Rating: 7/10
Summary
Some incredibly interesting, rich stories. Got about 50% the way through, then stopped. Mostly enjoyed the Bell stories and Zukor. Stopped before getting deeper into the Internet.
“It is easy to forget that every development in the history of the American information industry–from the telephone to radio to film–once existed in an open and chaotic marketplace inhabited by entrepreneurs and utopians, just as the Internet does today. Each of these, however, grew to be dominated by a monopolist or cartel. In this pathbreaking book, Tim Wu asks: will the Internet follow the same fate? Could the Web–the entire flow of American information–come to be ruled by a corporate leviathan in possession of “the master switch”?
Analyzing the strategic maneuvers of today’s great information powers–Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T–Wu uncovers a time-honored pattern in which invention begets industry and industry begets empire. He shows how a battle royale for Internet’s future is brewing, and this is one war we dare not tune out.”
Notes
They would travel over the phone line to El Paso, on the Mexican border, to find General John Pershing, later to command the American forces in World War I. “Hello, General Pershing!” “Hello, Mr. Carty!” “How’s everything on the border?” “All’s quiet on the border.” “Did you realize you were talking with eight hundred people?” “No, I did not,” answered General Pershing. “If I had known it, I might have thought of something worthwhile to say.” The audience was visibly stunned. “It was a latter-day miracle,” reported the magazine. “The human voice was speeding from ocean to ocean, stirring the electric waves from one end of the country to the other.”
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Bell’s newest and perhaps most astonishing invention yet: a “wireless telephone,” the ancestor of our mobile phone, of which, by 1916, Bell already had a working prototype. To show it off, Bell mounted what might be called one of history’s first multimedia presentations, combining radio, the phonograph, the telephone, and the motion picture projector—the most dazzling inventions of the early twentieth century.
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supposed to have changed everything forever. We see in fact a succession of optimistic and open media, each of which, in time, became a closed and controlled industry like Vail’s. Again and again in the past hundred years, the radical change promised by new ways to receive information has seemed, if anything, more dramatic than it does today.
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History shows a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel—from open to closed system. It is a progression so common as to seem inevitable, though it would hardly have seemed so at the dawn of any of the past century’s transformative technologies, whether telephony, radio, television, or film. History also shows that whatever has been closed too long is ripe for ingenuity’s assault: in time a closed industry can be opened anew, giving way to all sorts of technical possibilities and expressive uses for the medium before the effort to close the system likewise begins again.
Note: applies to crypto
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Vail’s ideas, while new to communications, were of his times. He came to power in an era that worshipped size and speed (the Titanic being among the less successful exemplars of this ideal), and in which there prevailed a strong belief in both human perfectibility and the unique optimal design of any system. It was the last decades of Utopia Victoriana, an era of faith in technological planning, applied science, and social conditioning that had seen the rise of eugenics, Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management,” socialism, and Darwinism, to name but a few disparate systematizing strains of thought. In those times, to believe in man’s ability to
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The pattern is distinctive. Every few decades, a new communications technology appears, bright with promise and possibility. It inspires a generation to dream of a better society, new forms of expression, alternative types of journalism. Yet each new technology eventually reveals its flaws, kinks, and limitations. For consumers, the technical novelty can wear thin, giving way to various kinds of dissatisfaction with the quality of content (which may tend toward the chaotic and the vulgar) and the reliability or security of service. From industry’s perspective, the invention may inspire other dissatisfactions: a threat to the revenues of existing information channels that the new technology makes less essential, if not obsolete; a difficulty commoditizing (i.e., making a salable product out of) the technology’s potential; or too much variation in standards or protocols of use to allow one to market a high quality product that will answer the consumers’ dissatisfactions.
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If the banquet revealed Bell on the cusp of monopoly, here is the opposite extreme from which it began: a stirring image of Bell and Watson toiling in their small attic laboratory. It is here that the Cycle begins: in a lonely room where one or two men are trying to solve a concrete problem. So many revolutionary innovations start small, with outsiders, amateurs, and idealists in attics or garages. This motif of Bell and Watson alone will reappear throughout this account, at the origins of radio, television, the personal computer, cable, and companies like Google and Apple. The importance of these moments makes it critical to understand the stories of lone inventors.
