9/29/22
Newsletter112
The Crack of Dawn
I must have scored high on a test I don’t remember taking, but in 5th grade I was inexplicably bussed to another school to attend a new program called Academically Able, or AA, which seemed like a mistake from the beginning. In this special program students could study that which they really loved and excelled, except they had no programs for movies, theater, or literature. Therefore, they stuck me in architecture. Well, I didn’t give a rat’s ass and paid absolutely no attention. At the end of the year we all had to turn in a final project. Everybody there had put their heart and souls into these final projects. Everyone but me, that is. I actually found a Cheerios box, took two pieces of gray plexiglass, glued them to the front and back of the cereal box, and actually had the audacity to turn that in and say it was an office building. I was stuck in Academically Able again in 6th grade. This time I was assigned to electronics, for which I have no aptitude. I found a cheap wireless radio kit, and at the last moment attempted to put it all together in an afternoon. I turned it in as my final project. The teacher said, “Let’s connect it to a battery and see if it works.” He connected it to a battery and it didn’t work. He asked, “Are you going to fix it?” I said, “No.”
Some inventions take off immediately, like the lightbulb or the phonograph or motion pictures, which all became multi-million dollar industries within ten years. The Wright Bros. didn’t have a functioning airplane until 1907, and by the start of WWI in 1914 – seven years later – all the combatant countries had air forces. However, other inventions have to sit around for a while until someone else figures out how to manufacture or sell them. As I’ve mentioned, Karl Benz received the first patent for the internal combustion automobile in 1878. But cars were so complicated and difficult to assemble that there weren’t 10,000 cars manufactured in the next 35 years. It wasn’t until Henry Ford applied the already existing technology of the assembly line in 1913 that cars became common. This same long gestating period also occurred with radio. In 1896 Guglielmo Marconi received the first patent for the transmission of radio waves, and the radio became possible. So vaguely in my mind, from about 1900-1910 everybody had a big wooden radio in the living room and they could turn it on and get the news or jazz or a radio show. No. It took another 25 years for someone to figure out that radio could be a money- making entertainment and news industry. In 1920 the only people who owned radios were geeks who had made them themselves. These were called crystal sets (the thing I couldn’t make functional in AA). Crystal set owners were a club. They had magazines.
However, it took one person to see the possibilities, and act on them. His name was David Sarnoff, a Jewish immigrant from Uzlyany, Russia (present-day Belarus), who worked for Marconi Wireless Company. He kept sending memos, for a couple of years, and nobody paid attention. So Sarnoff proved his point. He had microphones and broadcast equipment at the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier on July 2, 1921. Every geek with a crystal set made sure to tune in, numbering about 300,000 people. A new business was born. It was called Radio Corporation of America, or RCA, which also owned NBC and RKO Pictures. David Sarnoff was its president until 1970.
A good day to one and all.