Welcome to Continuous Wave, your home for essays, histories, and reflections on modern media from the POV of audio — a project of story editor Julia Barton.
First off, be honest. Until you opened this post, were you even aware of the name David Sarnoff?
Don’t feel bad if you answered “no.” Sarnoff, who strode the Earth like a colossus for much of his 80 years, started to be forgotten soon after he left us in 1971. This was a confounding irony to his biographers, both those who were commanded to make him look great during his lifetime, and those who tried to pick apart the many lies and exaggerations he left behind.
Radio and TV boy
It’s undeniable that Sarnoff remains a major figure in US history, someone who lived the kind of life that’s hard to imagine today. He was one of the first, and certainly the most effective, advocates for the idea that electromagnetic waves could transmit sound, and later images, into ordinary people’s homes. And then he made that impossible-seeming idea a reality.
David Sarnoff created the first US broadcasting network NBC, and via its parent company RCA, he played a major role in the technological development of television — especially color TV.
NBC turns 100 this year. The celebratory videos it has released thus far are heavy on the Seinfeld and SNL of it all. They don’t mention the network’s origins in radio, or Sarnoff.
I’m sure much more is to come, but this made me wonder: WTF, NBC? This is your dad! A guy born in 1891 in a dirt-floor shtetl in Belarus who went on to turn radio from a janky Morse-Code-based technology into a force that transformed war, finance and culture.
It’s a force that also transmitted 14 seasons of The Apprentice into American homes, thus creating the conditions for a public figure whose need for self-aggrandizement perhaps best matches David Sarnoff’s.
But that other guy? He is a mere shadow of the original.