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Hayes might never have been president but for the fact that Western Union provided secret access to the telegrams sent by his rivals. Western Union’s role was a blatant instance of malfeasance: despite its explicit promise that “all messages whatsoever” would be kept “strictly private and confidential,” the company regularly betrayed the public trust by turning over private, and strategically actionable, communications to the Hayes campaign.
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Against tiny Bell, Western Union brought overwhelming advantages: capital, an existing nationwide network of wires, and a close relationship with newspapers, hotels, and politicians. “With all the bulk of its great wealth and prestige,” as the historian Herbert N. Casson wrote in 1910, “it swept down upon Bell and his little bodyguard.” The decision, once taken, was implemented quickly. Ignoring Bell’s shoddy equipment, Western Union commissioned a promising young inventor named Thomas Edison to design a better telephone. Edison’s version would prove a major advance over Bell’s, including a much more sensitive transmitter that didn’t require one to shout. For that reason, depending on how you define “invention,” there is a strong case to be made for giving Bell and Edison, at a minimum, joint credit. By the end of 1878 Western Union had deployed 56,000 telephones,
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No thinker of the twentieth century better understood that such winner-take-all contests were the very soul of the capitalist system than did the economist Joseph Schumpeter, the “prophet of innovation.”
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He described innovation as a perennial state of unrest: a “process of industrial mutation … that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” In the age of carts, what mattered was not a cheaper cart, but the Mack truck that runs the cart over. Bell’s telephone was a quintessentially Schumpeterian innovation: it promised not improvement of the telegraph industry, but rather its annihilation.
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It is a vision to out-Darwin Darwin: “competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.” Schumpeter termed this process “creative destruction.” As he put it, “Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.”*
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So how did puny Bell prevail against the mighty Western Union? If the story were a film or novel, one would have to charge the author with abuse of deus ex machina. For right at Bell’s darkest hour it was saved by an unlikely and unexpected cavalry charge. Western Union came under attack from the financier Jay Gould, “King of the Robber Barons,” who had been quietly acquiring stock and preparing a hostile takeover. Now fighting for its own independence, Western Union was forced to look upon its tussle over the telephone as a lesser skirmish, one it no longer had the luxury of fighting. Thanks to Jay Gould’s blindsiding attack, and good old-fashioned corporate ineptitude on its own part, Western Union broke down and gave up on its imperial plans. Instead of dominating a business it could have bought for $100,000, the company entered into negotiations with Vail, who struck a tough bargain. Western agreed to abandon telephony forever, in exchange for 20 percent of rental income on the Edison telephone and a promise from Bell never to enter the telegraph market or offer competition to the Associated Press.
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What is so interesting about the Dempsey broadcast is that it revealed an emerging medium to be essentially up for grabs. It was in retrospect one of those moments when an amateur or hobbyist’s idea was about to emerge from relative obscurity, with the same force, one might say, as Dempsey’s blows raining down on Carpentier. And while not the cause of the extraordinary radio boom to follow, the Dempsey fight, which had taken so many ears by surprise, was in some sense its herald. While records are spotty, the number of broadcasting stations jumped from 5 in 1921 to 525 in 1923, and by the end of 1924, over 2 million broadcast-capable radio sets had been sold.
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And so, this is radio broadcasting in the 1920s: On one side of the Atlantic, in the geographically vast United States, isolated clusters of local and mostly amateur operators, inspired by the enthusiasm of the hobbyist and a somewhat vague though earnest idea of national betterment. In Britain, a private monopoly, with national reach, arguably elitist but unquestionably and systematically dedicated to bringing “the best of everything” to the general public. In either setting, the medium would never be more hopeful or high-minded. CHAPTER
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The economics of switching also made it possible for independent phone systems to compete with Bell. In today’s automated world, the larger the network, the better it is, because you can reach more people in more places. But when human operators (“What number, please?”—the “telephone girls” to whom we shall return in another chapter) were needed to physically connect one phone line to another, a larger network meant a slower switching system, prone to bottlenecks and breakdowns. That weakness allowed the Independents room to start with just a few customers. In some places Bell had never even offered phone service, allowing the Independents the advantage of being first to market.
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Vail knew that this man was to be taken seriously—for this seasonal resident of Jekyll Island was none other than J. P. Morgan, one of the greatest monopolists of that era or any other.13 In 1907, after gaining Vail’s assent, Morgan set his plan in motion. In a lightning-fast series of financial maneuvers, he took control of Bell, forcing out the Boston owners. Vail’s title would be president of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), now the holding company for the entire Bell system. Rather like Steve Jobs’s storied coming back to Apple, Vail’s return to Bell, at age sixty-two, would change everything.
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The story holds a powerful lesson for any independent business facing a much superior foe, a lesson as important in the 2010s as in the 1910s. Vail’s agreements offered the Independents membership in the Bell system, but they required the adoption of Bell’s standards and Bell’s equipment and imposed special fees for use of Bell’s long distance lines, though with no promise of connecting a call to any non-Bell subscriber.18 Vail’s offers were, then, essentially the ultimatums that Genghis Khan made famous: join the network and share the wealth, or face annihilation. But Vail needn’t have looked so far back for a role model; in his own time, John D. Rockefeller had pioneered the “purchase or perish” model to build Standard Oil.
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The option of being invited to dinner very effectively softens the fear of becoming dinner. It is the same logic Microsoft would follow in the 1990s, when its Windows operating system was similarly run as a partially open system. Like AT&T, Microsoft invited its enemies to connect, to take advantage of an open platform, hoping they wouldn’t notice or worry that the platform came with a spring trap. For as with Bell, once having made one’s bargain with Microsoft, there was no going
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Bell’s dedication to common carriage was a promise to serve any customer willing to pay, charge fixed rates, and carry his or her traffic without discrimination. It made Bell’s telephone service offer rather what a taxi service is meant to provide in most cities—a meaningful similarity, since the concept has its origins in transport.
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The idea of an open, competitive system had lost out to AT&T’s conception of an enlightened, licensed, and regulated monopoly. In this form, AT&T would remain in charge until the 1980s, and in not substantially different form it would return in the new millennium. As Milton Mueller writes, Vail had completed the “political and ideological victory of the regulated monopoly paradigm, advanced under the banner of universal service.”
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As for stars or artistic credits, they were banned. Thus Queen Elizabeth, which ran forty minutes and included a marquee performance, while a typical European production, was way outside the bounds for American film. Kennedy finally admitted Zukor to his office. In his autobiography, Zukor wrote that he wasn’t offended by the wait, because at the time he wasn’t important enough to be offended. Kennedy listened politely to his proposal, but would do no more. “The time is not ripe for features,” Kennedy said, “if it ever will be.”5 Stuck with a giant investment, Zukor had little choice. He became, in the words of the film scholar James Forsher, “one more outlaw.”6 Zukor began to travel a path that would lead slowly but inexorably to the creation of Hollywood, and all it has meant for America and the world.
Queen Elizabeth fulfilled Zukor’s hopes, and it anchored a whole new business model premised on “famous players,” or what we call bankable stars. Zukor would make for a different sort of despot than Kennedy, implacably driven, assuming a Don Vito Corleone-like status in early Hollywood, mixing favors and intimidation in equal measure. But in 1912 he was simply the ambitious owner of a small theater in Union Square. How he rose to the commanding heights of film is, as we shall see, essentially the story of the industry in America.
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As a consequence, if the American film industry can be said to have had a founder, it would be none other than the godfather of the gramophone, Thomas Edison.
Edison immediately entered the market with the “Vitascope,” essentially the Phantoscope by a different name. Eventually Jenkins had little choice but to sell his own patent interest in the first motion picture projector—for $2,500. “It’s the same old story,” he would say, years later; “the inventor gets the experience, and the capitalist gets the invention.”7
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In 1909, at one of those meetings, in the Imperial Hotel in New York, sat Carl Laemmle, a small elflike man, barely five feet tall. Laemmle was from Germany, and like Zukor and many other Jewish immigrants of that era, he had made his money in the garment trade before switching to theaters in 1906 or so.
