One Summer: America, 1927

device called the ‘multipactor’, which concentrated electron beams and fired them in bursts, multiplying their intensity. Inspired, Lawrence returned to Berkeley and produced the world’s first particle accelerator.
    Eventually, Farnsworth had 165 patents, including for all the important elements of modern television, from scanning and focusing images to projecting live pictures across great distances. But the one thing he didn’t have was any way of making the whole enterprise commercial.
    Enter David Sarnoff.
    Sarnoff’s world was radio. From a technical point of view he didn’t know the first thing about television – he didn’t actually know that much about radio – but he had two qualities that Farnsworth signally lacked: commercial acumen and vision. He was the one person in the world who could transform television from an interesting laboratory novelty into something that everyone would want to have within ten feet of his sofa.
    Sarnoff was born in a poor village in rural Russia, in what is now Belarus, but moved with his family to the lower East Side of New York in 1900 when he was nine. He could not have been more of a yokel; before his trip to America he had never seen a paved road. Now he was in the most colossally dynamic city on earth. Sarnoff learned English, quit school at fourteen and went out to make his mark on the world. He landed a job as an office boy at American Marconi, the telegraph company, and there became an adept wireless operator. Throughout his life he claimed to have been the first person to receive and relay onwards the news of the Titanic ’s sinking, from an office in Wanamaker’s department store. According to Sarnoff’s own version of events – and Sarnoff’s versions of events often only loosely intersected with what actually happened – he stayed at his post for seventy-two hours and more or less single-handedly coordinated rescue efforts.
    In 1919, American Marconi was bundled into a new company called Radio Corporation of America. Sarnoff – young, ambitious, instinctively opportunistic – quickly became master of the new medium. He made radio popular and profitable – two things that were by no means assured in 1920. Radio at the time was an exciting novelty, but a radio set was also a costly investment and peopleweren’t at all sure that it was worth the outlay, particularly if the only available programming was provided by a local bank or insurance broker or poultry farm.
    Companies that made radios didn’t care what people listened to, or whether they listened at all, once the radios were bought. Sarnoff, remarkably, seems to have been alone in seeing that if there wasn’t anything worth listening to, they wouldn’t buy radios. He realized that to succeed radio needed to be organized, professional, and above all entertaining. As a demonstration of radio’s potential, he arranged to broadcast the Dempsey–Carpentier prize fight on 2 July 1921. Sarnoff reasoned that if people realized that they could listen to exciting events live as they happened, they would flock to radio. To that end, he had loudspeakers erected at various locations where people could listen to the fight for free. Ten thousand listeners packed into Times Square and other demonstrations were laid on elsewhere. In the event, a technical fault meant there was no live broadcast from ringside. Instead the details of the fight were relayed by ticker tape to a Manhattan studio where an announcer recreated the fight from sketchy details and a great deal of imagination. That is what the crowds heard. It didn’t matter. They thought they were hearing the fight live. The idea of being able to know what was happening as it happened seemed to many an almost impossible miracle.
    Radio now took off. At the time of the Dempsey–Carpentier fight, one American home in five hundred had a radio. Within five years, the proportion was one in twenty. By the end of the decade, saturation would be nearly total. Never before had a consumer product gained universal acceptance so quickly.
    To improve broadcast standards, and secure RCA’s dominance of the industry, Sarnoff persuaded his masters to join with Westinghouse and General Electric to form a radio network, the National Broadcasting Company. NBC’s successful broadcasts of big events – not least Lindbergh’s arrival in Washington in June 1927 – were so impressive that they inspired the creation of asecond network, the Columbia Broadcasting