Word: sarnoffs
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...When Sarnoff came back in 1930, he was elected president of RCA and faced the Depression. It was forcing many a radiomaker to the wall, but Sarnoff kept on driving ahead. In 1932, the Department of Justice forced G.E. and Westinghouse to give up their 51.3% control of RCA (by distributing their RCA holdings to their own stockholders). In this way, RCA achieved independence, but as part of the deal Sarnoff also had to pay off $17.9 million that RCA owed its parents. He did it partly when he turned over to them RCA's new skyscraper headquarters...
...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...
...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...