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>> guest: and that's the thing that really brought wireless technology to the public conscious and, consciousness and made people realize this is a really important technology. it's not just sort of a parlor trick. >> host: what did the sinking of the titanic in 1912 have to do with wireless technology and its development? >> guest: among other things, it sort of saved the mar coney -- marcone company or helped save it.

there were a hundred wireless companies that stood up, but the marcone wireless telegraph company a hundred years ago was sort of the dominant wire he company. and be yet even it had not been successful. it had tried to make a business of sending messages across the atlantic, never succeeded. it had gotten along by sending little text messages to and from the various ships that were traversing the atlantic ocean, and that's why there were two marcone operators on the titanic. the only reason anybody was saved off the titanic. and it really changed wire wireless and the public consciousness from this tool of the rich to send wireless postcards from ships to this critically important part of maritime safety and not a toy at all. >> host: where -- who was gug

gugliomo marcone, and where was he the day the titanic sank? >> guest: he had been booked to travel on its maiden voyage but had moved up his travel plans to go to new york because he needed to convince american investors to keep pouring money into his wireless telegraph company that had lost money for over a decade and was still struggling to sends messages across the atlantic. it was just a few days before his shareholders' meeting that he was going to make this pitch for another $7 million, and a few days before that, the titanic sinks, and he goes from basically being seen as largely a shadily con man stock -- shady con man stock promoter to being a national hero. the only good thing about the story of the titanic was how the marcone operators saved 700 people. >> host: how were messages getting from europe to the u.s. prior to mr. marcone's wireless

technology? >> guest: there were sort of a couple eras, real simply. it used to be the mail traveled, carried in ship starting in the 1860s. the undersea telegraph started carrying the first text messages and marcone claimed to have sent the first wireless text message. it's indisputably true that the transatlantic telegraph market was dominated by the cables up until the end of world war ii. >> host: so where does david sarnoff begin in this story? >> guest: he shows up in manhattan in 1900 as a penniless russian immigrant. five years later he gets his first job at one of the big commercial cable companies. he's fired a few weeks into his job for taking rashannah off, so he gets a job with the only communications company that'll hire him.

so as a 15, 16-year-old, he gets his entry as an office and messenger boy for the company. he essentially stays at that company and in that industry for the next 60 years. >> host: are there power -- parallels to that time and today in the development of silicon valley? >> guest: absolutely. the most fascinating thing about david sarnoff is this belief he had in the potential of wireless technology. so if you look at what's happening today with the latest wireless technology, 5g that's coming out, and people are talking about millimeter wave technology and the crazy things we'll be able to do with the next generation of smartphones, this would be totally unsurprising to david sarnoff who always believed the next generation of wireless technology would shock us. kind of every time it does from am radio to fm radio, television, satellites, cell phones, smartphones, people kind of think at the time that's it, and sarnoff was a passionate believer, and he said i'm not

interested in the past, i'm barely interested in the present, what i really care about is the future. and he always had this unshakable optimism about what the airwaves could do, and it's completely as a applicable in 2016 as it was in 1916. >> host: do you consider him a visionary? >> guest: he was. i would argue he's pretty much be unequaled. in terms of the number of things he's said. as a human being, he was a flaws human being. but as a technology visionary, unmatch 3. >> host: -- unmatched. >> host: where did he end up? >> guest: so from the marcone company, he works up to be the general manager of the maring company, and after world war i, the american government and u.s. navy basically forced -- they didn't want a british company owning the important wireless technology communications company after the war, so that's how the radio corporation of america was formed, rca. and its name kind of says it all, the raid yore corporation

of america. -- radio corporation of america. and general -- and david sarnoff took over first as the general manager of that, worked his way up to president and by the early '30s was running rca. the biggest wireless technology company, the owner of the national broadcasting company, nbc, the biggest broadcaster. and so he was essentially the biggest, most powerful media mogul of the mid 20th century. >> host: so, scott woolley, to go back to the technology, who was edwin armstrong, and what was his role in making this so successful? >> guest: well, he was a good friend of david sarnoff starting in their 20s. they were both born around the same time, 1890, 1890, three months apart. and armstrong grew up fascinated by wireless technology like a lot of kids at the beginning of the 20th century, this amazing ability to send dots and dashes through the air.

