How the Wasteland Began: The Early Days of Radio

THE ATLANTIC

BY CARL DREHER

LONG before the mass broadcasting of the twenties there were several fitful attempts at radio telephony. On December 24, 1906, Professor Reginald A. Fessenden transmitted clear speech and music from his experimental station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts. His audience was limited to wireless telegraphers, mostly on ships at sea. Beginning in 1907, Lee de Forest conducted similar experiments, culminating in the 1910 broadcast of Caruso and other artists of the Metropolitan Opera Company, whatever the defects of that achievement.

By 1916 De Forest had an authentic broadcasting station at High Bridge on the Harlem River in New York powered by his three-element vacuum tube and complete with phonograph records, with Do Forest himself sometimes acting as a primeval disc jockey. The listeners, until World War I caused a shutdown of all such activities, were largely amateurs.

After the war, I was working as a research assistant in the laboratory of Professor Alfred N. Goldsmith at the College of the City of New York. Dr. Goldsmith was a leading radio engineer, and I had had the good fortune of being one of his students. The laboratory was supported in part by the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America, the predecessor of RCA. In the latter part of 1918, a flotilla of U.S. destroyers equipped with radio telephones was anchored in the Hudson, and several of us listened to the conversations. The speech quality was tolerable but badly broken by spark transmissions from other vessels. Since we had all heard De Forest’s High Bridge broadcasts, the thought that radio telephony might have entertainment value naturally reoccurred to us, but the interference was so severe that we saw little chance of commercial application. Dr. Goldsmith recalled, however, that in 1916 David Sarnoff had submitted to his superiors in the Marconi Company a prospectus for what he called a “Radio Music Box.”

“I have in mind,” Sarnoff had written, “a plan of development which would make radio a ‘household utility’ in the same sense as the piano or phonograph. The idea is to bring music into the house by wireless. . . . The ‘Radio Music Box’ can be supplied with amplifying tubes and a loudspeaker telephone, all of which can be mounted in one box. The box can be placed on a table in the parlor or living room, the switch set accordingly and the transmitted music be received.”

Although it was coolly received by the officials of the Marconi Company, who had their minds on transoceanic and marine telegraphy, the music box memorandum was one of the early steps in Sarnoff’s Horatio Alger rise. The next year he became commercial manager of the Marconi Company. The job did not pay much — about forty-five dollars a week, I was told — but it was already a remarkable success for an immigrant in a business where, by established custom, Jews were not employed. Sarnoff’s later remark about that situation is characteristic: “I realized that I couldn’t compete with Gentiles in a Gentile industry if I were merely as good as they were. But if I were, say, twice as good, they couldn’t hold me down. So I decided to be twice as good.”

We all knew, even then, that his rise had only begun. People were not afraid of him as they are now, when, with perhaps two exceptions, no one on the fifty-third floor of the RCA building would dare to tell a humorous anecdote about him, or concede publicly that even a genius is a human being with, perhaps, a few little faults and absurdities in his makeup. Nor, though he was always busy, was his time then rationed as if he were creating the world in seven days.

Sarnoff was extraordinary — he had phenomenal clarity of mind. The salient point quickly emerged in any discussion with him, one reason being that if you had any wit of your own, Sarnoff brought it out. He who at ten spoke only Russian or Yiddish now expressed himself in pellucid English sentences, with never the slightest hesitation, as if he were reading from a manuscript already completed in his brain. But if you interrupted him with a question or an observation which he could not have anticipated, he took off on the changed course with the same fluency.

Equally impressive was the authority he radiated. He was not a big executive yet, but he had the posture of one. Nor was it only a posture. “The difference between you and me” he said a few years later to a group of RCA engineers and executives, “is that I’m willing to take responsibility.” Not that we were lacking in confidence ourselves — much less subservient — but we knew from sometimes painful experience that he would be right more often, in business matters, than we could possibly hope to be.