Note: make money in one trade to pursue another
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But Laemmle’s most important supporter was the sole exchange owner who’d refused to sell out, the owner of the Greater New York Film Rental Company, one Wilhelm Fuchs (later William Fox). Fox was another Jewish immigrant, albeit with a much harder life story than even Zukor’s. A destitute childhood on New York’s Lower East Side, selling candy and stove polish to support his family, had left him with a dead arm and a paranoid sensibility.
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He would go on to found Paramount Pictures as a competitor to the General Film Exchange, the new firm’s enduring mountain logo originating as a doodle from his own hand.
Note:willian h hodgekinson – would end up with nothing
The former—Zukor’s course—held its own limitations, and so, not without misgivings, Laemmle and Fox became film producers. Thus was the Hollywood studio born, not out of choice, let alone glamour, but of brutal necessity. The studio Laemmle opened near Union Square soon began making films as quickly and cheaply as it could, relying on French sources for raw film stock (since Eastman Kodak was part of the Trust). He named his firm the Independent Motion Picture Company (IMP); it would later be known as Universal Studios.17 Fox soon followed, creating Fox Features, whose first production would be Life’s Shop Window. At this point they crossed paths with Zukor; fresh from his rebuff by Kennedy, he joined in 1912, making his star-centered films in the European style.
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Less romantically, Tino Balio points out that the Trust itself had been producing films in Los Angeles before the Independents got there.22 Suffice it to say by the mid-1910s the suburb of Hollywood was clearly the new home for the Independents, with seventy independent production companies, including Fox and Universal, located in the vicinity.
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The Edison Company and the Trust had their patents, plenty of money, control of the theaters and distribution, and all of the advantages that go with being a “first mover.” And yet as the 1910s progressed, the Trust grew ever weaker, and the Independents grew stronger. Why?
While there was no one key to the film Independents’ victory, we might say they won by a process of funded innovation—by guessing right about what the next step in film could be and attracting capital to their guess. Rather than the endless pulp offered by the Trust, the Independents imported big European pictures (such as Queen Elizabeth) or produced films of similar ambition and complexity, creating the demand their product was fulfilling. In An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, Neal Gabler makes this point a different way, by comparing WASP and Jewish cultural sensibilities at the time. For the former, movies “would always be novelties.” These “aging WASPs,” he writes, “were increasingly losing touch with the predominantly young, urban, ethnic audience—the audience from which the Jewish exchangemen and theatre owners had themselves recently risen.”26 Hollywood’s entrepreneurs, moreover, were adept at gaining Wall Street financing, at a time when the idea of a bank funding a cultural product was unheard of. In contrast, the Trust was slow to turn to banking, doggedly relying on its system of fixed prices.27 But the set fees paid to producers meant an upper limit on budgets, limiting production flexibility and ensuring that a Trust film would never be as unusual or eye-catching a confection as independent or foreign films. As Zukor once put it: “what they were making belonged entirely to technicians. What I was talking about—that was show business.
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The Trust’s defense against price-fixing charges was fascinating and colossally unpersuasive. In court, they openly admitted their purpose of dominating the film industry. But they argued that their existence was necessary both to “improve the art” of cinema and to perform censorship on behalf of the government, fulfilling a “neglected function of the State.” The Trust proposed, in effect, that it was due an exemption from the law because, as a private regulator of free speech, it was performing a public service.
The claim to be a surrogate censor probably seemed less bizarre in that jurisprudential and cultural climate than in our present one. Nevertheless, the theory failed to impress the courts, and the Trust was unable to strike a lifesaving deal. Not that there was much to save by then, the Trust’s ranks and coffers having been depleted. In 1915, a federal district court finally ordered the tattered Trust be dissolved.30 The American film industry was, for the first time, an open industry.
The founders of Hollywood, for the most part, went on to riches and fame, including the very first rebels, Laemmle, Fox, and Hodkinson. Their studios—Universal, Twentieth Century–Fox, Warner Bros., and Paramount—continue to dominate American film. But as we shall see, more important still than any of these would be that man waiting outside that office in New York City, Adolph Zukor. It was he, above all, who would manifest that rare trait Schumpeter described as “the dream and the will to found a private kingdom.”
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So while radio was supposedly developing in the United States without direct government intervention, contrary to the British model, in fact it was a case of two government-sponsored champions dueling over the same industrial prize in a decidedly unbloody bout. For in the end, AT&T’s National Broadcasting System never died, but simply morphed a bit. Walter Gifford and David Sarnoff, finally on speaking terms, relaunched the entity under an almost imperceptibly different new name: ANNOUNCING THE NATIONAL BROADCASTING COMPANY, INC.… The purpose of that company will be to provide the best programs available for broadcasting in the United States.… The Radio Corporation of America is not in any sense seeking a monopoly of the air.…
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Zukor stealthily made good Hampton’s prediction, buying out a majority of Hodkinson’s partners. On July 13, 1916, at a dramatic board meeting, Hodkinson was ousted from the presidency in a single vote. The new president of Paramount, Hiram Abrams, announced: “On behalf of Adolph Zukor, who has purchased my shares in Paramount, I call this meeting to order.”14 With one of the original proponents of separating production and distribution gone, Zukor made himself head of the new combination, the first major integrated studio in America and now the largest film corporation in the world.
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In this, the first use of the chain model to destroy independent theaters, we see the application of Henry Ford’s credo of central organization to the point of sale.24 The chain approach had been pioneered in the 1910s by firms like A&P and Woolworth’s, decades before Walmart would use it to conquer retail to a degree previously unimaginable. But taking the chain concept to the film industry was an entirely radical innovation, one introducing consequences, cultural as well as economic, that continue to this very day.
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The late 1920s would thus prove little more than a mop-up operation. Paramount, MGM, and Universal hunted down and destroyed most of the independent theaters, producers, and distribution companies. Warner Bros., once a small independent producer, managed to join the ranks of the major studios with the first truly successful sound film, The Jazz Singer. Among the others, only United Artists, formed by D. W. Griffith and a group of movie stars, would survive, going on to play, as we shall see, an important role in the film industry of the 1970s.
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In early 1934, Clarence Hickman, a Bell Labs engineer, had a secret machine, about six feet tall, standing in his office. It was a device without equal in the world, decades ahead of its time. If you called and there was no answer on the phone line to which Hickman’s invention was connected, the machine would beep and a recording device would come on allowing the caller to leave a message.3 The genius at the heart of Hickman’s secret proto–answering machine was not so much the concept—perceptive of social change as that was—but rather the technical principle that made it work and that would, eventually, transform the world: magnetic recording tape. Recall that before magnetic storage there was no way to store sound other than by pressing a record or making a piano roll. The new technology would not only usher in audiocassettes and videotapes, but when used with the silicon chip, make computer storage a reality. Indeed, from the 1980s onward, firms from Microsoft to Google, and by implication the whole world, would become utterly dependent on magnetic storage, otherwise known as the hard drive.
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Let’s return to Hickman’s magnetic tape and the answering machine. What’s interesting is that Hickman’s invention in the 1930s would not be “discovered” until the 1990s. For soon after Hickman had demonstrated his invention, AT&T ordered the Labs to cease all research into magnetic storage, and Hickman’s research was suppressed and concealed for more than sixty years, coming to light only only when the historian Mark Clark came across Hickman’s laboratory notebook in the Bell archives.
But why would company management bury such an important and commercially valuable discovery? What were they afraid of? The answer, rather surreal, is evident in the corporate memoranda, also unearthed by Clark, imposing the research ban. AT&T firmly believed that the answering machine, and its magnetic tapes, would lead the public to abandon the telephone. More precisely, in Bell’s imagination, the very knowledge that it was possible to record a conversation would “greatly restrict the use of the telephone,” with catastrophic consequences for its business.
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Yes, Bell Labs was great. But AT&T, as an innovator, bore a serious genetic flaw: it could not originate technologies that might, by the remotest possibility, threaten the Bell system. In the language of innovation theory, the output of the Bell Labs was practically restricted to sustaining inventions; disruptive technologies, those that might even cast a shadow of uncertainty over the business model, were simply out of the question.
Note:have to be willing to put self out of business
The recording machine is only one example of a technology that AT&T, out of such fears, would for years suppress or fail to market: fiber optics, mobile telephones, digital subscriber lines (DSL), facsimile machines, speakerphones—the list goes on and on. These technologies, ranging from novel to revolutionary, were simply too daring for Bell’s comfort. Without a reliable sense of how they might affect the Bell system, AT&T and its heirs would deploy each with painfully slow caution, if at all.
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By contrast, Nelson and Winter argued, the most rapid or efficient innovation typically results when the widest range of variations are proposed and the invisible hand of competition, as proxy of the future, picks among them. It is rather like Darwin’s idea of the relative fitness of individuals in determining the evolution of species, and like natural selection it depends on the power of accidents.
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Hush-A-Phone’s valiant founder died sometime in the 1970s, to be forgotten, apart from one great cultural reference. In the 1985 film Brazil, Robert De Niro plays a maverick repairman who does unauthorized repairs and leads a resistance movement against a totalitarian state. The hero and hope of that dystopia is named Harry Tuttle.
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Three important waves of innovation followed the great consolidation of broadcasting in the 1920s: mechanical television, electronic television, and FM radio transmission. And despite the importance of each technology, what is so striking is that none managed to produce an independent industry capable of challenging the dominant Radio Trust, comprising primarily RCA, NBC, and NBC’s industrial allies, CBS, General Electric, and Westinghouse.
For while Vail and Zukor consolidated industries by means of financial pressure and corporate acquisition, Sarnoff managed his empire by using government to restrict inventions, and hence the future. In pursuit of this aim, the Radio Trust perfected
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Most of us know that FM is capable of a far higher fidelity in sound reproduction than AM. It’s a matter of less static: in the 1930s, when it appeared, FM was capable of signal-to-noise ratios of 100:1 or better, as compared to 30:1 for AM stations.6 But perhaps even more innovative was FM’s capability to broadcast using far less power than AM, thus obviating the high-wattage stations controlled by a few broadcasters. If managed correctly, Armstrong realized, the adoption of FM could clear the way for many more broadcasters than the large networks dominating the AM dial.
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The denial that Armstrong had in fact invented FM was, if not the last straw, then very nearly the last. A man’s decision to end his life is inevitably a complex one and cannot easily be blamed on any one person or event. Yet it is clear that by the 1950s, whatever faith Armstrong had had in the fairness of the system—of business, of justice, or of life itself—was being chipped away by the travails of FM, which he had made his own. He was nearly bankrupted, as the lawsuit with RCA consumed the once great fortune from his earlier patents. His marriage (to Sarnoff’s onetime secretary) had also fallen to pieces over his refusal to settle. In 1954 it all became too much too bear. On February 1, forty years to the day from the night he and Sarnoff had spent searching for radio signals, he wrote a final note, dressed neatly, and walked out the window of his thirteenth-floor Manhattan apartment.
and a sense of David Sarnoff’s genius in the art of industrial combat. He saw not just that FM could replace AM, but that television would more generally replace radio, and by implication, destroy the Radio Corporation of America. He was a man who proved it is possible to defy both Joseph Schumpeter’s doctrine of creative destruction and, as he turned RCA into a television company, the adage that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks.
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Television was not to evolve, in response to ambient forces, à la Darwin; rather, it would be created as though by the God of the Old Testament, in the image of the creator, in this case radio. For Sarnoff, the paramount objective was that television not pose a threat to radio’s hold on the attention of Americans in their homes, their attention to the advertising that was now the industry’s lifeblood.
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David Sarnoff was a true visionary, but not of the progressive kind. He could foresee even in the 1920s, as he founded NBC, that television had the potential to destroy both the broadcast network and its parent company, RCA, increasingly dependent on broadcast revenues.
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Combined with the credit scarcity of those years and the FCC’s ban on commercial television, the Sarnoff squeeze made survival quite a struggle for Farnsworth’s “Television Laboratories.” His machine, although it worked, still required powerful lighting, which problem he needed to address in development while he tried to build his own industry. He would find money to do neither, and one can well imagine the frustration of a man who in 1935 owns a working television camera and television sets of the highest quality anywhere, yet who is legally and financially constrained from bringing his surefire product to market. Little wonder that Farnsworth, despite his Mormon upbringing, turned to the bottle.
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The news media, having ostensibly forgotten every dazzling demonstration of the technology they had reported over the past thirteen years, fell lazily into line to inform an equally forgetful public that RCA and Sarnoff had invented television—and now were launching it in the United States. The “Talk of the Town” column in The New Yorker put it with laconic knowingness: “Last week, of course, witnessed the official birth of television.” Decades later, that impression would stand unchanged. In 1999, Time magazine, celebrating Sarnoff as the “Father of Broadcasting,” would harken to that “fateful day in 1939” when “Sarnoff gave the world a look into a new life.”
note: the ability to manipulate the media
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In 1948, the United States Supreme Court agreed with the Justice Department’s petition that Hollywood was an illegal conspiracy in restraint of trade, whose proper remedy lay in uncoupling the studios from the theaters. The Court’s ruling by Justice William O. Douglas readily accepted Arnold’s contention that the first-run theaters were the key to the matter, and with that acceptance disappeared any hope the studios might prevail.
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That may not sound terribly exciting. “We would have at least four large computers,” he continued, “and a great assortment of disc files and magnetic tape units—not to mention the remote consoles and teletype stations—all churning away.” A collection of hardware churning away; but to what end? Actually, the “intergalactic memo” was the seed of what we now call the Internet.
but our specific concern is to understand what was the same and what was different about this network as compared with radio, television, and the telephone system. Licklider and other early Internet founders believed that they were building an information network like none other. Some of its innovations, like packet switching, were obviously radical even in their day. Yet as we have seen time and time again, one generation’s radical innovation is the next generation’s unyielding dinosaur.
These were systems whose priority was human augmentation rather than the system itself. The aim was therefore an effort to create a decentralized network, and one that would stay that way.
Note:like blockchain. what happened
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Toward this end, a man named Paul Baran would spend years of his life trying to persuade AT&T to adopt the networking technologies that would ultimately underlie the Internet.6 In the early 1960s, Baran, a researcher at the RAND Institute, was thinking about how America could survive a nuclear attack. His goal, as he wrote at the time, was to “do all those things necessary to permit the survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstruct the economy.” Chief among his concerns were communications systems. Having concluded that AT&T’s long distance system was vulnerable to a Soviet strike, Baran came up with an ingenious means to harden the system. The idea was to try to turn the telephone infrastructure, a point-to-point system, into a highly redundant network—that is, one with various paths between any two points, so that if one route were taken out, the others would survive.† Baran’s inspiration was the human brain, which can sometimes recover from damage by reassigning lost functions to neural paths still intact. In order for his approach to work, Baran envisioned breaking up every message into tiny pieces, which would be sent over the network by any path available at a given moment. Today we call Baran’s concept “packet networking,” and it is the basis of almost every information network in the world.
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COMMUNICATIONS “In a few years,” Licklider wrote in 1968, “men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.” If we owe the computer’s interface more to Engelbart’s vision, we owe its status as communications instrument par excellence more to Licklider’s. It was his conviction that one day, the computer would displace the telephone as the dominant tool for human interaction. He was first to see the great coming rivalry between the telephone and the computer.
Note:requires vision
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With just three TV channels, producers had to make hard choices, as in 1964, when faced with broadcasting the cash cow I Love Lucy or the congressional hearings on the Vietnam War. Friendly’s vision of public television was of a channel free of commercial considerations and thus always available to serve up “alternative” content. In cable, Friendly saw the same, only more so: a giant, wide-open medium where the public interest could be given its due respecting all sorts of issues, and the people thereby empowered.
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American electoral politics.” The two shared the view that the cable system could simply open an extra channel exclusively for politicians to speak to the public. Without the need to spend money on broadcast time just to be heard, all politicians, presumably, could compete on equal footing in the marketplace of ideas.