you know, he grew up putting antennas on top of his parents' house and becoming an inventer. he meets sarnoff in this one amazing moment when armstrong claims to have invented an amplifier that can take faded wireless signals and magnify them a thousandfold without increasing the noise and static along with it. everybody thought this was impossible, but david sarnoff, ever the optimist, team up with armstrong -- teamed up with armstrong, also a wild optimist. hooks this amplifier up to the wireless telegraph antennas in 1914, and all of a sudden they're hearing messages from around the world, from germany, from hawaii, they're in new jersey. and those two for the first time see the power of what inventions like armstrong's can do to vastly multiply the power and the communications capacity of the airwaves. >> host: what was mr. armstrong's trajectory career wise and life wise? >> guest: he was as a wireless

inventer also, essentially, unparalleled. as an inventer. i'm not saying he was history's most accomplished inventer, but when it came to wireless inventions, he certainly was in the first half of the 20th century. he went on to invent a couple other critical components that made consumer am radio possible in the mid '20s, and then in 1933 he patents fm radio. comes as close to being the sole creator of fm radio as you going to find in a technology like this. there were some others who contributed, but he was a remarkably prolific inventer over a 20-year period before it started to go go wrong. >> host: why don't we know his name like david sarnoff's name or thomas edison's? >> guest: a large part of it is the way he spent the second half of his career which was fighting over the invents he'd already discovered instead of continuing to invent. so his key invention in is 1914,

the vacuum tube amplifier was basically replaced by the transistor in 1948, and that kind of created the computer age. so his invention was the core of electronics of the first half of the 20th century, but by the time the people in bell labs were researching the transistor, he was spending his time in court. he took things very personally, he made things personal, and he let that consume his life. leading to the story i open the book with which is him in his penthouse apartment contemplating suicide, contemplating killing himself despite all this success in his life. still he feels so like he's been treated so unjustly, you know, he's going to jump out of his penthouse. so the last half of his life really tarnished his legacy. it shouldn't tarnish his technical legacy, but certainly

his personal legacy. >> host: when you look back, did david sarnoff play fair with edwin armstrong? >> guest: he played tough but fair, i guess. that's a great question. you know, when you get into discussions about, say, who deserves credit for am radio or who deserves credit for fm radio and the patents, there were 4,000 patents in am radio alone, so who invented am radio if and who, which of those 4,000 people should get what share of the credit. so armstrong was responsible for a couple of the most important parts of am radio and became fabulously rich as a result. when it came to fm radio, he wanted basically at the pent be royalties that were in excess of what sarnoff wanted to pay, so who was right? that's a really hard question. i think armstrong was probably asking for too much, and sarnoff

was willing to give too little. but armstrong wasn't capable of treating that as a business decision. he thought that sarnoff had betrayed him. he thought he was due his right as the inventer, it was this number, and he budget going to budge. so in terms of was he treated fairly, i think he was treated in a business-like fashion and basically fairly, but it was tough, you know? sarnoff was not the sort just because they were friends to roll over. >> host: scott woolley, what's the technical difference between am and fm radio? >> guest: so this was armstrong's really great insight. the old idea, so all of wireless communication you're trying to imprint information onto electromagnetic wave or waves, send those to a distant location and decode that information back into maybe a text message, maybe a phone call, maybe a tv program. so up until fm radio, everybody had basically been trying to

encode, say, the human voice into a single airwave, come as close as possible to using one airwave, essentially. sarnoff -- i mean, excuse me, armstrong creates the broadband era by having the idea let's use lots of airwaves at once. let's transmit over a wide spectrum of frequencies, essentially, using a lot of airwaves at once as opposed to one. so it can clearly get more technical than that, but that was basically his breakthrough. the old idea was there was no advantage to be gained in this. his idea was using wider bands of frequency to transmit even something as simple as the human voice. he was proven 100% correct in that. >> host: was there a business art against fm radio -- argument against fm radio? >> guest: i mean, there was from the local am radio stations who really didn't like it and saw themselves being supplanted by a

superior technology. i don't think there was -- you know, as in most cases when a superior technology comes along and is ready to supplant an old one, and this was sarnoff's case, you have to the kind of look at what you informed in the -- investedded in the old one and is the improvement worth it? clearly, fm was. and you could argue how rapidly you wanted to supplant am for fm, but there was no question that it should be done and fm was the better technology. >> host: when you talk about david sarnoff, you used the term, or the term is used about him televisionary. what did that mean? >> guest: it started as an insult. so sarnoff, who gets a lot of, you know, the traditional view of david sarnoff has not been very positive and one of the big knocks on him is that that he really treeled filo far, this sworth -- farnsworth unfairly,

