Notes - Empire of the Air

Tom Lewis | January 1, 2026

Chapter 1: The Faith in the Future

The Spirit of Yale and Early Ambitions

In June 1899, Lee de Forest graduated from Yale University with a doctorate, fueled by the "spirit of Yale," a quality often described as "grit" or traction for the soul. Despite coming from a less wealthy background in Alabama, he shared the unbridled faith of his peers that science and technology would define the coming "American century". During his years at Yale, de Forest was a relentless tinkerer, inventing everything from steam condensers and pants creasers to ear cleaners and typewriters, though manufacturers rejected all his early proposals. His doctoral dissertation focused on the length and velocity of electromagnetic waves, building on the experiments of Heinrich Hertz and the work of giants like Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi. He recorded his life and scientific vows in a voluminous journal, driven by a desperate need to win fame and show the greatness of his own genius.

Roots and the Talladega Experience

De Forest’s family heritage was deeply American, with a mother descended from Mayflower passengers and a father, Henry Swift De Forest, who was a stern Congregationalist minister and Civil War chaplain. In 1879, his father assumed the presidency of Talladega College in Alabama, an institution dedicated to educating freedmen. This upbringing was defined by isolation; the local white "Rebs" hated the family for their work with Black students, and the Black community often shunned the De Forest children, leading Lee to feel alienated and puny. He found solace in the college library, poring over the Patent Office Gazette and building intricate scale models, such as a lawn locomotive made from packing cases and barrel heads.

A Struggle of Wills and Faith

A significant conflict erupted between Lee and his father regarding his education; Henry wanted Lee to pursue a classical ministerial path, while Lee was determined to be an inventor. Lee eventually won this conte of wills through stubbornness and even resorted to forging his father’s name on a letter to Thomas Edison to seek career advice, though Edison never replied. During his time at Yale's Sheffield Scientific School, de Forest’s religious faith gradually eroded, replaced by a belief in material progress and the perfectibility of man through science. Following his father’s sudden death in 1896, he fully embraced agnosticism, resolving to rely only on "prudence, common sense, and good luck".

Scientific Influences

De Forest was profoundly influenced by Nikola Tesla, whose mystical and poetic approach to electricity fired his ambition to explore the "connecting link between God and mind". However, his most rigorous training came from Josiah Willard Gibbs, a world-class mathematician at Yale who provided de Forest with the mathematical foundation needed to master electromagnetic wave theory. Gibbs connected de Forest to the nineteenth-century breakthroughs of James Clerk Maxwell, wquations proved that electricity and magnetism travel in waves at the speed of light.

Chapter 2: The Will to Succeed

The Rise of Marconi

While de Forest studied at Yale, Guglielmo Marconi, the son of a wealthy Italian businessman and an Anglo-Irish mother, was experimenting with electromagnetism in Italy. Marconi lacked a deep scientific background but possessed a remarkable vision for the practical application of Hertzian waves. By grounding both his transmitter and aerial, he discovered he could send signals over several miles, a breakthrough he quickly patented in England in 1896. He became a master of promotion, reporting yacht races and linking royalty via wireless, making the term "Marconi" synonymous with wireless technology.

De Forest’s Early Struggles

After graduation, de Forest worked menial jobs at Western Electric while developing a wireless receiver to replace Marconi’s crude "coherer". He created a device he called a "responder," which utilized a paste of lead peroxind glycerin—scientificially dubbed "goo"—to detect signals more sensitively. His first attempt to challenge Marconi commercially occurred during the 1901 International Yacht Races, but his equipment failed and the rival transmitters jammed each other.

Stock Fraud and the American De Forest Company

Financial salvation came in the form of Abraham White, a flamboyant speculator who saw de Forest as a tool for a massive stock promotion. White incorporated the De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company, using de Forest's name as "bait" to lure investors into what was essentially a fraudulent scheme. While White lived in luxury on the proceeds of stock sales, de Forest was kept on a modest salary of $30 a week, though he was happy to see his name atop a massive steel tower at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. The company eventually collapsed under the weight of litigation from Reginald Fessenden, who proved de Forest had stolen the design for his "spade detector" from Fessenden's laboratory.

The Invention of the Audion

Following his dismissal from his own company, de Forest turned to a small invention White had deemed worthless: a tube detector using a heated filament. Building on the "Edison effect" and the Fleming valve, de Forest made a breakthrough on November 25, 1906, by inserting a third element—a zigzag wire he called a "grid"—between the filament and the plate. This allowed him to regulate and amplify the flow of electrons, effectively birthing modern electronics. Although de Forest did not fully understand the physics of how the "Audion" worked, his addition of the grid remains one of the most significant advances in the history of science.

