Lee de Forest. Edwin Howard Armstrong. David Sarnoff. With the possible exception of that last name, history has not been kind to the memories of the men most responsible for radio broadcasting.
Unlike Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, radio`s primary visionaries have remained obscure-lost, if you will, in the ether they sought to conquer.
In his first film since 1990`s much-acclaimed ”The Civil War,”
documentary-maker Ken Burns sets out to change that with ”Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio.” The 100-minute film, narrated by Jason Robards, will air at 8 p.m. Wednesday on WTTW-Ch. 11 and on public broadcasting stations nationwide.
A radio play adaptation written and directed by former Firesign Theatre member David Ossman and distributed by American Public Radio will be broadcast at 9 a.m. Feb. 19 on WBEZ-FM 91.5.
A film about radio`s pioneers may at first seem like an odd choice for Burns, 38, whose 11-hour Civil War epic won two Emmys and drew the largest audience of any series in PBS` 20-year history.
In fact, Burns admits he was dubious when associate Tom Lewis, author of the book upon which the film is based, first approached him several years ago about doing a film version of ”Empire of the Air.”
”I had no particular interest in this area at first-in fact, radio itself turned me off,” Burns said during a recent Chicago visit to preview his film at a benefit for the Museum of Broadcast Communications` Radio Hall of Fame. ”All I knew about the history of radio was the `golden age` stuff-` Amos `n` Andy,` `The Shadow` and `The Lone Ranger.` But as soon as I got familiar with the story, I got very excited about it.
”What captured me more than anything is the complexity of the individual psychologies involved. De Forest, Armstrong and Sarnoff are heroic figures, and this should be a heroic story of genius and determination. But it`s not. It`s a story of greed and of envy and of ambition becoming a kind of poison in each of their bloodstreams.”
Indeed, as Burns` film and Lewis` book make clear, the story of radio`s seminal figures could just as easily have been a soap opera. Genius, theft, lawsuits, rancor, acrimony and, in the end, tragedy all figure prominently.
But as much as ”Empire of the Air” is about those three men, it`s also about the profound ways radio changed American life.
”Radio made America a land of listeners,” Robards says in the film.
”It entertained and educated, angered and delighted Americans of every age and class. It taught them new ways to dance and talk and think. It brought the world into their living rooms and sold them things they hadn`t known they wanted.”
Said Burns: ”Before radio, all communications were intimate. You spoke to a friend, you played an instrument, you went to a political rally or you wrote a letter. Suddenly, strangers were talking to you in your living room. It changed what you did, and made you more passive. Radio radically changed the language and the topography of our land. It went so far as to annihilate borders and to change the relationships you had with people who were far away.”
Expertly combining still photographs, archival film, radio transcriptions, sound effects, music and on-camera interviews, Burns` film brings to life the three men whose visions transformed American life.
The self-styled Father of Radio, De Forest was an inventor whose discoveries were often borrowed from others. He was also a poor businessman who went through companies and wives with equal alacrity.
De Forest`s lasting contribution was his 1906 addition of a third element, or grid, to the early glass valve pioneered by Britain`s John Ambrose Fleming. De Forest called his new device the audion-known today as the vacuum tube-and it made voice radio reception possible. It also launched the era of modern electronics.
An equally obscure figure, Armstrong emerges as the most brilliant personality in ”Empire of the Air.” Among his contributions were the principle of regeneration in 1912, an improvement on De Forest`s audion that amplified signals and served as the basis of radio as we know it; the superheterodyne in 1916, the circuit that still forms the basis of the tuner in modern-day radios and TV sets; and the system of frequency modulation or FM broadcasting in 1933, which eliminated the static inherent in AM broadcasting. He also was an eccentric character who lost most of his fortune and his discoveries in litigation against De Forest and Sarnoff-the later a former friend and associate.
Ruthless businessman
Unlike De Forest and Armstrong, Sarnoff wasn`t an inventor. The genius of this Russian immigrant and former wireless telegraph operator for American Marconi was to envision applications for others` inventions.
In 1916 he drafted a memo for his bosses at Marconi in which he described his idea for a ”Radio Music Box” that would become a ”household utility”
like a piano or phonograph. After he joined the newly created Radio Corporation of America three years later, he made his dream a reality and eventually became the head of RCA and NBC, where he introduced TV to the world at the 1939 New York World`s Fair.
Sarnoff was also a ruthless businessman who, one way or another, usually got what he wanted-including others` creations.
