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By then, the Depression had hit hard enough so that Sarnoff decided to lighten ship. He started selling off control of RKO and later, on orders of FCC, sold the Blue network (it became the American Broadcasting Co.). In RCA's stock-swapping years, it paid no dividends. The first one was not paid until 1937, nearly 20 years after the company started. Sarnoff has thought it more important to plow earnings into research to keep up with the electronic world. And profits from research have often been a long time acoming.
Brave New World. Television is the best example. In 1923, Dr. Vladimir Zworykin, Westinghouse's Russian-born wizard, invented the eye of the modern TV camera—the iconoscope, and developed the kinescope. Sarnoff then called television "a dream whose shadowy outlines are beginning to appear on the far horizon," and set to work to make it come true. In 1928, RCA opened an experimental TV station in New York and during the next 20 years poured $50 million into television. At the opening of New York's World
Fair on April 30, 1939, Sarnoff made the first U.S. commercial telecast with the words: "Now at last we add sight to sound."
But even so it was not until after World War II that the mass production of TV sets began.
Out of RCA's big research headquarters at Princeton, N.J. Dr. Zworykin (who joined RCA in 1929) and his colleagues, under Vice President C. B. Jolliffe, brought many other startling developments : the electron microscope, the infrared "sniperscope" which enabled World War II G.I.s to knock off skulking Japanese troops at night, "shoran" for accurate blind-bombing. In World War II, RCA turned out an estimated $500 million worth of devices for the armed forces. Now it has big defense orders, many for products no one else can make.
Sarnoff is no scientist, yet of all RCA's activities, research is nearest his heart and he is one of the few top men of the industry who can talk to scientists without an interpreter. And research represents tomorrow, expansion, new success which David Sarnoff, after the painful insecurity of his early life, still seeks.
Collector's Items. Modesty, false or otherwise, does not disguise Sarnoff's power and success. His chill blue eyes shine with impatient energy, his boyish, scrubbed-pink face radiates cockiness. All 5 feet 5 inches of his bullnecked, bull-chested figure bristles with authority and assurance. He dresses with conservative, expensive elegance, even carries a gold frame to hold matchbooks.
At RCA he makes all the top decisions, is brusque with slower-witted underlings. He insists that every memo to him must be no more than a page, but allows himself more latitude, has written memos as long as 30 pages. A collection of his better memos, bound in gold-tooled leather, is a prized Sarnoff possession.