EXECUTIVES: The Fellow on the Bridge

• Share

In 1900 a scrawny nine-year-old from Minsk clambered out of steerage class and onto the hardscrabble streets of Manhattan. Before he died last week at 80, David Sarnoff rose to rule one of the last great personal autocracies in U.S. industry, the $3.3 billion-a-year RCA Corp. Though he was neither scientist nor inventor, he probably did more than any other American to bring radio, television and color TV to the masses. With considerable justification, "General" Sarnoff* cast himself as the father of the entire electronic-communications industry. "In a big ship sailing in an uncharted sea," he would say, "one fellow needs to be on the bridge. I happen to be that fellow."

Chances that Paid. Sarnoff's special gift was that he was not only a visionary but also a hustling salesman who could persuade scientists and capitalists to invest their brainpower and money to make his own dreams of the future come true. As a teenager, he taught himself telegraphy and talked his way into an operator's job at the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. of America. A classic tragedy gave him a big break; the Titanic sank in 1912, and Sarnoff stayed at his key for 72 hours in New York, relaying the news to the world. The Titanic brought much attention to the possibilities of radio communication —and Sarnoff, who soon became commercial manager of American Marconi.

The company was bought from its British owners after World War I by General Electric, which changed its name to Radio Corp. of America. Sarnoff became general manager and, during the 1920s, persuaded its reluctant owners to invest in a series of chancy schemes. His restless drive led RCA to mass-produce home radio sets, to set up a broadcasting network (NBC) and to make the company's first tentative steps into television. By 1932, when the trustbusters forced the company's owners to spin off RCA, Sarnoff had been president for two years. He led by sheer force of personality; Sarnoff owned only one-third of 1% of the stock, but even that is now worth $7.4 million.

No Butterflies. Sarnoff's zeal to be first with color TV led him into an epic battle with William Paley's CBS. RCA developed a "compatible" broadcast method that could send color and black-and-white signals on special color TVs, but CBS, with a superior picture, won the Federal Communications Commission's license to proceed commercially. Sarnoff ordered his engineers back to their labs. Three years later, they produced a high-quality compatible system. The FCC reversed itself, and CBS lost a big round to RCA.

Sarnoff's inclination to spend, spend, spend on research also resulted in some spectacular failures. Even before RCA had begun to recoup the $130 million it had invested in color TV, it began laying out millions more to break into computers, an effort that it finally abandoned at a great loss this year when profitability seemed far off. Sarnoff's son Robert, 53, who succeeded him as chairman last year, will do well if he can boast, as his father did after a particularly rocky period at RCA, that "I never got butterflies."