Word: sarnoffs
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Robert W. Sarnoff '39, chairman of RCA said in announcing the grant that the money will be used to determine how men manage the awesome tools they have fashioned...
Robert W. Sarnoff, LL.D., president of RCA. One whose master's voice is truly...
...Butterflies. Sarnoff's zeal to be first with color TV led him into an epic battle with William Paley's CBS. RCA developed a "compatible" broadcast method that could send color and black-and-white signals on special color TVs, but CBS, with a superior picture, won the Federal Communications Commission's license to proceed commercially. Sarnoff ordered his engineers back to their labs. Three years later, they produced a high-quality compatible system. The FCC reversed itself, and CBS lost a big round...
...Sarnoff's inclination to spend, spend, spend on research also resulted in some spectacular failures. Even before RCA had begun to recoup the $130 million it had invested in color TV, it began laying out millions more to break into computers, an effort that it finally abandoned at a great loss this year when profitability seemed far off. Sarnoff's son Robert, 53, who succeeded him as chairman last year, will do well if he can boast, as his father did after a particularly rocky period at RCA, that "I never got butterflies...
With his big cigars and his hard-boiled manner, David Sarnoff sometimes seemed to be trying to prove his own aphorism that "competition brings out the best in products and the worst in men." Some of his critics charged that if he had been more interested in the quality of his network's products ("Basically, we're the delivery boys," he would say) TV programming might be much better than it is today. Sarnoff also ran RCA with a messianic but too simplistic belief in technology's ability to advance the frontiers of society. Some...