A pioneer in radio and television, David Sarnoff was an immigrant who climbed the rungs of corporate America to head the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). Born on February 27, 1891, in Uzlian, in the Russian province of Minsk, Sarnoff's early childhood years were spent studying to be a rabbi, but when he emigrated to the United States in 1900, he was forced to work to feed his mother, ailing father, and siblings.

Leaming early the value of self-promotion and pub­ licity, Sarnoff falsely advanced himself both as the sole hero who stayed by his telegraph key for three days to receive information on the Titanic's survivors and as the prescient prophet of broadcasting who predicted the medium's rise in 1915. While later described by others as the founder of both RCA and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Sarnoff was neither. These misconceptions were perpetuated because Sarnoff's later accomplishments were so plentiful that any myth was believable. Indeed, his foresight and corporate savvy led to many communication develop­ ments, especially television.

Sarnoff began his career at age nine, selling Yiddish-language newspapers shortly after arriving in New York. To improve his English, he picked up dis­ carded English-language newspapers. By the time he was ten, he had a fairly passable vocabulary. He also soon had his own newsstand. During the day he at­ tended grade school, while at night he enrolled in classes at the Educational Alliance, an East Side settle­ ment house. At age 15, with his father's health deterio­rating, Sarnoff was forced to seek a full-time job.

He became a messenger for the Commercial Cable Company, the American subsidiary of the British firm that controlled undersea cable communication. The telegraph key lured him to the American Marconi Company a few months later, where he was hired as an office boy. Once there, he began his corporate rise, in­cluding the job of being Marconi's personal messenger when the inventor was in town. With Marconi's endorsement, Sarnoff became a junior wireless telegraph operator, and at age 17 he volunteered for wireless duty at one of the company's remote stations. There he studied the station's technical library and took corre­spondence courses. Eighteen months later, he was ap­pointed manager of the station in Sea Gate, New York. He was the youngest manager employed by Marconi. After volunteering as a wireless operator for an Arctic seal expedition, he became operator of the Marconi wireless purchased by the John Wanamaker depart­ment stores. At night he continued his studies.

Then, on the evening of April 14, 1912, he heard the faint reports of the Titanic disaster. One of a number of wireless operators reporting the tragedy, Sarnoff would later claim he was the only one to remain on the air after President Taft ordered others to stay silent. Another controversial claim concerns Sarnoff's asser­tion that he wrote his famous "Radio Music Box Memo" in 1915. While the version often cited was ac­tually written in 1920, Sarnoff did correspond in 1916 with his superior, E.J. Nally, about protecting Ameri­can Marconi's interests from others investigating the potential of wireless technology, including "music box" uses.

As his career thrived, Sarnoff's personal life also grew. On July 4, 1917, he married Lizette Hermant, following a closely supervised courtship. Their 54- year marriage survived Sarnoff's occasional philander­ ing and proved the bedrock of his life. They had three sons, Robert, Edward, and Thomas. Robert succeeded his father as RCA's president. In 1919, when British Marconi sold its American Marconi assets to General Electric (GE) to form RCA, Sarnoff came on board as commercial manager. Under the tutelage of RCA's chair, Owen D. Young, Sarnoff was soon in charge of broadcasting as general manager of RCA and was inte­ gral in formation of NBC in 1926. As Young's protege, he also negotiated the secret contracts with American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) that led to NBC's development. With acquisition of AT&T's broadcast­ ing assets, RCA had two networks, the Red and the Blue, and they debuted in a simulcast on November 15, 1926.

In 1927, Sarnoff was elected to RCA's board, and during the summer of 1928, he became RCA's acting president when the company's president, General James G. Harbord, took a leave of absence to cam­paign for Herbert Hoover. Sarnoff's eventual succes­sion to that position was assured. At the end of the decade, Sarnoff negotiated successful contracts to form Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) motion pictures, to introduce radios as a permanent fixture in automo­biles, and to consolidate all radio manufacturing by the Victor company under RCA's banner. On January 3, 1930, the 39-year-old Sarnoff became RCA's presi­dent.

The next two years were pivotal in Sarnoff's life, as the U.S. Department of Justice sued GE and RCA for monopoly and restraint of trade. Sarnoff led industry efforts to combat the government's suits, which would have destroyed RCA. The result was a consent decree in 1932 calling for RCA's divestiture from GE and the licensing of RCA's patents to competitors. When GE freed RCA, Sarnoff was at the helm, and for nearly the next three decades, he would oversee numerous communications developments, including television.

