Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio

This video contains brief biographies of three men instrumental in creating the radio industry as well as making it a mass media. The necessary background history of the United States at the time is also included. Those three men are Lee de Forest, Howard Armstrong and David Sarnoff. Armstrong and de Forest were inventors that created the key hardware that made radio possible while Sarnoff was the ruthless tycoon that made radio a mass media.

These were three men with colossal egos, and each demanded more than their share of the glory and bounty. They fought each other in the legal system, the court of public opinion and in the technical press. The development of radio not only required the solving of significant technical problems, but to make it into a mass media required the development of an expensive and extensive infrastructure.

In December of 1901, Guglielmo Marconi send the letter "S' in Morse Code across the Atlantic, demonstrating that radio signals could travel enormous distances. In December 1906 the first audio radio broadcast was made. The first scheduled broadcast was made in 1920, and the first receivers had only headphones. Due to the popularity of radio, by 1930 40% of US households had a radio. Politicians of the 1930s knew how to exploit radio to get their messages out.

Radio truly changed the world, and these men made it possible. It is unfortunate that they battled so much over the fortune and glory. This video presents all of the issues in an in-depth manner as the three spent millions of dollars in legal battles against each other over patent and inventors rights. Yet, the technology was such a game changer that these issues never slowed down the expansion. One commentator at the end said it well. "In 100 years, people will be reading the seminal paper on Frequency Modulation by Howard Armstrong and complimenting him. Those people will have no idea who David Sarnoff was."