... >> a discussion on u.s.-russia relations and the 2016 presidential campaign. and later, immigration advocates join government officials and legal experts to discuss what the next president and congress are likely to face in term of immigration policy. >> host: our topic this week is this book: "the network: the battle for the airwaves and the birth of the communications age"

the author is scott wooley. mr. wooley, looking back a hundred years ago, what was considered high tech then? >> guest: the wireless age has been around for about a decade and a half but there was only one app which was texting. there was before am radio as we know it now there was the wireless telegraph. by 1960 it had been around but struggled to make itself proven as a real wireless technology with the exception of the sinking of the titanic in 1912 so just over a hundred years ago. that is what brought wireless technology to the public conscious and made people consciousness and realize this is an important technology. >> host: what did the sinking of

the titanic have to do with the technology development? >> guest: there were a hundred wireless technologies companies that spread up but the marconi wireless telegraph company was the dominant wireless company. even it not been successful. it tried to make a business of sending messages across the atlantic never succeeded and got long sending text messages to and from the various ships. that is why there were two on the titanics and that is the reason anybody was saved off the titanic and it changed wireless and the public consciousness to something that the rich used to an important part of maritime

safety and not a toy. >> host: who was google marconi and where was he on the day the t titanic sank? >> guest: he was going to be on the titanic but moved up travel plans to go to new york because he needed to convince americans to keep pouring money in the messaging service that was struggling. he had just shown up in new york. it was just a few days before his shareholders meeting he was going to make a pitch for another $7 million. a few days before that the titanic sink and he goes from being seen as a shady con-man to being an international hero and the only good thing that came occupant of the titanic was the story of the marconi operator helped save 700 people.

>> host: mr. wooley, how were messages getting from europe to the u.s. prior to mr. marconi's technology? >> guest: it used to be the mailed carried in ships starting in the 1860s the undersea telegraph started carrying the first text messages and marconi claims to have sent the first wireless text message across the atlantic. i cast come doubt in my book. it is true the transatlantic telegraph was dominated by the cables. >> host: where does david sar nauf begin in the story? >> guest: he shows up in manhattan as a russian immigrant and five years later gets a job at a commercial cable company. he is fired a few weeks into his job for taking rash shanna off.

he gets a job with the marconi telegraph wireless company. he gets his entry as an office boy for the marconi company around 15-16. he stays with that company and the successors and in the industry for the next 60 years. >> host: are there parallels to that time and today in the development of silicone valley? >> guest: absolutely. the most fascinating thing about david in this is this belief he had in the potential of wireless technology. if you look at the 5g and the technology coming out this wouldn't be surprising to david who believed the next generation of wireless technology would shock us every time it does from am radio to fm radio, television, satellite, smart phones.

people think at the time that is it and sar nauf was a passionate believer and said i am not interest in the past or the present but what i care about is the future. he had an unshakable optimism about what the airways can do. >> host: do you consider him a visionary? >> guest: he was. as a technology visionary i would argue he is pretty much unequaled. as a human being he is flawed. as a technology visionary unmatched. >> host: where did he end up? >> guest: he worked his way up to be the general manager and after world war one the american government and the u.s. navvy forced -- they didn't want a british company owning an important wireless technology. the important wireless technology communication company after the war.

that is how the radio corporation of america was formed. rca. it's name says it. they wanted american corporation running radio. david sar nauf took over as the general manager of that worked 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 so he was essentially the most powerful media mogul of the 20th-century. >> host: who was edwin armstrong and what was his role in making this so successful? >> guest: well he was a good friend of david sarnauf starting in their 20s. they were both born around the same time. 1890 and 1891 three months apart. armstri

armstrong grew up fascinating by the ability to send dots and dashes through the air. he grew up putting antennas on top of his parent's house and becoming an inventor. he meets david and in this one amazing moment armstrong claims to have invented an amplifier and everybody thought it was impossible but they teamed up together and hooks the amplifier up to the marconi wireless telegraph antenna in 194 and they are hearing messages from around the world from germany, hawaii. they are in new jersey. those two for the first time see the power of what inventions like armstrong can do to vastly multiple the power and communications throughout the airways. >> host: what was mr.