In 1920, after the formation of RCA, Sarnoff renewed his radio music box proposal. The time was now propitious. Dr. Frank Conrad was broadcasting music from his station 8XK, and the audience was spreading in widening circles from an amateur nucleus to a large part of the population in Pittsburgh. The station was not an ordinary amateur station — the “X” indicated a special experimental license — any more than Conrad was an ordinary amateur. He was assistant chief engineer of the Westinghouse Company. In November, 1920, KDKA took over from 8XK, and that was the real beginning of broadcasting. With this background, the RCA directors allowed Sarnoff $2000 to develop a broadcast receiver.

In 1921 a short but sharp depression upset the economy. I was among those affected by it. RCA had a lower budget for research, and I was assigned as an engineer and telegrapher at the outlying stations, where the money was coming in (though not much of it) instead of going out. In the meantime, Westinghouse had established other broadcasting stations, including one at Newark, New Jersey, a location dictated by the fact that the company had a meter-manufacturing plant there and the station could lay down a signal in nearby New York and western Connecticut as well as northern New Jersey. RCA paid half the operating expenses of this early WJZ, and in 1923 took over Radio Group broadcasting in the metropolitan area. I was recalled from the provinces by my superiors in the RCA engineering department to serve as chief control operator of the new station, and after a few months, as engineer in charge.

The installation was in Aeolian Hall on FortySecond Street, just west of Fifth Avenue. The Aeolian Company made player pianos; thus the location imparted a faintly artistic atmosphere, and it was close to the theatrical district. A part of the sixth floor was converted into studios, one for WJZ, the other for a companion station, WJY, which never amounted to much but enabled the RCA publicists to call the facility Broadcast Central. On the roof a transmitter building and two one-hundred-foot towers were erected, giving the antennas an elevation of about four hundred feet above the street.

From its dedication on May 15, 1923, WJZ served a threefold purpose: it enabled RCA to sell receiving sets, the income from which shortly made the company’s telegraph business a mere sideline. Second, it enabled the Radio Group (mainly RCA, General Electric, and Westinghouse) to contend with the Telephone Company for control of broadcasting. Third, it gave David Sarnoff his radio music box and, though not for that reason alone, brought him to the top of a corporation which grew from some four hundred employees to ninety thousand, and which in 1964 had assets of over $1.1 billion, with a profit of over $82 million after taxes on sales of $1.8 billion. RCA is still ruled by Sarnoff, a nearly absolute industrial monarch at seventy-five.

GOING from radio telegraphy into broadcasting, I was, in a sense, disorbiting myself as an engineer. Although I was still doing technical work, I was now dealing not only with a technical staff but with announcers, musicians, actors, politicians, and other public figures, and with the public itself. Even further from his origins was the program manager, Charles B. Popenoe, who came to the station from Newark, where he had been a supervisor in the factory. He too was a technical man, with a degree in mechanical engineering. He was a driving, aggressive type, very tall, with the manner of a martinet transparently concealing much uncertainty and self-doubt. I considered him a Babbitt — Sinclair Lewis had just written the book — but we got along well and were even friends on balance.

My staff consisted mainly of thirty-five-dollar-aweek wireless operators home from the sea, with a few men from Newark-Westinghouse and General Electric-Schenectady. They were divided into three functional groups: control operators, who worked in a room on the sixth door between the two studios, switching, adjusting volume, and sending audio currents up to the roof; outside operators, who picked up program material at hotels, concert halls, the Lewisohn Stadium; and the transmitter operators, who put the stuff on the air. One of the outside operators became president of the institute of Radio Engineers, the highest honor that could befall an electronics engineer; another operator, this one in the roof gang, committed several murders and died in prison. The rest of us fell in between.

