NETWORK: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age - Softcover

Woolley, Scott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062242768 ISBN 13: 9780062242761

Publisher: EccoPress, 2017

Synopsis

The astonishing story of America's airwaves, the two friends--one a media mogul, the other a famous inventor--who made them available to us, and the government which figured out how to put a price on air.

This is the origin story of the airwaves--the foundational technology of the communications age--as told through the forty-year friendship of an entrepreneurial industrialist and a brilliant inventor.

David Sarnoff, the head of RCA and equal parts Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, and William Randolph Hearst, was the greatest supporter of his friend Edwin Armstrong, developer of the first amplifier, the modern radio transmitter, and FM radio. Sarnoff was convinced that Armstrong's inventions had the power to change the way societies communicated with each other forever. He would become a visionary captain of the media industry, even predicting the advent of the Internet.

In the mid-1930s, however, when Armstrong suspected Sarnoff of orchestrating a cadre of government officials to seize control of the FM airwaves, he committed suicide. Sarnoff had a very different view of who his friend's enemies were.

Many corrupt politicians and corporations saw in Armstrong's inventions the opportunity to commodify our most ubiquitous natural resource--the air. This early alliance between high tech and business set the precedent for countless legal and industrial battles over broadband and licensing bandwidth, many of which continue to influence policy and debate today.

About this title

About the Author

Scott Woolley is a technology and business writer. Formerly a Forbes Telecom correspondent and the magazine's West Coast Bureau Chief, he has written about technology and business affairs for the MIT Technology Review, Fortune, and Slate, among other publications. He studied economics and public policy at Claremont McKenna College and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

From the Back Cover

In The Network, investigative journalist Scott Woolley recounts one of the greatest business heists in American history--the massive rip-off of the airwaves--as it played out in a compelling drama between the technology's inventor, Edwin Armstrong; its primary purveyor, David Sarnoff, the head of RCA and NBC; and corrupt government regulators across the country.

Edition details

• Publisher: EccoPress
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0062242768
• ISBN 13: 9780062242761
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288