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Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio
by Tom Lewis
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Harpercollins (1991-09)
ISBN: 0060182156
EAN: 9780060182151
Dewy Decimal #: 621.3840973
Hardcover: 421 pages
Edition: 1st
SKU: 080514010
Condition: Collectible: Very Go
Comments: This First Edition, First Printing with full numberline, is in excellent condition. No visible markings, highlights, underlining, tears to text. Tight spine. Clean Hard Cover. Inside front flap of Dust Jacket, price clipped. On top corner of front Dust Jacket, has a gold sticker which states The Companion to the PBS Documentary. Light/minimum, shelf/edge wear. Very interesting copy, worth having at an affordable price. (5H-28)
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Acclaimed by hobbyists as the best book on radio ever written, Empire of the Air traces the lives of the three visionaries behind the modern communications age--Lee de Forest, Edwin Howard Armstrong, and David Sarnoff--in this fascinating, inspiring, and at times tragic tale. 32 pages of photos.
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Customer Reviews
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The story of broadcast radio from RCAs point of view
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-03-13
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
"Empire of The Air: The Men Who Made Radio," by Tom Lewis, HarperCollins, New York, 1991. This 421 page paperback is the book that accompanied the 1990s PBS series, a three-hour presentation of the story of radio. It emphasized the role of three individuals: Lee DeForest, Howard Armstrong, and David Sarnoff. Lee DeForest invented the audion tube by inserting a grid between the plate and the filament in a vacuum tube. Howard Armstrong perfected the invention with a series of circuits that made the vacuum tube more sensitive as a radio receiver and suitable as a transmitter. Later he invented FM radio, which greatly reduced static and distortions. David Sarnoff envisioned broadcast radio and provided leadership in its successful commercialization. Later, his company, RCA, also pioneered network radio, television and color television. Modern electronics owe their origins to the electric telegraph, which first brought wires and electricity into communities across the country. Indeed, Thomas Edison and David Sarnoff both began as telegraph operators.
Although the subject of the series was radio, the true subject was Radio Corporation of America or RCA. The book covers the technical developments that made broadcast radio possible and ends with RCA being acquired by General Electric in 1985.
DeForest billed himself as "The Father of Radio," but we learn he was a tinkerer who did not understand how the audion tube worked. In an age when white Anglo-Saxon (Calvinist) Protestants attended Ivy League colleges, and ran most corporations, you would expect Armstrong to win. He was a Presbyterian, educated at Columbia University, under the then leading professor of electrical engineering, Michael Pupin. He was reportedly shy and introverted, but his intelligence was recognized early, and he began experimenting with electronics as a teenager. DeForest, on the other hand, also Presbyterian was educated at Yale University, but his father, a minister, was president of a black college in the South, Talladega College. DeForest is described as an outgoing extrovert, but as a carpetbagger in the South, he had few friends. He spent his time reading patents in the college library, where he resolved to become an inventor. He selected electricity as a promising field of study. DeForest attended Dwight Moody's prep school in Mt. Herman, MA, on his way to Yale, but his rural background meant he did not fit-in with classmates.
Sarnoff was a poor immigrant (Russian) Jew, who was forced to support the family after his father died. After selling newspapers, he learned Morse code in the telegraph department at the New York Herald. From that experience, he got a job at American Marconi, the famous radio telegraph company. When RCA it was formed, he moved into management ranks, and functioned as the technical visionary who promoted broadcast radio as a more profitable venture than the radio telegraphy business. He arranged to have "music boxes" built, and demonstrated their utility. It was Sarnoff who recognized the technical superiority of Armstrong's regenerative circuit and recommended that Marconi license it. Later, he co-operated with Armstrong's demonstration of FM radio. But it was Sarnoff, who decided to invest in television, to resist FM and then to develop alternative circuits, which he claimed were outside of Armstrong's patents. The result was a patent fight, which proved expensive to Armstrong, and ultimately led to his suicide.
American Marconi was the US branch of the Italian Marconi firm. It had been founded by Guglielmo Marconi, based on his invention of radio telegraphy. He had improved the primitive art and greatly increased signal range. He is famous for having transmitted the coded letter S across the Atlantic, but the main use for radiotelegraphy was ship to ship and ship to shore communications (as became clear after the sinking of the Titanic in 1912), plus the flexibility of building stations without the need to install cabling. Unlike the fly-by-night radio telegraph companies founded by DeForest (which set up demonstrations in various cities, sold stock, and then disappeared often without even trying to build a successful business), Marconi was an honest businessman who provided a quality service at a fair price. (DeForest was charged with fraud for one of his ventures, but was judged not guilty in a jury trial. He had been duped by promoters who ran the business end of his ventures, often leaving him with debts and taking off with the cash.)