Chapter 3: “What Wireless Is Yet to Be”

The Inspiration of Howard Armstrong

In 1904, a thirteen-year-old Edwin Howard Armstrong decided to become an inventor after reading The Boy’s Book of Inventions, which presented Marconi as a heroic figure. Born into a middle-class Presbyterian family in Yonkers, a serious, intense youth. His childhood was marked by a severe bout of Saint Vitus’s dance, which left him with a lifelong physical tic that intensified under stress. He became an advanced radio amateur, building a massive 125-foot antenna mast in his backyard to receive signals from as far away as Key West.

Innovation at Columbia

Armstrong entered Columbia University in 1909, where he was mentored by the legendary physicist Michael Pupin. Unlike his peers, Armstrong eschewed textbooksnd mathematical abstractions, preferring to observe physical phenomena directly in the laboratory. He once humiliated a visiting professor by demonstrating that a supposedly dangerous electrical coil could be handled safely if one understood the circuit.

The Discovery of Regeneration

In 1912, while a junior at Columbia, Armstrong investigated de Forest’s Audion and discovered its true nature as a relay of electrons. He realized that by feeding the oscillating current from the plate back into the grid, could amplify a signal many thousands of times—a principle known as "feedback" or "regeneration". This discovery turned the weak Audion into a powerful instrument of both reception and transmission. By early 1913, he also modified the circuit to generate continuous waves, solving the problem of voice transmission and rendering massive mechanical alternators obsolete.

Conflict and War

Armstrong’s secretive nature led to a crucial error; he failed to disclose the transmitting properties of his circuit to his lawyer during his initial patent application in 1913, an omission that would cause decades of legal tragedy. He met de Forest in late 1913, a meeting born of distrust that sparked a lifelong animosity. Meanwhile, de st was mired in marital failure with his second wife, Nora Blatch, and was fighting federal fraud charges related to his radio telephone companies. Despite being acquitted of fraud, de Forest claimed he had discovered the "oscillating" properties of the tube in 1912, launching a nineteen-year legal battle against Armstrong. The entry of the U.S. into World War I in 1917 eventually paused these disputes, as Armstrong departed for France as a captain in the Signal Corps.

Chapter 4: Sarnoff and Marconi: Inventing a Legend

From the Pale to the Pavements

David Sarnoff was born in 1891 in the bleak shtetl of Uzlian in the Russian Pale of Settlement. His early childhood was defined by a rigorous "Talmudic boot camp," where he was required to memorize 2,000 words of scripture a day. He arrived in New York at age nine, finding his family in a squalid Lower East Side tenement. When his father became too ill to work, David became the primary provider, hustling newspapers and eventually buying his own newsstand in Hell's Kitchen.

Entering the Marconi Company

At fifteen, Sarnoff sought a job with the New York Herald but accidentally walked into the offices of the Commercial Cable Company, where he was hired as a messenger boy. After being fired for requesting time off for Jewish holidays, he joined the American Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company as an office boy in 1906. He made himself indispensable to Guglielmo Marconi by acting as his personal messenger and delivering gifts to the inventor's many female acquaintances.

The Titanic and the Legend

Sarnoff rose through the ranks as an operator and manager, serving on seal-hunting ships and in department store stations. His greatest fame came from the Titanic disaster in 1912. Although he later cultivated a legend that he was the sole wireless link to the disaster for 72 straight hours, in reality, he was just one of several operators and likely did not hear the first distress calls as the store was closed. However, he correctly sensed that the tragedy would make radio indispensable to the public and used the event to propel his career into management.

Vision for the Future

By 1917, Sarnoff was the commercial manager of American Marconi, having successfully navigated a corporate landscape filled with anti-Semitism. In late 1916, he submitted a prophetic memorandum to his superiors proposing a "Radio Music Box". He envisioned radio as a "household utility" that could broadcast music, news, and sports into every home, shifting the technology from a private telegraphic medium to a mass medium. Though the proposal was initially ignored due to the impending war, it laid the foundation for the broadcasting era that Sarnoff would eventually dominate.

Chapter 5: Wireless Goes to War

The Spark of Global Conflict

The era of the wireless telegraph was permanently altered by the onset of the Great War, as communication technology shifted from a novelty to a military necessity,. In 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II received the news of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination via a telegram relayed from Sarajevo to his royal yacht, illustrating the growing reach of the medium,. Following the declaration of war, Great Britain cut the German submarine cables to the United States, which forced Germany to rely almost entirely on its high-powered radio transmitters at Hannover and Nauen. By 1918, radio technology enabled the near-instantaneous transmission of the Fourteen Points for peace across the Atlantic.

The U.S. Home Front and Nationalization

On April 6, 1917, the U.S. Navy signaled the country's entry into the war by broadcasting from Arlington, Virginia; shortly after, the government commandeered all amateur and commercial radio stations. Giant stations owned by American Marconi were integrated into a naval communication system, while the government also seized German-owned stations found to be relaying the positions of British ships to U-boats. To ensure rapid technological development, the government imposed a moratorium on all patent litigation, effectively creating a shared pool of radio inventions for the duration of the conflict,. This era marked the transition from the lone inventor to large-scale, standardized industrial production, as vacuum tubes were manufactured by the hundreds of thousands on assembly lines for the first time,.

