Word: sarnoffs
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...Hermitage. American business biography abounds in up-from-the-bottom stories; few are quite so dramatic and revealing as Sarnoff's. Owen D. Young said that Sarnoff had lived "the most amazing romance of its kind on record." Horatio Alger himself could hardly have done it in one book; he would have needed Adrift in New York, Nelson the Newsboy, The Telegraph Boy and Joe's Luck or Always Wide Awake...
...Sarnoff was born in 1891, eldest son of a poverty-stricken family in the tiny (pop. 200) Jewish community of Uzlian, in Russia's province of Minsk. His father, who came of a trading family, wanted him to become a trader. His mother, who came of a long line of rabbis, insisted that he become a scholar. Sarnoff remembers that in the world of his childhood, prestige was based not on money but on "the possession of knowledge...
...Sarnoff got his first operator's job on Nantucket Island, a job so lonely that few operators wanted it ($70 a month, $40 home to mother). David used his spare time to study books on wireless as tirelessly as he had the Talmud. Soon his expert "fist" could send 45 words per minute steadily for eight hours-a pace not many could equal. After two years there, he got himself transferred to Long Island, at a $10 cut in pay, so that he could go to night school, where he finished a three-year electrical engineering course in twelve...
...Sarnoff notes that the Titanic disaster "brought radio (and incidentally me) to the front." As a result of the disaster, Congress passed a law requiring every ship with more than 50 passengers to carry wireless. American Marconi set up a school to fill the sudden demand for operators; Sarnoff became an instructor at the school, rapidly moved up the ladder to commercial manager...
...Music Box. In 1915 he wrote a historic memo to his boss. Experiments had already proved that wireless could broadcast speech as well as signals,* but since anybody could "listen in" on such messages, the wireless companies thought the lack of privacy robbed radiotelephony of any commercial value. Sarnoff realized its possibilities. In his memo, he proposed to build a "Radio Music Box ... to bring music into the house by wireless . . . Receiving lectures at home can be made perfectly audible; also events of national importance can be simultaneously announced and received." In the turmoil of World War I, Sarnoff...