One Summer: America, 1927

System, which began broadcasting now, in September 1927. Its principal investor was the Columbia Phonograph Corporation, which wanted to sell more phonograph albums.
    Network broadcasting proved to be extremely expensive. Radio was unique among entertainment media in that it didn’t charge for content. Once someone bought a radio, he could listen to all the programmes he wanted in perpetuity for free. On top of that, the programming was dismayingly ephemeral. Movies could be shown again, plays could be performed over and over, but a radio play or concert or variety show was broadcast once and then was gone for ever. Even if it could be recorded, nobody wanted to hear the same programmes night after night, so radio had constantly to generate new material at often quite staggering costs. NBC executives were horrified to discover that their two regular opera programmes were costing the network $6,000 a week. It was so hard to make a profit that some insiders wondered whether radio had a commercial future.
    The obvious solution, selling advertising, was curiously slow to take hold. In the beginning, programmes, if they had any commercial content at all, just mentioned the name of a sponsor, without making any kind of overt sales pitch. Commercial radio also had to contend with the stout opposition of Herbert Hoover, who as secretary of commerce controlled the air waves. Hoover believed that radio should apply itself to noble, sober purposes. ‘If a speech by the President is to be used as the meat in a sandwich of two patent medicine advertisements, there will be no radio left,’ he declared, and threatened to take away licences from the worst abusers. Luckily, however, by the summer of 1927 Hoover was so busy with other matters – the Mississippi flood at first, then getting himself elected president – that he lost the will or ability to follow through.
    Sarnoff was only too happy to take advantage of this. He found, as he suspected, that listeners didn’t mind advertisements at all. Byits second year on air, NBC was selling over $10 million worth of ads a year. By the early 1930s, radio advertising was worth over $40 million a year in a market that was greatly shrunken by the Great Depression. Newspaper advertising fell by a third and magazine ads by closer to a half as radio advertising took off. Nearly 250 daily newspapers folded in the decade after the birth of network radio. Listening to the radio became the thing that every household did, and David Sarnoff could legitimately take the credit for almost all of that. By 1929, just before the stock market crash, RCA stock was 10,000 per cent higher than it had been just five years before, and David Sarnoff was the darling of the radio industry.
    And in the midst of all this, he discovered television. In 1929, Sarnoff attended a conference of radio engineers in Rochester, New York, and there saw a presentation by a clever inventor named Vladimir Zworykin. Like his compatriot Igor Sikorsky, the aircraft designer, Zworykin had grown up rich in Russia, but had fled to America following the country’s revolution. Although Zworykin spoke almost no English on arrival, he landed a job with Westinghouse in Pittsburgh and so impressed the directors that he was soon given his own lab.
    Zworykin perceived the possibility of electronic television in exactly the way that Farnsworth did. Television was what he talked about in Rochester and it transfixed Sarnoff. Sarnoff saw at once the future of television as an even greater potential medium for entertainment and wealth creation for RCA, and now threw himself behind its development with an almost alarming enthusiasm.
    Zworykin told Sarnoff that he could deliver a working system in two years for a cost of $100,000. Sarnoff hired him and provided him with everything he could need. As matters turned out, it would cost RCA more than $50 million to get a working system together – an incredible gamble for an unproven technology. Worse, Sarnoff discovered that the most vital patents, and much of the attendant insight, resided with a young man with the improbable name of Philo Farnsworth in San Francisco.
     
    For Farnsworth, things were not going so well. Broadcasting a clear image of a line was one thing, developing it into a fully fledged entertainment system was quite another. Even a fairly basic set-up would require millions of dollars of investment, which Farnsworth clearly didn’t have. Learning of his progress, Zworykin