One of the most revealing images of him in Burns` film is a photograph of a steely-eyed Sarnoff in middle age at his desk in his Rockefeller Center office. ”I don`t get ulcers,” he was known to say. ”I give them.”
”This is a story of stunning instances of overbearing pride,” author Lewis said in a phone interview. ”Pride which really prevents people from making a decent and honest assessment of who they are. Pride which blinds them to their essential humanness.”
De Forest and Armstrong battled in the courtroom from 1913 to 1933 over their claims to the discovery of regeneration, making it the longest patent suit in history.
Armstrong ultimately lost his invention to De Forest on a legal technicality. In 1940, Armstrong refused to sell the rights to his system of FM broadcasting to Sarnoff and RCA. Sarnoff retaliated against his former friend by successfully lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to change FM`s frequency allocation, thus effectively making obsolete all the FM radios licensed by Armstrong. Another protracted legal battle ensued, which Armstrong`s widow ultimately won after his death.
”You might be able to see the hero as Armstrong, the fool as De Forest and the villain as Sarnoff, but the lines are blurred,” Burns said. ”There`s nothing heroic about the final chapter in Armstrong`s life. There is something, in all his messianic buffoonery, heroic about De Forest`s stick-to- itiveness. And one cannot deny the genius of David Sarnoff, to be able to rise so far from his origins and be such a man of vision. This is what makes it a complex story.”
1st `portable` radio
Helping to tell that story are the wonderful images Burns and his crew have uncovered. We see still photos of Sarnoff as a teenager, with an expression of confidence already in place; a little girl who is sitting on a table next to a radio nearly as big as she is, her head cocked intently on the sound emanating from it; and Armstrong balancing precariously atop the steel globe at the apex of RCA`s broadcasting tower in New York to impress his future wife, Marion MacInnis-Sarnoff`s secretary. Later we see them as a married couple at the beach with Armstrong`s first superheterodyne
”portable” radio-a radio so big it makes a modern-day boom box look like a transistor radio.
Covering the years 1906 to 1955, ”Empire of the Air” makes extensive use of archival film and sound recordings. A doddering De Forest in his later years is the subject of a ”This Is Your Life” TV tribute. Later we see a clip of De Forest reading an angry missive he`s sending to the National Association of Broadcasters: ”Gentlemen,” he reads, ”what have you done to my child, the radio broadcast? You have debased this child, dressed him in rags of ragtime and tatters of jive and boogie-woogie.”
We also see and hear Frank Sinatra singing a rewrite of ”The Lady Is a Tramp” at a tribute to Sarnoff: ”To radio what Edison was to lamps/That`s why the gentleman is a champ.”
And while ”Empire of the Air” has no Shelby Foote, the novelist and historian who became the star of ”The Civil War,” interviews with notables such as sportscaster Red Barber and radio writer-producer Norman Corwin, historian Erik Barnouw and radio personality and author Garrison Keillor add other voices to the story.
Also featured are lesser-known engineers and historians as well as Armstrong`s niece, putting the contributions of De Forest, Armstrong and Sarnoff in perspective.
De Forest ”was always looking over somebody else`s shoulders and appropriating what he could,” says engineer Gertrude Tyne in the film.
”Howard Armstrong should be remembered as the greatest inventor of the 20th Century,” says engineer Frank Gunther.
”Radio really joined us together as a nation in ways that few people saw before it happened,” said Lewis, a professor of English at Skidmore College. ”Even David Sarnoff was stunned by its impact, and he saw the future more clearly than anyone else. It was beyond what anybody had thought.”
Problems and promises
Distilling Lewis` 400-page book into a palatable length without losing its heart and soul wasn`t easy.
”I knew this was going to be a very difficult film from the start,”
said Lewis, who co-produced it and has worked on such Burns documentaries as
”The Brooklyn Bridge” (1981) and ”The Shakers” (1985). ”I also knew that it was in the hands of a splendid filmmaker, and that this was a Ken Burns type of story.”
For Burns, doing a film that took ”only” two years to make compared with the 5 1/2 years he spent on his last film didn`t necessarily make
”Empire of the Air” an easy project.
”I sort of liken my films to children; each project has its own set of problems and promises,” said Burns, whose current project, a five-hour history of baseball for PBS, won`t be finished until 1994. ”You have to judge the work by itself, and I found this a very exciting film to make.”
”Obviously `The Civil War` creates a tremendous wake,” he said, ”but I`m not afraid of that. Each one of these films is not to please a critic or to be better than the next. They`re all just patches in a quilt I need to make.”