Sarnoff's interest in television began in the 191Os, when he became aware of the theory of television. By 1923, he was convinced that television would be the next great step in mass communication. In 1929, West­inghouse engineer Vladimir Zworykin called on Sarnoff to outline his concept of an electronic camera. Within the year, Sarnoff underwrote Zworykin's ef­forts, and Zworykin headed the team developing electronic television. As the Depression deepened, Sarnoff bought television patents from inventors Charles Jenk­ins and Lee De Forest, among others, but he could not acquire those patents held by Philo Farnsworth. These he had to license, and in 1936, RCA entered into a cross-licensing agreement with Farnsworth. This agreement solved the technological problems of televi­ sion, and establishing television's standards became Sarnoff's goal.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would set those standards, but within the industry, ef­forts to reach consensus failed. Other manufacturers, especially Philco, Dumont, and Zenith, fought adop­ tion of RCA's standards as the industry norm. In 1936, the Radio Manufacturers Association (RMA) set up a technical committee to seek agreement on industry standards, an action blessed actively by Sarnoff and silently by the FCC. For more than five years, the com­ mittee would fight over standards. Sarnoff told the RMA that, standards or not, he would initiate televi­sion service at the opening of the New York World's Fair on April 20, 1939, and he did. Skirmishes contin­ued for the next two years over standards, but in May 1941 the FCC's National Television System Commit­ tee (NTSC) finally set standards at 525 lines, inter­laced, and 30 frames per second. Rapid television development stalled, however, as World War II inter­ vened. Sarnoff's attention then turned to devices, in­cluding radar and sonar, that would help win the war.

During World War I, Sarnoff had applied for a com­ mission in naval communications, only to be turned down, ostensibly because his wireless job was consid­ered essential to the war effort. Sarnoff suspected anti­ Semitism. Now as head of the world's largest communication's firm, Sarnoff was made a brigadier general and served as communication consultant to General Dwight Eisenhower. After the war, with the death of RCA chair of the board General J.G. Harbord in 1947, General Sarnoff, as he preferred to be called, was appointed chair, and he served in that capacity un­ til his death in 1971.

After the war, RCA introduced monochrome televi­ sion on a wide scale to the American population, and the race for color television with the Columbia Broad­ casting System (CBS) was on. CBS picked up its pre­ war experiments with a mechanical system that Sarnoff did not see initially as a threat because it was incompatible with already approved black-and-white standards. When CBS received approval for its system in 1951, Sarnoff challenged the FCC's decision in the courts on the grounds that it contravened the opinions of the industry's technical leaders and threatened the $2 billion investment the public had already made in television sets. When the lower courts refused to block the FCC ruling, Sarnoff appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which affirmed the FCC action as a proper exer­cise of its regulatory power.

Sarnoff counterattacked through an FCC-granted authority for RCA to field-test color developments. Demonstrations were carefully set for  maximum  pub­ lic exposure, and they were billed  as  "progress  re­ports" on compatible color. By then, the Korean War intervened in the domestic battle over color television and blunted introduction of CBS's sets on a large scale. Monochrome still reigned, and Sarnoff continued pressing the compatibility issue. In 1953, CBS aban­doned its color efforts as  "economically  foolish"  in light of the 25 million incompatible monochrome sets already in use. The FCC was forced to reconsider its earlier order, and on December 17, 1953, the commis­sion voted to reverse itself and adopt standards along those proposed by RCA. During the 1950s and 1960s, Sarnoff's interests included not only television but also satellites, rocketry, and computers.

At the same time he was battling CBS over color, Sarnoff's feud with Edwin Howard Armstrong over FM radio's development and patents continued. Sarnoff and Armstrong, once close friends, were hopelessly alienated by the end of World War II. Their deadly feud lasted for years, consumed numerous court challenges, and ended with Armstrong's suicide in 1954.

Sarnoff died in his sleep on December 12, 1971, of car­diac arrest. At his funeral, he was eulogized as a visionary who had the capacity to see into tomorrow and make his visions work. His obituary, which began on page I and ran nearly one full page in the New York Times, aptly summed up his career in these words: "He was not an in­ventor, nor was he a scientist. But he was a man of as­tounding vision who was able to see with remarkable clarity the possibilities of harnessing the electron."