I had a conversation recently with one of my co-conpsirators for the Centennial of Television in 2027. At one point I found myself making the case that “David Sarnoff was the Darth Vader” of 20th Century communications.
To validate my case, I cited the plight of Edwin Armstrong, the radio pioneer who eliminated static by coming up with a whole new way of transmitting radio signals – Frequency Modulation or “FM.”
What I remembered at the time was the one of the things that Sarnoff did to slow the adoption of FM was get the FCC to give its spectrum space to television. The details were a little fuzzy so I dug in to sort out the full story, which I posted to my Substack: