David Sarnoff was a Russian-American businessman and pioneer of American radio and television. Throughout most of his career he led the Radio Corporation of America in various capacities from shortly after its founding in 1919 until his retirement in 1970.
As a boy in Russia, Sarnoff spent several years preparing for a career as a Jewish scholar of the Talmud. He immigrated with his family in 1900 and settled in New York City. While going to school, he helped support the family by selling newspapers, running errands, and singing the liturgy in a synagogue. In 1906 he left school to become a messenger boy for a telegraph company and with his first money bought a telegraph instrument. He soon became proficient in Morse operation and found work as a radio operator for the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America (also called American Marconi), where he became a protégé of radio inventor Guglielmo Marconi. He was the first general manager of RCA and founded the television network NBC (1926). His first job was that of delivery boy, and his life continued to display a rags-to-riches element. Foreseeing the multiple possibilities of radio, he became commercial manager of American Marconi in 1917, having already predicted that radio would become “a household utility in the same sense as the piano or phonograph”. RCA succeded the Marconi group (1919), and Sarnoff became its general manager (1921) then its president (1930-50). He steering it into the world of television, first black and white, then colour with NBC.