an inventor of a key piece of technology. but the televisionary rap says a lot. he was pitching television as this successor to radio. it was still a dozen years away from becoming a real technology, and he was pouring money into it. the great depression starts, he doesn't stop pour toking money into it. he wires all of rockefeller center with two sets of wires in 1933, one for radio, one for television. you know, television duds -- does not start as a viable commercial enterprise until after world war world war ii, so he was really pushing it. after television succeeds, the epithet, what had been an epithet, becomes a compliment. but i think the amount of heat that sarnoff or took for it, for his support of television and his support of television research in the late '20s, early '30s, kind of disproves this notion that he was sort of

a corporate vulture who wanted to steal other people's ideas. he poured a ton of his own money into it. >> host: who first used the term network? >> guest: you know, i don't want to claim i know what the original source of it was. [laughter] it's certainly true that that it grew up in terms of modern communication, there was the telegraph network, the telephone network as its successor, and then radio networks group. they were originally called radio chains, and the first report on radio networks was by the fcc in the early '30s. but the notion of the radio network as sort of a successor to both the telegraph and the telephone network started to occur in the '30s, and then in the 40s people started to refer to the big networks. and by the time tv came along, nbc and cbs, the big radio networks, that term had gone, and they just became networks. >> host: when was the fcc

developed, and how did it change during this period of changing technology? >> guest: well, that's a great question with, i think, a fascinating answer and one thing i was a little surprised about. i didn't really intend to write an expose of the fcc's incompetence in the 20th century, but i sort of ended up doing it. the fcc was created by the '34 communications act, a successor to the federal radio commission. and it was given charge of regulating both radio and the telephone network and tv when it came along. it was created to have no role in antitrust enforcement and specifically the communications act says nothing about it having a role in antitrust. it ended up taking on that, putting that role on itself, and there's a famous case nbc v. united states in 1943 when the supreme court basically says

although the fcc was not created to enforce the antitrust law, it's free to do so if it likes because the law basically didn't say it could, but it didn't say it couldn't. i'm surprising justice felix frankfurter, but the notion -- it was a very interesting, when you look at what the fcc does today in 2016 and the arguments we're having about what it should do and shouldn't do, it's very interesting to think back to its creation, that it was not created to serve many of the roles it sort of adopted on its own. and there's a strong case given how ineffectively and incompetently, frankly, it tried to improve the competitive environment in communications in the 20th century that it's an agency that was never designed for these sorts of purposes and that has done a reliably poor job at them over the decades. >> host: so, scott woolley, prior to 1934 would it be safe to say that communications technology was kind of the wild, wild west? >> guest: absolutely.

and people didn't understand it. i mean, by '34 the idea that you could make money in radio and that owning a radio station might be a lucrative enterprise wasn't a totally crazy idea anymore, but certainly by the late '30s people had really come to see that this was a big business and a business that you could make a ton of money in by owning a local radio station especially. that's where the money was going in radio. and then when television came along, it was really the wild west because people had a sense of how big tv could be and how big owning a local tv franchise could be. and that was, the wild west is sort of a good metaphor be because it was completely open territory. all of a sudden this incredibly valuable territory was thrown open first in the radio airwaves, then the television airwaves, and people stormed in and tried to claim it. >> host: you write in your bio that the book idea for "the network" grew out of your interest in the growing value of

the airwaves and how horrifically mismanaged they are. [laughter] >> guest: yes, that's true. i was at "forbes" magazine for a long time, from about 1996 to 2010, covered telecommunications, and a lot of that period, a very interesting period, and got to learn about the airwaves. didn't really know much about them like i think most people, they can use a smartphone or cell phone and not think about the invisible waves connecting you to wi-fi routers and cell phone towers, but if you cover the industry, it's impossible not to notice how important these things are. if you look at verizon's balance sheet today, their airwaves are worth $81 billion. all the rest of their physical networks, their switches, fibers, all the rest of it isn't worth that much. so the vast majority of value in television networks today is often a scarce airwave right. and so understanding those and punsing people who have tried to control -- understanding people who have tried to control them

and manipulate them for their own purposes was obviously important. and because of the sort of slippery nature of these things, the invisible nature, the intangible nature of the airwaves, when you're looking to fund a kind of corrupt scheme, it's good to using use somethin, a, is incredibly valuable and, b, most people don't really understand. >> host: so would it be fair to say that insiders or washington insiders were able to profit from this new technology? >> guest: it would be unfair to say anything else. [laughter] because the control in the '34 act, the communications act says specifically that the airwaves are the property of the american people and the government, and they will be loaned out at no charge, but they -- but those rent-free leases convey no other rights. and so as a result as the value of these licenses -- when that act was written, you know, a