armstrong's trajectory career and life wise? >> guest: he was as a wireless inventor unparalleled. as an inventor. i am not saying he was the most accomplished inventor but when it comes to wireless inventions he was in the first half of the 20th century. he went on to invent a couple critical components of am radio that made consumer radio possible in the mid-20s and in 1933 he comes as close to being the creator of the fm radio. there were other people that contributed but he was a remarkable and prolific inventor over a 20-year period before it all started to go wrong. >> host: why don't we know his name like we do david or thomas edison's name? >> guest: a large part of it is how he spent the second half of his career which is fighting

over the inventions he discovered rather than looking to the future. his key invention in 1914, the vacuum tube amplifier was replaced by the transistor in 1948 and that created the computer age. so his invention was the core of electronics in the first half of the 20th century. but by the time people in bell labs were resisting the transistor he was fighting in court. he took things personally, made things personal, and let that consume his life leading to the story i open the book with which is him in his pent house apartment contemplating killing himself despite all this success in his life he still feels like he has been treated unjustly. you know, he is going to jump out of his pent house. so the last half of his life

really tarnished his legacy. it shouldn't tarnish the technical legacy but did his personal legacy. >> host: when you look back did david sernauf play fair with edwin armstrong? >> guest: he played tough but fair. that is a great question. when you get into discussions about who deserves credit for am radio, who deserved credit for fm radio. there were 4,000 patents in am radio that went into the pool. which of those 4,000 people should get what share of the credit? 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 they wanted to patent royalties in excess of what ser' playonauf w

to pay. i think armstrong was asking for too much. he thought sarnoff was not being fair. sarnoff wasn't the source who would just role over. >> host: what is the technical difference between am and fm radio? >> guest: this was armstrong's great insight. you are trying to imprint information on to an electro magnetic wave and decode that into a text message, phone call

or tv program. up until fm radio, everybody had basically been trying to encode the human voice into a single airwave. come as close as possible to using a one-airwave essentially. 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 frequency as opposed to using one airwave. it can get more technical than that but that was the 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 is a better idea and he was proven hundred percent correct in that. >> host: was there a business 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. as in most cases when a technology comes along ready to supplant the other you have to look what you invested in the old one and if the improvement is worth changing the system. with the case of fm it clearly was. there was no question it should be done and fm was the better technology. >> host: when you talk about david sarnoff the term is used about him televisionary. what did that mean? >> guest: it started as an insult. so sarnoff who gets a lot of -- the traditional view of david sarnoff hasn't been positive and one of the knocks on him is he

treated farmsworth, a key inventor to a tv technology piece, unfairly. but the televisionary wrap when labelled on him said a lot. this happened in the late '20s. he was pitching television as the successor to radio. it it was a dozen years away from becoming a real technology and he was pouring money into it. the great depression starts and he doesn't stop pouring money into it. he wires all of rockefeller center with two wires, one for radio and one for television. television isn't a viable commercial enterprise until after world war ii. he was early and pushing it. after television succeeds televisionary becomes a compliment. but i think the amount of heat

sarnoff took for it disproved the motion he was a corporate vulture that wanted to steal other ideas. he poured a ton of his own money into it. >> host: who first used the term network? it is a term we still used to. >> guest: i don't want to claim i know who the original source of it was. but it is certainly true that it grew up with the telephone network as the successor and radio networks grew up. they were originally called radio chains and the first record was called the report on chain broadcasting on the fcc in the early '30s. but the notion of the radio network as a successor to the telegraph and telephone network started occurring in the '30s and in the '40s people referred to the big networks.

by the time tv came along, nbc and cbs started just networks. >> host: when the was the fcc developed and how did it change during this period of changing technology? >> guest: that is a great question. i think it has a fascinating answer and i waw surprised. i didn't intend to write an expose of the fcc's imcompetence. it was given charge of regulating both radio and the telephone network and tv when it came along. it was created and the communication act says nothing about having a role in anti-trust. it ended up putting that role on

itself. nbc versus united states in 1943 when the supreme court said the fcc wasn't created to enforce n an anti-trust laws it is free to do so. the notion was very interesting. when you look at what the fcc does today in 2016 and the arguments we are having about what it should do and shouldn't do it is very interesting to think back to its creation it it wasn't created to serve many of the roles it has adopted on its own. there is a strong case given how ineffectively it tried to improve the competitive environment in communication in the 20th century that it is an agency that was never designed for these sorts of purposes and has done a poor job over the decade.

>> prior to 1934, would it be safe to say communication technology was kind of the wild, wild west? >> gues >> guest: absolutely. by '34, the idea you could make money in radio and owning a radio station could be lucrative wasn't crazy but by the late '30s people came to see this was a big business and a business you could make a ton of money in by owning a local radio station especially. and 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. the wild west is a metaphor because this valuable area was thrown open and people stormed in and tried to claim it.

