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.

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 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. It’s intriguing to think that someone like DJ Trump was bound to emerge from the daddy issues Sarnoff left behind at NBC, the network he created but never really understood. Still, that’s not where we’re going today. 

As I’ve read about David Sarnoff, I’ve become fascinated by his story — not the real one, which in many respects he obscured and rendered unknowable — but the exaggerated version, the legend. That version has become the unattainable template for all our modern tech billionaires, rocket bros and merger kings. 

David Sarnoff was the first swinging-dick corporate media titan — someone whose dick-swinging was based on genuine accomplishments, a lot of hype, and a childhood of grinding desperation and hustle.

So let’s talk about that childhood, since in a very real way, we all live in the world that emerged from it.

I found the book David Sarnoff: Radio and TV Boy in the Harvard University Library. Maybe some graduate student has written a worthy thesis about the series called Childhood of Famous Americans. The volume on Sarnoff came out in 1972, the year after his death, and I think it’s a good a way as any to understand the man and the legend.

This children’s book is full of the same Sarnoff-ian anecdotes that future historians would have to fact-check. Here’s how it begins:

This anecdote is at least partly true: “David's first memory was of building blocks, a gift from his mother and the only childhood toy he recalled ever receiving,” his biographer Kenneth Bilby wrote in 1986, remembering a conversation with Sarnoff during which he said, “I guess I was hermetically sealed off from childhood.”

That’s because at age five, Sarnoff was picked to study the Talmud and sent to live far away with a rabbi uncle. He lived in a lonely village north of Ukraine for almost four years, where he memorized and recited texts in Hebrew and later Aramaic. 

The legend of Sarnoff starts here, with how many words he supposedly memorized per day: 2000. “The figure, which Sarnoff repeated often, is undoubtedly suspect. If we assume he had to follow this regimen six days a week, 52 weeks a year, he would have committed 2,496,000 words to memory,” writes Tom Lewis in an endnote to Empire of the Air (which later became the basis of a Ken Burns documentary).

When Sarnoff was nine, he emigrated with his mother and brothers to New York. He learned English (his fifth language!) quickly, but had to drop out of school after the eighth grade to support his family. He sold Yiddish-language newspapers around the Lower East Side, and then managed to buy a newsstand (and later told a suss story about a nice social worker giving him the money, as opposed to the usual way unbanked immigrants of the time had to finance new ventures: a debt to some criminal gang).

Young Sarnoff handed over the newsstand operation to his brothers so he could get a job during the day. And that’s how he bumbled into a place called the Commercial Cable Company.

Sarnoff says he got fired from his first job because he asked for time off to sing in temple during the Jewish high holy days. But soon he found another office-boy gig at the North American offices of the Marconi Company. 

The Anglo-Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi had, just a few years earlier, claimed to send an experimental wireless signal across the Atlantic. But the American branch of his business was almost bust, as Sarnoff found out when he was sent to collect loans so the office could make payroll.

Finally, Sarnoff got to meet the boss, Marconi himself. Marconi had a lot of mistresses around town and sent Sarnoff on errands to bring them flowers and chocolates. But he and Sarnoff also found time to talk about the mysterious wireless.

“The story of Marconi’s meeting with Sarnoff is well documented and not exaggerated; Marconi himself referred to it on several occasions,” Tom Lewis writes (374). Sarnoff went on to man wireless posts in Nantucket and Brooklyn, but the next chapter of his biography is the weirdest yet.

In 1911, Sarnoff volunteered for a six-week post as a Marconi operator on a seal-hunting vessel called the Boethic heading for the Arctic Sea. This was a dangerous gig, and a little irresponsible since Sarnoff was by now supporting his family with his salary. But perhaps he jumped at it precisely because he’d been adulting since age five.

Sarnoff kept a journal during this time, describing things like a journey on foot across the ice to inspect another hunting-vessel’s equipment. He and his companion, a doctor, insisted that they needed to cross back to their ship before nightfall.

As you can imagine, this incident is the highlight of Radio and TV Boy.

Will they survive?? Yes, a search party from the ship finds them just in time. 

Thirty-six thousand Arctic seals were not as lucky. Thanks to wireless communications between ships in the fleet, the hunters — including Sarnoff — were able to locate many herds and slaughter them. Sarnoff would keep the taxidermied body of a seal fetus as a souvenir on his mantle for years.

All this (probably real) ice adventure led seamlessly to the next chapter of Sarnoff’s legend, which his former colleague and biographer Carl Dreher calls “bunkum.” This is the myth that Sarnoff personally coordinated the rescue of those aboard the doomed Titanic, all from the perch of a new wireless station atop Wanamaker’s department store in New York. As Radio and TV Boy tells it:

“The fact is that Sarnoff was not on watch. The Wanamaker stations kept store hours. Even if he had been on watch, he could not possibly have heard signals from the Titanic, which sank a thousand miles away and hours before he got into the act,” Dreher writes (28). 

But Tom Lewis admits, you gotta hand it to him. “Of all the wireless operators…Sarnoff alone had the prescience to embellish his role as the sole wireless link between the Titanic and the mainland. In that single incident, he saw better than anyone else the power of the new medium” (107).

Marconi’s American branch became profitable after Congress passed the Radio Act of 1912. It required shipboard wireless operators on watch at all times, and more stations on shore. 

The Navy took control of US radio when the country entered World War I in 1917. After the war, the military was reluctant to give up its control. The alternative looked like chaos.

But in late 1919, lawmakers (and an assistant secretary of the Navy named Franklin D. Roosevelt) hammered out a deal with the big tech companies of the time: AT&T, General Electric, and Westinghouse. They would share patents under a new entity called the Radio Corporation of America. British-owned Marconi would sell its assets to this new entity.

Among those assets was David Sarnoff, now a manager and soon to be head of RCA.

Here it is possible to jump ahead to some of the things Sarnoff did in the decades to come:

None of that grown-up stuff is appropriate material for a book like TV and Radio Boy. As I read it, I could feel my inner fourth-grader getting bored after the Titanic part ended.

The book even struggles to make interesting Sarnoff’s early, prophetic vision for radio, known as the “music box” memo. That was written in either 1916 (his version) or 1920 (more likely).

Of course, it wasn’t impractical, even at a time when “broadcasting” was not a word most people knew. Many of Sarnoff’s prescient tech dreams came to pass, and every Silicon Valley titan should ransack his archives for ideas — he and his researchers also predicted the rise of computers and the Internet. His place in history should be assured.

But during his lifetime, no matter how often the world lauded David Sarnoff — and he had a full-time staff in search of honorary degrees and awards — it was never enough. He was an outsider who never got the respect he was due.

If that tendency reminds you of someone? Like I said, the Freudian hangovers must be gigantic over at 30 Rock. But look what unresolved issues get you in the end:

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