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Within two months, RCA will start putting on similar public color demonstrations on 100 receivers which will be moved from city to city all over the U.S. By broadcasting its color show last week on its regular channel, RCA also showed TV set owners that its system is compatible, i.e., it could receive the broadcasts in black & white. (RCA can also convert existing sets to color.) The new tube's performance was so impressive that such TV competitors as Allen B. Du Mont, who has opposed any form of color up till now, changed their minds. Said Du Mont: "The RCA picture was good enough to start commercial programs immediately."
Sarnoff is far more cautious. He says:
"Commercial color television on a big basis is still two to five years away. Material shortage, NPA cutbacks on TV production and defense orders will delay it. On top of that, it will take a long time to get the bugs out of mass production of the color tube."
Many a TV man thinks that Sarnoff's five years is too long. One big reason is that when FCC made its decision last fall, TV setmakers were almost solidly against the CBS system, because they were up to their ears in orders and wanted to make no changes that might upset sales. Now,
TV manufacturers are up to their ears in unsold sets, are more likely to grab at RCA's system, which they think will get customers buying again. RCA has already given manufacturers the blueprints of its color system, to make sets (on a royalty basis)—if FCC gives the go-ahead.
Whatever technical or bureaucratic difficulties may lie ahead of RCA's color system, it was clear from last week's demonstration that Sarnoff was fighting his way out of a tough spot.
For more than 50 of his 60 years, Sarnoff has been doing just that. Driving through obstacles is his habit, his joy, his bitter necessity. He says: "There are three drives that rule most men: money, sex and power." Nobody doubts that Sarnoff's ruling drive is power. Says a deputy: "There is no question about it, he is the god over here."
The 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."