The PBS series told the story well, but some of the details omitted should be mentioned. In spite of pending challenges to his audion patent, DeForest sold nonexclusive rights to American Telephone & Telegraph Co., i.e., the phone company--in July, 1913. They used the technology in a practical amplifier, which made possible coast-to-coast long-distance telephone service by 1915.
A Canadian university professor named Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, working in Pittsburgh, invented a spade detector that advanced the art of radio telegraphy. He successfully broadcast a playing violin to radio operators in 1906. Later he sold his patents to Westinghouse, who set up, KDKA in Pittsburgh as the first broadcast radio station in November, 1916.
RCA came about because the most powerful transmitter at the time was the alternator. General Electric became expert at manufacturing the device, but a proliferation of patents made it difficult to operate without licenses under competitors patents. GE and American Marconi decided to set up RCA, when it was realized that the American government would not allow a foreign corporation to own a technology considered essential to the national defense. Germany operated an undersea telegraph cable to the Americas, but it was promptly severed in World War I. That made Germany dependent on radio telegraphy for communications and emphasized the importance of radio as a critical national defense technology.
Others soon realized the advantage of contributing their radio patents to RCA in return for part ownership. Westinghouse and AT&T participated, but General Electric was the major shareholder, and had greatest control. Both Westinghouse and AT&T had broadcast radio stations, which they contributed to the venture. It was GE's Owen Young, who recognized Sarnoff's talents and saw to his promotion in spite of the anti-Semitic practices of the day.
World War I had a major impact on radio. Thousands of soldiers were trained in the basics of radio during their military service. After the war, they came home to build crystal sets, and some times one or two tube radio sets constructed from kits. These sets were the audience for early broadcast radio. As with the personal computer, initially it was a hobbyist market. But Sarnoff believed radio should be made available to the average man on the street with a handsome set suitable for the living room with a speaker instead of headphones.
The quest for talking movies began in about 1919. DeForest was an early participant. His technology, called Phonofilm, proved cumbersome. Warner Brothers issued the first talking films using Vitaphone, a record synchronized to the film. In 1928, RCA and GE followed with the photocell film track technology, called pallophotophone. They with Joseph Kennedy formed RKO Radio Pictures to make and distribute talking films by the purchase of the Keith-Albee-Orphium theater chain. (At the time, theater chains showed only the films produced by their companies.) RCA owned 25%. The book does not say so but apparently AT&T/Western Electric was a key developer of talking film technology especially working with Warner Brothers. They built the large speaker amplifier system that filled the theater with sound. RCA came later to the business but entered into an agreement making films with either system compatible on the same projection equipment.
RCA repeatedly encountered challenges from Federal antitrust authorities. In a settlement reached in 1926, AT&T sold its broadcast radio stations to RCA in return for an agreement to be the exclusive carrier of NBC network transmissions to its affiliated stations for a $1MM annual fee. (William Paley founded CBS independently in 1928.) In 1930, an antitrust suit forced the founding companies to divest their interests in RCA, to discontinue manufacture of radio equipment for 30 months, and to cease any non-compete agreements regarding radio equipment. RCA would license its radio technology to others resulting in a proliferation of competing brands of radio sets. In addition, Sarnoff was freed of board members of the sponsoring companies allowing him total control of RCA and its board. ABC was created in 1945 after NBC was forced to divest itself of the blue network.
Television came to RCA almost as a lark. Vladimir Zworykin, a research assistant at Westinghouse, had taken out a patent on a primitive TV camera, but Westinghouse failed to invest in the technology. Sarnoff hired him to work in RCA's Camden, NJ laboratories (on the manufacturing site of the Victor Phonograph Co. which RCA had acquired in 1929 after working with it to provide radio phonograph combinations since 1924). The Sarnoff Labs in Princeton, NJ were constructed in 1941.
RCA became the leading manufacturer of vacuum tubes. DeForest had offered his audion tube for sale almost from the beginning, but he was unable to manufacture tubes with consistent performance. RCA reduced them to standardized designs with predictable characteristics. The Princeton Lab was a developer of over 150 new types of radio tubes. In 1940, a manufacturing plant for vacuum tubes was built in Lancaster, PA. It made 20MM tubes by the end of the war in 2000 types.