In the nature of things, announcers were more in the public eye than operators. WJZ incubated several prominent ones: Milton J. Cross and Thomas H. Cowan, who came from Newark, and Norman Brokenshire and Ted Husing, who were hired in New York. The explosive celebrity of announcers was another sign that broadcasting would attract an ever increasing mass audience and become big business. At first, since every would-be orator wanted to be an announcer and the eligible ones could be hired for fifty dollars a week, the Westinghouse-RCA policy was to play them down so that they would not be getting swelled heads and demanding raises. They were not allowed to use their names on the air, and operators did some of the announcing. Identification was by cryptic call letters, beginning with A for announcers and 0 for operators. After the station moved to New York, operators announced only in emergencies, as when poor Brokenshire had to be yanked off the air because he was too obviously intoxicated.

Nor did time become precious at WJZ until about 1925. Popenoe and I would be at the station most of the day, each managing in his own domain. In the evening, except for big events, we would monitor at home, he in a New Jersey suburb and I in Manhattan a mile or two from the station, with a direct-order wire to the control room. If I heard some out-of-town station on our wavelength, I would take WJZ off the air, with a suitable announcement from the studio, for five minutes or so and try to get the offender’s call letters so that I could complain to the radio inspector in the morning. One reason for this cavalier disregard for continuity of service was that much of the early program material was hardly worth broadcasting. Aspiring instrumentalists who should have been organ-grinders, church vocalists who dreamed of the Metropolitan, inspirational speakers who beat their wives might manage to get on the air if Popenoe could not scrounge up anything better. The only time liberties could not be taken was when we were broadcasting a prizefight.

Occasionally, real talent came our way, but it might not sound as good on the air as it did in the concert hall. One evening a big New York politician and real estate operator brought Beniamino Gigli to the studio, and he sang arias for half an hour. I stayed at the station to see that all went well, but it didn’t. Gigli had a powerful tenor, and the studio was about the size of a modern ranch-house living room. He sang at full volume, and the distortion was hideous. We begged him to hold it down, but he only smiled and sang louder. Later I was told that he had cabled his relatives in Italy to listen for him, and thought if he sang fortissimo, they would hear him better.

OUR chief competitor was WEAL, the Telephone Company’s station, with studios at 195 Broadway and a transmitter atop the old Bell Laboratories building on West Street. The Telephone Company’s Long Lines network was available for connecting WEAF with other stations, and local pickup facilities were likewise superior. The Telephone Company would not furnish long-distance service to RCA stations at any time, and local service only by special arrangement between Sarnoff and their executives for events of great public importance. Otherwise we had to rely on lines leased from the Western Union Telegraph Company, and in the case of WJZ’s connection to the RCA Washington station, from Postal Telegraph. The service was good, considering that these systems were not designed for telephony; but sometimes noise was excessive, and now and then the lines would fail entirely — once while Mary Garden was singing from a New York hotel ballroom.

For the first few years, radio was held in about the same repute as the theater was in Elizabethan England, and that caused the worst debacle in WJZ’s history. David Lloyd George, the wartime Prime Minister, came to the United States in the autumn of 1923, shortly after his fall from power and my ascension to engineer in charge. One of his principal addresses was before a distinguished gathering at the Lotos Club. By skillful maneuvering, Sarnoff took the event away from the Telephone Company, and to make certain there would be no failure, he pressed the Telephone officials to furnish wire service from the club to the WJZ control room. When our outside operator started to set up a microphone on the speakers’ table, a club functionary declared that it was out of the question to put the intrusive instrument before the eminent though disowned statesman. Finally they compromised — the microphone would be hidden in a bowl of roses.

None of us had had experience with the acoustic properties of roses. Those at the Lotos Club muffled the sound considerably: the vowels came through, but the consonants, riding on higher frequencies, were down. Still, the quality would have got by had it not been for an error in the original installation of the lines between the control room and the transmitter. The electricians had put in lead-covered cable, and no one had corrected them. The lead gave good mechanical protection, but discriminated against the higher tones. The combination of the two attenuations was fatal.

