The Radio Music Box

Sarnoff.

A young immigrant from Russia named David Sarnoff spent the thirteen years from 1906 to 1919 working for the American branch of the Marconi Wireless Company. As one of the company's most skilled telegraph operators, he often forwarded memos with suggestions for company operations to E. J. Nally, the vice president and general manager. In November 1916 Sarnoff wrote a memo to Nally on the subject of the "Radio Music Box." None of the Marconi executives who read it gave it a second thought, and if they did it was to consider Sarnoff a screwball. But the memo foretold the future of the radio industry at a time when the technology was still used exclusively as a means for point-to-point communication. While radio pioneer Lee De Forest was already transmitting music from a phonograph from his home in the Bronx, his audience was made up of those who already had receivers. It would be left to others, including Sarnoff, to induce...

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