Early television technology relied on unreliable, mechanical devices to receive a moving picture. RCA was forced to license Philo Farnsworth's electronic television patents. However, it galled David Sarnoff to pay for such technology. It is said he resolved never to be bested again in patent negotiations. Perhaps that is the reason he fought so hard to avoid licensing FM rights from Howard Armstrong (after Armstrong rejected his offer).
This book is loaded with historical details that make interesting reading. It includes extensive references and notes as well as a bibliography. Indexed.
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An Excellent Book with a Major Flaw
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-11-08
I greatly enjoyed reading this book, and viewing the documentary that was based on it. Tom Lewis crafted an interesting, well-written story, and did his research. His facts are almost all correct, and Empire of the Air does a service in reviving interest in the history of the single most-important technological leap of the past century. (It is even more important than the Internet; the Internet has precedents--computers, telephones, TV, FAX, etc.--but radio had no precedent. It was the very first instantaneous mass-communication system in the world.)
Empire of the Air likewise portrays the personalities of "the Men Who Made Radio" almost flawlessly. In all, this is a book not only worth reading, but worth owning.
But I have one problem with Empire of the Air. How is it that How is it that Powel Crosley, Jr., the man who built the most powerful commercial radio station in the U.S. is mentioned only once, referred to in passing as an inventor in a garage? Crosley, the creator of one of the first 100 radio stations in the U.S., a man who consistently led in breaking the barriers to higher power for more than a decade, and who almost single-handedly established the market for radios (something Sarnoff tried to do six years earlier--and failed). Crosley, who bested Sarnoff's RCA in a 7-year legal battle? I can't blame Tom for the omission; I believe it is part of the aftermath of Sarnoff's revenge of persuading his contemporaries to omit Crosley from history. (There's an argument for that, but this is not the place to propound it.)
That aside, Empire of the Air deserves a place on your history bookshelf. It's on mine.
--Mike
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Turn your radio on . . .
Rating (4)
Date: 2005-04-02
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
Subtitled "The Men Who Made Radio," this book is concerned with the principal actors developing radio: Marconi, Sarnoff, Armstrong, and De Forrest. Sarnoff ("The General") was the egoist who founded RCA, and Armstrong was the secretive inventor of FM who refused to compromise and lost everything (and committed suicide). The first half of the book is the best; it's all about the inventors and their new inventions and is very interesting. The second half suffers from being mostly about the legal hassling that occurred among the principals. Recommended.
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Americana At It's Best.
Rating (5)
Date: 2004-12-28
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
I didn't just read this book, I've read it three times and will probably read it at least two more times, slowly. It's easily the best recounting of an industrial development that I've ever been through in any medium. The amount of detail about the invention of "radio" is almost overwhelming. The way that the lives of the major figures are professionally interwoven and spiced up with backstabbing, deceit, lying and tragedy is also keeps the reader's eyes glued to the pages. You also begin to realise why the work of honest inventors needs to be protected. However, the authors distinction between "wireless" and "radio" is pretty thin in my opinion and his use of that to exclude Marconi from the group is a bit ungenerous and just flat-out, technically wrong. The inclusion of Sarnoff is just as wrong. Sarnoff was a classic, ruthless American entrepreneur- not an inventor. He was no doubt a great visionary but he also appropriated for himself events to which he was not connected. Sarnoff more properly belongs in a second volume with Paley and others who raised broadcasting to the level of a major industry. They gave alot to their country, but, not as inventors. It's an all round great read and I highly recommend it. Tom Lewis did a fantastic job and I've got an opinion thanks to his incredible research. In fact, his book has caused me to do even more reading on the subject. Finally, I think there's also an accidental, back-door warning in there about the debasement of the American economy. As radio grew, it created hard, marketable skills and spread the wealth into just about every town and household. That's not happening today in an economy that's based on endless consumption, paper debt, cheap unskilled labour, easy credit, no savings and a manufacturing heartland that is anywhere but the USA.
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Excellent History of Radio
Rating (5)
Date: 2004-06-03
3 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
As a radio professional myself, I very much enjoyed reading about the evolution of radio and the marvelous myriad of personalities involved. Since the beginning radio has been filled with colorful and interesting people. It reinforced in me that I picked the right profession to dedicate my life to. I would recommend this book to any professional broadcaster. If we fail to have an appreciation of history, we fail to grasp the big picture. Jeffrey McAndrew
WHBL News Anchor and Editor and author of "Our Brown-Eyed Boy"
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