I was in the control room when Lloyd George began speaking. He sounded as if he were shouting into a rain barrel. Now and then a word was intelligible, but as for getting the drift of his argument, he might as well have been talking in Turkish. The Telephone Company’s representative called my attention to the fact that the speech coming over the lines was understandable, while the monitoring signal we were taking off the air was not. I knew, moreover, that the telephone circuit was “flat” — that is, equalized to transmit all frequencies within the speech range. The trouble was entirely our responsibility. Soon the switchboard was swamped with calls from listeners who had tuned to other stations to check their receiving sets, and wanted to tell us what we already knew only too well.

There was nothing we could do. As any highfidelity fan will understand, with modern equipment much could have been done; but then, today’s speaker, whether he is the President of the United States or Fidel Castro, has the microphone stuck in front of his nose. I was marginally thankful for one thing — Sarnoff was at the Lotos Club, and the full measure of the debacle would not be apparent to him until later.

Sarnoff could exercise a kind of baronial charm, or he could hurl administrative lightnings, and I knew it was going to be the lightnings this time. A high-level conference was convened at his Woolworth Tower office thirty-six hours after the fatal broadcast, and I was invited. The trouble was not predominantly my fault. Others were responsible for the design of the station, and until the microphone was buried in the roses, none of us had realized how serious the cable losses really were. Still, results are what count, and these results would take a lot of explaining. My job was at stake. On my way downtown that morning, I decided to wait out the inevitable recriminations and counterrecriminations, and then make as clear and candid a statement as I could manage, not concealing the fact that if I had had a sharper ear, I could have detected the cable trouble earlier and taken steps to have it corrected.

Sarnoff was loaded for bear, as we all knew he would be. Sitting at the head of the big conference table, he referred to his mortification at having wrested Lloyd George from the Telephone Company and then having the job botched by his technical people. Why? At first everyone felt obliged to defend the past decisions and actions of his own department. I was silent, Sarnoff’s fury was rising. What was most to be feared was not the loss of a job, not even the setback of a career, but his contempt. Finally there was an opening, and I began to speak. Desperation, instead of tying my tongue as often happened, made me suddenly fluent. I ended with the assurance that with what we now knew and remedial measures that were already under way, it could not happen again.

“ That was a good speech,” Sarnoff said, and ended the conference. He knew what he needed to know. He was not vindictive, only efficient. Had there been a recurrence, heads would have rolled, but we took care to see that there was none.

THE clash between the Radio Group and the Telephone Company was never an open one, for the antagonists recognized what the elder Morgan called “community of interest.” Nor was the controversy confined to broadcasting. There were all sorts of conflicts over commercial and patent rights, particularly vacuum tube patents, and the stakes were enormous. Everyone wanted to build up a position of strength for an eventual settlement. An arbitrator was agreed on, and hearings, arguments, decisions, and compromises extended over a period of years, with some of the leading lawyers and most expensive law firms in the country representing the parties. During this interval of private litigation, the Radio Group stations were debarred from selling time. From the moment the carrier went on the air to the sign-off at night, WJZ was on a sustaining basis. It alone cost $100,000 a year to maintain.

All the income came from the sale of receiving sets, and Sarnoff was determined to hold down costs so long as the stations had no income of their own. It was humiliating to him not to be able to pay the artists; he said so at the WJZ opening. It was even worse for the artists. Among the aspiring sopranos, I remember one girl who could sing and who had looks and charm besides. Her name was Doris Doe, and she was very successful later. On her appearances at WJZ she was always accompanied by her mother, and I used to talk to them in the control room. Doris was invited by an organ company which had a regular remote program to sing at their studio. She hoped they might offer her a fee, however small — perhaps live dollars — but money was not mentioned. “How is one expected to live?” her mother asked, and I had no answer.

It was a problem, and not a minor one. But after 1924 it was no longer a problem for the Telephone Company. Their broadcasting department had losses of $100,000 in both 1923 and 1924, but 1925 showed an operating profit of $150,000. They were selling time. The advertisers who were buying the time not only supported the station but could pay the performers. Popenoe could get the advertisers to pay selected performers, mostly dance orchestras or other surefire draws, but he had to give the time free.

