiding rescue ships and relaying names of survivors. Thereafter, his rise at Marconi was swift. In 1919 RCA absorbed the company. Two years later, RCA Board Chairman Owen D. Young, somewhat awed by Sarnoff’s knowledge of wireless and visions of the future of communications, appointed him general manager.

The Box. Six years earlier, in 1915, Sarnoff had proposed a “radio music box,” predicted it would bring music, lectures and reports of national events into the American living room. In the confusion of World War I, Sarnoff’s memo had been pigeonholed. Now he dug it out, showed it to Owen Young. Sarnoff’s boss was enthusiastic, but the RCA board would agree to put up only $2,000—which Sarnoff spent to transmit a broadcast of the Dempsey-Carpentier heavyweight championship fight.-Heard by 200,000 wireless enthusiasts, the broadcast caused a sensation, and RCA began developing sets immediately. By 1926, sales had passed $83 million, and Sarnoff was a vice president in charge of its newest venture: the NBC radio network.

Always focusing ahead, Sarnoff conceived the radio phonograph, negotiated the acquisition of the Victor Talking Machine Co., then immersed himself in developing Vladimir Zworykin’s miraculous iconoscope for commercial television. The vision became a reality at the 1939 World’s Fair, when, in the first public demonstration of TV, Sarnoff himself intoned from the screen:

“Now at last we add sight to sound.”

Out of the Pillbox. Elected RCA’s board chairman in 1947, Sarnoff weathered the roughest of electrical storms in 1950 when the FCC licensed the CBS color television system nationally, turned thumbs down on RCA’s. Sarnoff retreated to the labs. Within a year, his scientists had worked out a system that virtually elbowed CBS out of the picture.

Adviser to Presidents, U.S. Army brigadier general and chief communications aide to Dwight Eisenhower in Europe, Sarnoff, at 75, would be more than justified if he were to retire. But he remains “too fascinated with the fu ture.” Although he has relinquished his title of chief executive officer to Dr.

Elmer W. Engstrom and plans to spend much of his time at RCA’s David Sarnoff Research Labs in Princeton, N.J., he is still “the General,” and no major decision is reached at RCA without his approval.

Seated at an antique desk in his 53rd-floor office in the RCA building recently, Sarnoff pulled out a small gold pillbox. “Personal transceivers of this size,” he predicted, “will enable anyone to talk to anyone else so equipped anywhere in the world—via satellite relay.” Visionary? Perhaps. Unlikely? Not when the soothsayer is David Sarnoff.