I am a stranger here myself
 

Hi,
I signed up last week and this is my first post--I am so thoroughly non-technical that it has taken me this long to figure out how to post anything.
I am researching a book on the early years of American television, roughly from 1936 to 1950, and while my interest is in programming, I have been reading as widely as I can about the technology, the business practices, and the government regulations of the time and how they shaped programming decisions. Videokarma was suggested to me as a place where I could talk to people who were knowledgeable and enthusiastic.
And so, "a little traveling music, maestro, and away we go."

You've found the Right Place !

Welcome! It's a huge topic with a lot of angles, stuff like RCA vs. CBS, people like Farnsworth, DuMont, Sarnoff, Muntz.

I think you'll find plenty of help here.

Sarnoff would be a book or 2 in & of himself...So would Cdr. Eugene F. McDonald, Jr, & the bitter rivalry between them...William Pailey was a a Character, & I've always found it interesting that radio, & especially Television, which is regarded as primarily an American invention, was actually developed in no small part by a bunch of Russian Jewish expatriates here in the States... Another theme that goes thru "Captains of Industry" types seems to be that you have one, sometimes two, men who were STRONG "Personalities"- bordering on what we'd consider flamboyant or even psychotic now. I guess there were colorless "Bean Counter" types who started companies, but who remembers them now ? Its ALWAYS the Sarnoffs, Paileys, Fords, Durants, etc we remember. Often as not, their personalities precluded them from MAINTAINING a successful enterprise, but they did have the blind ambition, luck, mulishness, and/or Stupidity to take crazy idea, kick it in the Arse, & RUN w/it...

There have been several biographies written about Sarnoff, and also a book by Evan Schwartz about Farnsworth and Sarnoff called The Last Lone Inventor, and some day if I ever get done with reading about the persistence characteristics of CRT phosphors, fringe flaring problems in Iconoscope pickup tubes, and anti-keystone circuitry, I might read them.

Yeah, Farnsworth seemingly was an affable guy who I think got taken advantage of by Sarnoff... Sarnoff's worst "crime" was, IMHO, his treatment of Maj. Armstrong.

Here Here , I read the History of RCA and was thoroughly P-O'd at Sarnoff for what he did to Major Edwin Armstrong. I mention Ed every time somebody brings up the subject of FM! He should be immortalized somehow.