The dual scheme of the Telephone Company was largely the creation of George F. McClelland, Popenoe’s opposite number at WEAF. To McClelland more than any other individual is due whatever acclaim or opprobrium commercial broadcasting merits. Before he joined the Telephone Company he was secretary of the Association of National Advertisers — the right background and the right man. Action came fast. Before the end of 1922, McClelland was calling on the head of the William H. Rankin advertising agency to ask them to sell their clients a ten-minute talk over WEAF for $100. He did sell ten minutes to the president of Rankin, who used it for a talk on Advertising and Its Relation to the Public on December 30, 1922. By March, 1923, McClelland had sponsored entertainment on the air, and was offering a balanced mix of commercial and nonpaying presentations.

The advertising message was at first handled with the utmost caution. The Telephone executives and publicists understood the difference between advertising in publications and on radio, where in effect the audience was forced to listen to the advertising message in return for entertainment. William Peck Banning, a former assistant vice president of AT&T who wrote a history of the WEAF experiment (Commercial Broadcasting Pioneer, Harvard University Press, 1946), says: “Sales arguments like those in the ‘commercials’ that are common today were considered offensive to listeners and, therefore, antagonistic to the station’s policy of building a following by the broadcasting of the best possible programs available and the avoidance of offense.” Banning refers to an argument between a radio-time salesman and the manager of WEAF over the propriety of mentioning toothpaste on the air, and comments: “The contrast between this ‘squeamishness,’ as a member of WEAF’s original staff has termed it, and today’s frank references to intimately personal subjects is certainly marked; and there is much evidence that the restraint insisted upon at WEAF would appeal to listeners now.”

THE restraint of which Banning wistfully speaks was not only public-relations wisdom within the Telephone Company but also apprehension that the government might step in. Radio was under the jurisdiction of the Department of Commerce, headed by Herbert Hoover. Legally there was no basis for regulation of broadcasting, not even for allocation of wavelengths, but Mr. Hoover’s sharp distaste for radio advertising did have some regulative effect. In his address at the conference of industry representatives in February, 1922, he said: “It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service to be drowned in advertising chatter.” It proved to be quite conceivable, but for the time being the broadcasters were prudent.

At this juncture Sarnoff was of the same mind as Hoover. He envisioned NBC in 1922 under various names — Public Service Broadcasting Company, National Radio Broadcasting Company, American Broadcasting Company — as a nonprofit organization supported by 2 percent of the gross broadcast receiver sales of RCA, Westinghouse, General Electric, and their licensees. Advertising was to be barred. For several years he also considered, and publicly advocated, the endowment of broadcasting stations by philanthropists.

Even after the founding of NBC in 1926, these visions persisted. Owen D. Young, the RCA chairman of that period, regarded NBC as a “semiphilanthropic activity ... an investment in the youth of America.” Between Young and Sarnoff, NBC acquired an advisory council which included John W. Davis, William Green, Charles Evans Hughes, Dwight W. Morrow, Elihu Root, Julius Rosenwald, and at one time, Robert Hutchins.

Within five years all these noble dreams had vanished. The dreams were a compound of public relations puffery and good faith; to some extent the dreamers even believed in their dreams. But reality soon asserted itself. The essential factor in the formation of NBC was the merger of WEAF and WJZ into one company. WEAF (later WNBC) became the key station of what was known as the Red Network, while WJZ became the key station of the Blue Network. (The WJZ chain was later sold to the American Broadcasting Company in 1943 under a Federal Communications Commission ruling prohibiting multiple ownership of networks serving substantially the same area.) RCA paid $1 million for WEAF after the Telephone Company finally decided that entertainment and broadcasting were incompatible with their primary mission.