>> host: you write the book idea for the network grew out of your interest in the growing value of the airwaves and how horrifically mismanaged they are. >> guest: that is true. i was at forbes magazine from 1996-2010 and covered telecommunication and got to learn about the airways. didn't know much about them when i started. i think people use a smartphone and don't think about the invisible waves connecting you to satellites and wi-fi routers and towers and how it works. but tou cover it it is impossible to not notice how important this. verizon's balance sheet airways are worth 81 billion. their switches, wires and fibers isn't worth that much. the vast majority of value is in

the scarce airwave rights so understanding those and the people that try to control and m manipulate them for their own purpose was important. because of the invisible nature of the airwaves when you are looking to fund the kind of corrupt scheme it is good to use something that is valuable and most people don't understand. >> host: would it be fair to say washington insiders were able to profit from this new technology? >> guest: it would be unfair to say anything else because the control in the 34 act. the communication act. says specifically the airways are the property of the american people and the government and they will be loaned out at no charge but those rent-free leases convey no other rights. so as a result when that act was

written, radio station license was worth something especially in new york but not that big of a business. as the value of the licenses explode, the fcc is charged with giving away legal rights that at no-cost will immediately be worth millions, if not tens or hundreds of millions over time. it was an inevitable source of corruption. it was too much to think political insiders wouldn't find ways to manipulate the fcc. >> host: no one came close to matching the scales of lyndon johnson's contributions.

what is that about? >> guest: i want to say i give credit to others who at the time the story came out, lbj put together a broadcasting empire based on his political influence at the fcc. he got his wife to own an am radio station and as soon as she purchased it it wasome allowed to broadcast during the daytime hours. all of a sudden it was allowed to broadcast 24 hours a day. it was only allowed to broadcast with enough power to cover austin and all of a sudden the power limit was increased. the value of the broadcasting empire, as the fcc 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 just get one but it was the only one. 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 dollar range and from nothing. well from an original $25,000 investment. johnson is the starkest example of corruption. he turned political influence into a personal fortune by mani mani manipulating the rules. >> host: back to sarnoff and the term laser pipes. >> guest: what we call laser

pipes now are fiber optics cables and they have lasers that shoot information. he had a more descriptive and fun name so i don't know why it changed. but he had this vision in 1966, long before the internet as we know it, long before fiber optic technology was recognized as important, but he had a vision from his talks with his researchers, his laboratories, tat fiber optics combined with computers was going to create a global information network. 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 the notion all forms of communication would collapse into a single network and all forms of communication would become digital. to make this prediction in 1965 at the age of 75 is, i think, the greatest testament.

this prediction has been lost to history but i think it is the clearest proof of his talent as a technological prophet. to go from foreseeing the advent of am radio to go all the way through to seeing the predicting the formation of the internet and most communication improvements in between is a career no one will ever match. >> host: back to 1914. delmar, new jersey. can you draw a direct line between what happened there and today's silicone valley? >> guest: yes. this is a technical answer so i will try to keep it short. that tube armstrong invented was

basically the biggest step in controlling electrons and creating electronics. if you look at all pre-war electronics and the electronics that helped the allies win the twhar were all built along the vacuum tubes that armstrong did more than anybody to create. and then that was replaced by the transistor, by computer chip, and the thing that didn't change was the rate of improvement. when you look at the advancement of the wireless telegraph from fm radio to television to satellites. you go through the 20th-century and come to today with the amazing progress of the cellphone we have in our pockets today versus the cell phones we didn't have ten years ago.

you look at the rate of wireless progress you see it not so amazing. we are amazed by how it changed our lives but if you look at the last hundred years and the rate of improvement since armstrong created that first amplifier the pace of change hasn't changed so we should expect more. >> host: scott wooley is the author of this book: "the network: the battle for the airwaves and the birth of the communications age" thanks for being our guest. >> guest: thanks so much for having me. >> c-span, created by america's cable television companies and brought to you as a public service by your cable or satellite provider. c-span's washington journal live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. coming up tuesday morning, pennsylvania republican congressman keith ross joins us to discuss his latest priorities, the upcoming deadline to fund the government

and the role of his home state as a key battleground state in 2016 election. and brandon boil who is a member of the oversight government and reform hearing and the hearings looking at hillary clinton's private e-mail server during her time as secretary of state. and james pendal reviews the new hampshire primary and republican kelly ayote's battle for re-election. beginning at 7 a.m. eastern on c-span. >> now a look at the state of the u.s.-russia relations and the 2016 presidential race. topics include russia's president vladimer putin and his unpopularity around the world and what the future could look like with a donald trump or hillary clinton presidential

election. this is an hour and a half. >> good morning, everybody. my job is to quickly get out of the way so we can get to the panel. we are lucky and excited to have the particular members in front you have this morning. the center on global interest job is to produce for you constructive discourse. we have depth and breadth of exp exp expertise on the panel. i will pass it off