radio station license was worth something especially in new york, but it wasn't that big a business. as the value of these licenses explodes, first in radio and then in television, all of a sudden the fcc is charged with giving away legal rights that, at no cost that will immediately be worth millions, if not tens or hundreds of millions of dollars over time. and it was an inevitable source of corruption. you know? it was just too much to think that political insiders wouldn't figure out ways to manipulate the fcc when it was just giving away money. >> host: from your book, despite his many imitators, no lawmaker had ever come close to matching the scale of lyndon johnson's broadcasting ambitions. what's that story? >> guest: well, lbj and much of the story has been told before unlike other pieces of the book that are based on a lot more original resource. i just want to say that i give credit to people like robert

caro and others, even at the time bits of the story came out. but lbj put together a broadcasting empire based on his political influence at the fcc. and so he first got his wife to own an am radio station, and as soon as she owned it, as soon as she purchased it, all of a sudden, you know, it had only been allowed to broadcast during the daytime hours, all of a sudden it was allowed to body r broadcast -- broadcast 24 hours a day. all of a sudden it was, the power limit was increased so they could reach dozens more counties. and the value of his broadcasting 'em pyre is he added on as the fcc just happened to give him the only vhf television station in austin even though other cities of similar size got multiple stations. not only did he get one of the vhf stations, it was the only one. so just over and over again everything broke his way, and in

the end he had a broadcasting empire worth, you know, depending on your estimates, you know, in the $10 million range. and from nothing. well, from an original $25,000 investment. so johnson is the starkest example of political corruption involving the airwaves. he used, he turned political influence into a personal fortune by manipulating the rules governing the public airwaves. and it's just that simple. >> host: back to david sarnoff, the 1960s and the term laser pipes. >> guest: that, that's a great one from sarnoff, and it just sort of shows how he was a guy who understood technology, but he was also a guy who understood real people. so we call, what we call laser pipes now is fibroper optic cables -- fiber optic cables, and those are glass cables that, essentially, have lasers on one end to shoot information through

them. it's more descriptive and more fun. i don't know why it ever changed. he had this vision in 1966 long before the internet as we know it, long before fiber technology was recognized as important, but he had this vision from his, you know, talks with his researchers, i mean, his laboratories that laser pipes, that fiber optics combined with computers was going to create a global information network. and he went on in 1965 to paint an incredibly detailed picture of the way the internet would come to be based on fiber optics, based on increased computer power and based on a notion that all forms of communication would collapse into a single network, and be all forms would become digital. so to make this sort of prediction in 1965 at the age of 75 is, i think, the greatest testament. and this prediction of his, it's sort of been lost to history.

but i think it's the clearest proof of his talent as a technical or a technological prophet. i mean, to go from foreseeing the advent of am radio to go to all the way through to seeing with the, predicting the formation of the internet and most major technological communications, improvements in between? be that's a career no one will ever match. >> host: so back to 1914. belmar, new jersey. can you draw a direct line between what happened there and today's silicon valley? >> guest: yes. i mean, i think -- it's basically a technical answer, so i'll try to keep it short. [laughter] but that, that tube that armstrong invented was basically the first, the biggest step in controlling electrons and creating electronics.

so if you look at all prewar electronics, if you look at the electronics that helped the allies win the war, essentially all of it was built upon those vacuum tubes that armstrong did more than anybody to create. and then that tool was replaced by the transistor, by computer chips, and so the thing that didn't change was the rate of improvement. when you look at the advance from wireless texting to wireless telegraph to the wireless telephone to am radio, to fm radio, to satellites, go through the entire 20th century and come to today x the amazing progress was seen with the cell phones we have in our pockets today versus the cell phones that we had or didn't have 20 years ago or 10 years ago, and you rook at the rate of wireless portion you see that it's not so amazing. we're aa maided by how it's

changed our lives, but the if you look at that last 100 yearses and the rate of improvement, the pace of change really hasn't changed, and so we should expect more of it. >> host: soothe woolley is the -- scott woolley is the author of this book, "the network." thanks for being our guest. >> guest: thanks so much for having me. >> for campaign 2016, c-span continues on the road to the white house. >> we are going to get things done, big things. that's who we are as americans. >> we will have one great american future. our potential is unlimited. >> ahead, live coverage of the presidential and vice presidential debate withs on c-span. the c-span radio app and c-span.org. monday, september 26th is the first presidential debate live from hofstra university in hempstead, new york. then on tuesday, october 4th, vice presidential candidates

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.. >> just before summer reads as, predicate of a scottish government mandate to take scotland's relationship with the european