By that time a third network was gestating, the one which was to become the Columbia Broadcasting System. CBS was a factor in the transition from Young’s semiphilanthropy to a normal corporate drive for maximum profitability. One of the prime movers in the CBS development was a pavingmachine salesman and catch-as-catch-can promoter named George Coats, who wandered into a radio industry gathering at the Hotel Astor in New York in 1926 and stayed. Another was Major J. Andrew White, long with RCA in various capacities and sports broadcaster for WJZ; Popenoe had beaten him out for the program manager’s job. The third was the concert manager Arthur Judson, who had tried to interest Sarnoff in an NBC concert bureau and had been rebuffed. These three, with a few lesser associates, formed a paper network which they called United Independent Broadcasters. They signed up sixteen stations for ten hours a week of network time at fifty dollars an hour, but they had neither wire lines nor capital. The Columbia Phonograph Company, alarmed by the tie-up between RCA and the Victor Talking Machine Company which was then in the making, bought into the network with $163,000. The name was changed to Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System. Operations then began, but losses amounted to $100,000 a month, and after three months the phonograph company was glad to sell the network back for $10,000 and thirty hours of broadcasting time. Next, Jerome H. Louchheim, a Philadelphia millionaire, went in with some associates. After they had invested almost $400,000, the network was still on the verge of bankruptcy and Louchheim wanted out. Then came William S. Paley.

THE opportunity came to Paley because his father, Samuel, was president and principal stockholder of the Congress Cigar Company, which had a contract with the Columbia network. Young Paley — he was twenty-seven — was the advertising manager of the cigar company and the heir apparent to the presidency. But after looking the situation over and noting a sharp rise in the sales of La Palina cigars as a result of advertising over the Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System, he decided his vocation was in radio. The Paley family bought the network from the Louchheim interests at a knockdown price, William S. Paley became president on January 3, 1929, the “Phonograph” was dropped, and NBC had competition.

About the only thing Sarnoff and Paley had in common was that both were Jews. Sarnoff was ten years older. He had been in radio (including wireless telegraphy) for twenty-three years and knew more about it than anyone else. Paley was so ignorant of the technical requirements that when Congress Cigar began broadcasting over WCAU, a local Philadelphia station, he wired distributors all over the country to listen for a signal that probably died away fifty miles from the transmitter. Sarnoff’s family had been so poor that, as one of his brothers said, David never had a childhood at all. At the age of ten, he was peddling papers in the street; at twelve he found additional income as a boy soprano singing in the synagogue and at weddings (thirty cents a performance); soon, when his father fell ill, David became the principal support of his family. Paley received a large amount of stock in the family company from his father when he graduated from the Wharton School of Finance, and later sold it for $400,000. Sarnoff got his education while working. But finally, rich boy and poor boy had something else in common — business success achieved by their own acumen and enterprise.

The biggest advantage Paley had was what Thorstein Veblen called “the merits of borrowing and the penalty of taking the lead.” Veblen applied this concept to imperial states, especially preWorld War I Germany and Britain, but in many situations it is applicable to corporations as well. Paley came into an industry with the road to profit paved for him by the salesmanship, technology, and investments of the Radio Group and the Telephone Company. NBC did not make a profit until 1931 — $2.3 million net. CBS made money almost as soon as Paley took control. In those beginning days Paley did not go in for any of that nonsense about investing in the youth of America or bringing culture to the masses. He wanted CBS to have a respectable public image, but his chief interest was in beating NBC in profit on investment — which, considering how he acquired the network in the first place, could not have been too difficult — and profit on sales — which did require some doing. Yet by 1934, CBS had more stations than either NBC network, sales had increased from $5 million in 1929 to $19 million in 1934, and in the midst of the Great Depression, the net had quadrupled.

The effect on Sarnoff does not require elaboration. He became president of RCA in 1930. The company was ten years old and still a mere sales agency for GE and Westinghouse, not yet in possession of its own manufacturing facilities, when the roof fell in. Sarnoff needed money to keep RCA in business, and NBC had to pull its weight in the boat and more. Its profits from 1931 on helped the parent company. As it was, Sarnoff had to sell RKO, the movie subsidiary, for $15 million, less than he had invested in it. The Depression alone would have driven Sarnoff to unleash the advertisers, but the CBS performance made it imperative for NBC to make the best possible showing on the balance sheet. And that way lay the “Wasteland.”