David Sarnoff (February 27, 1891 – December 12, 1971) was an American businessman who played an important role in the American history of radio broadcasting and television. He led the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) for most of his career in various capacities from shortly after its founding in 1919 until his retirement in 1970.
He headed a conglomerate of telecommunications and media companies, including RCA and NBC, that became one of the largest in the world. Named a Reserve Brigadier General of the Signal Corps in 1945, Sarnoff thereafter insisted on being called "The General" and addressed as "General Sarnoff".
David Sarnoff was born to a Jewish family in Uzlian, a small town in Minsk Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Belarus), the son of Abraham Sarnoff and Leah Privin. Abraham emigrated to the United States and raised funds to bring the family. Sarnoff spent much of his early childhood in a cheder (or yeshiva) studying and memorizing the Torah. He emigrated with his mother and three brothers and one sister to New York City in 1900 at the age of 9, where he helped support his family by selling newspapers before and after his classes at the Educational Alliance. In 1906 when he was 15 years , his father became incapacitated by tuberculosis, and Sarnoff went to work to support the family. He had planned to pursue a full-time career in the newspaper business, but a chance encounter led to a position as an office boy at the Commercial Cable Company. When his superior refused him leave for Rosh Hashanah, he quit to join the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America on September 30, 1906, and started a career of over 60 years in electronic communications.
Over the next 13 years, Sarnoff rose from office boy to commercial manager of the company, learning about the technology and the business of electronic communications on the job and in libraries. He also served at Marconi stations on ships and posts on Siasconset, Nantucket and the New York Wanamaker Department Store. In 1911, he installed and operated the wireless equipment on a ship hunting seals off Newfoundland and Labrador, and used the technology to relay the first remote medical diagnosis from the ship's doctor to a radio operator at Belle Isle with an infected tooth.
The following year, he led two other operators at the Wanamaker station in an effort to confirm the fate of the Titanic. Always the self-promoter, Sarnoff later exaggerated his role as the sole hero who stayed by his telegraph key for three days to receive information on the Titanic's survivors. Schwartz questions whether Sarnoff, who was a manager of the telegraphers by the time of the disaster, was working the key although that brushes aside concerns about corporate hierarchy. The event began on a Sunday when the store would have been closed.
Over the next two years, Sarnoff earned promotions to chief inspector and contracts manager for a company whose revenues swelled after Congress passed legislation mandating continuous staffing of commercial shipboard radio stations. That same year, Marconi won a patent suit that gave it the coastal stations of the United Wireless Telegraph Company. Sarnoff also demonstrated the first use of radio on a railroad line, the Lackawanna Railroad Company's link between Binghamton, New York, and Scranton, Pennsylvania; and permitted and observed Edwin Armstrong's demonstration of his regenerative receiver at the Marconi station at Belmar, New Jersey. Sarnoff used H. J. Round's hydrogen arc transmitter to demonstrate the broadcast of music from the New York Wanamaker station.
This demonstration and the AT&T demonstrations in 1915 of long-distance wireless telephony inspired the first of many memos to his superiors on applications of current and future radio technologies. Sometime late in 1915 or in 1916 he proposed to the company's president, Edward J. Nally, that the company develop a "radio music box" for the "amateur" market of radio enthusiasts. Nally deferred on the proposal because of the expanded volume of business during World War I. Throughout the war years, Sarnoff remained Marconi's Commercial Manager, including oversight of the company's factory in Roselle Park, New Jersey.
Unlike many who were involved with early radio communications, who often viewed radio as point-to-point, Sarnoff saw the potential of radio as point-to-mass. One person (the broadcaster) could speak to many (the listeners).
When Owen D. Young of General Electric arranged the purchase of American Marconi and reorganized it as the Radio Corporation of America, a radio patent monopoly, Sarnoff realized his dream and revived his proposal in a lengthy memo on the company's business and prospects. Although his superiors again ignored him, he contributed to the rising postwar radio boom by helping arrange for the broadcast of a heavyweight boxing match between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier in July 1921, with Sarnoff as one of announcers. Up to 300,000 people listened to the broadcast of the fight, and demand for home radio equipment bloomed that winter. By the spring of 1922, Sarnoff's prediction of popular demand for radio broadcasting had come to pass and over the next few years, he gained much stature and influence.
In 1926, RCA purchased, from AT&T, its recently formed Broadcasting Company of America subsidiary, which included its New York City station, WEAF, and associated "WEAF Chain" network operations. This was reorganized to launch the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the first national radio network in America. Four years later, Sarnoff became president of RCA. NBC had by that time split into two networks, the Red and the Blue. The Blue Network eventually became ABC Radio. Sarnoff is often inaccurately referred to as the founder of both RCA and NBC, but he was in fact founder of only NBC.
Sarnoff was instrumental in building and establishing the AM broadcasting radio business that became the preeminent public radio standard for the majority of the 20th century.
Via the Pecora Commission, congressional investigations revealed that when Sarnoff was in charge of the RCA, he participated in pool operations (market manipulation) of RCA stock. In one noted instance, Sarnoff used his housewife as a proxy in order to try and hide his involvement in the operations, which were considered highly unethical even at the time. Using Sarnoff’s large sums of money, and that of other leading executives of the era, the pool started to artificially inflate the price of RCA stock on March 12, 1929 and concluded operations seven calendar days later. This short market manipulation netted the pool a gross profit of $5,563,198.48 ($105,198,447.02 in May 2025). Sarnoff’s actions, and similar ones of other leading executives at the time, led to public and congressional outcry and stricter securities-related regulations.
Sarnoff negotiated successful contracts to form Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO), a film production and distribution company. Essential elements in that new company were RCA, the Film Booking Offices of America (FBO), and the Keith-Albee-Orpheum (KAO) theater chain.
When Sarnoff was put in charge of radio broadcasting at RCA, he soon recognized the potential for television, i.e., the combination of motion pictures with electronic transmission. Schemes for television had long been proposed (well before World War I) but with no practical outcome. Sarnoff was determined to lead his company in pioneering the medium and met with Westinghouse engineer Vladimir Zworykin in 1928. At the time Zworykin was attempting to develop an all-electronic television system at Westinghouse, but with little success. Zworykin had visited the laboratory of the inventor Philo T. Farnsworth, who had developed an Image Dissector, part of a system that could enable a working television. Zworykin was sufficiently impressed with Farnsworth's invention that he had his team at Westinghouse make several copies of the device for experimentation.
Zworykin pitched the concept to Sarnoff, claiming a viable television system could be realized in two years with a mere $100,000 investment. Sarnoff opted to fund Zworkyin's research, most likely well-aware that Zworykin was underestimating the scope of his television effort. Seven years later, in late 1935, Zworykin's photograph appeared on the cover of the trade journal Electronics, holding an early RCA photomultiplier prototype. The photomultiplier, subject of intensive research at RCA and in Leningrad, Russia, would become an essential component within sensitive television cameras. On April 24, 1936, RCA demonstrated to the press a working iconoscope camera tube and kinescope receiver display tube (an early cathode-ray tube), two key components of all-electronic television.