Personal and Professional Turmoil

Lee de Forest spent the war years oscillating between financial success and personal despair,. In 1917, he sold the rights to his patents to AT&T for $250,000, which initially gave him a sense of security and wealth, yet he later felt "robbed" when the corporation used his audion to achieve transcontinental telephony without crediting him,. His marriage to Mary Mayo suffered as she struggled with alcoholism and a stalled singing career, leading de Forest to describe himself as a "dead man alive",.

Edwin Howard Armstrong served as a Captain and later a Major in the Army Signal Corps in France, where he was tasked with solving Allied communication problems,,. During a German air raid over Paris, he conceived of a way to detect ultra-high frequency waves, leading to his invention of the superheterodyne circuit, which remains a fundamental component of modern radio and television tuning,.

David Sarnoff, having been denied a naval commission due to suspected anti-Semitism, remained at the Marconi Company as commercial manager,,. He proved his patriotism by managing millions of dollars in government contracts and was eventually exempted from the draft because his leadership was deemed essential to the fleet's supply chain,. On July 4, 1917, he married Lizette Hermant, beginning a relationship that would endure despite his later infidelities,.

Chapter 6: Releasing the Art: The Creation of RCA

The Birth of an American Empire

In 1919, Owen D. Young of General Electric was informed by the U.S. Navy that the government opposed the sale of critical radio technology, specifically the Alexanderson alternator, to foreign-controlled interests like British Marconi,,. This led to a patriotic initiative to form a purely American communication corporation. Young negotiated the purchase of American Marconi's assets, leading to the incorporation of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) on October 17, 1919,. The new entity consolidated a massive patent pool involving GE, AT&T, and eventually Westinghouse and United Fruit,,.

Sarnoff’s Vision and Prophecy

As RCA’s commercial manager, Sarnoff resubmitted his 1916 proposal for a "Radio Music Box," envisioning radio as a "household utility" that would bring music and news into the living room. Despite initial skepticism from his superiors, he received $2,500 to develop a prototype, which Dr. Alfred Goldsmith realized as the "Radiola",. Sarnoff also successfully fought against government attempts to maintain a post-war monopoly on radio, arguing that private invention was essential for progress,.

The Triumph of Mass Broadcasting

Sarnoff’s greatest early public success came in July 1921 when he orchestrated the broadcast of the Dempsey-Carpentier heavyweight fight. Using a makeshift transmitter and a massive network of amateur operators, he enabled an estimated 300,000 people to hear the bout simultaneously. This event shattered the perception of radio as a toy for enthusiasts and proved its power as the first modern mass medium,.

Chapter 7: Snapshots from the First Age of Broadcasting

The Era of Radio Mania

By 1923, the number of radio stations in the U.S. exploded to over 500, creating a national craze,. Edwin Howard Armstrong became a wealthy celebrity through the sale of his patents and famously celebrated by climbing to the top of the Aeolian Hall towers, where he was photographed doing a handstand—an act that infuriated Sarnoff,,. During this time, Armstrong courted and married Marion MacInnis, Sarnoff’s secretary, gifting her the world's first portable superheterodyne radio,.

De Forest’s Pursuit of Sound on Film

Lee de Forest abandoned radio to focus on Phonofilm, a system for recording sound directly onto photographic film,. He produced short films featuring stars like Eddie Cantor and even recorded the 1924 presidential candidates,. Despite his technical pioneering, he lacked the capital and business acumen to compete with emerging studio giants and eventually saw his Phonofilm venture end in insolvency,.

The Network Wars: NBC vs. CBS

The 1920s saw the formalization of broadcasting through the creation of networks. After a bitter rivalry with AT&T over "toll broadcasting," RCA purchased station WEAF and formed the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) in 1926,. Sarnoff, now executive vice president, saw his "Radio Music Box" dream become a commercial reality, though he regretted that it had become a revenue-producing advertising medium rather than a purely public service,. Meanwhile, William S. Paley launched the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in 1928, focusing on popular entertainment and aggressive advertising to challenge NBC’s dominance,.

The Dawn of Television

In the late 1920s, Sarnoff shifted his gaze toward the "Dawning Age of Sight by Radio". He hired Vladimir Zworykin, a Russian émigré who was developing an all-electronic television system using a tube called the iconoscope,. Sarnoff realized that television would eventually supplant radio, noting that the "eye would be impatient with the twice repeated scene" that the ear might tolerate in a song.

Chapter 8: Court Fight

A Twenty-Year Legal War

The discovery of regeneration (or feedback) became the subject of one of the most acrimonious patent disputes in history. Although Armstrong received the first patent in 1914, Lee de Forest claimed prior discovery based on a 1912 notebook entry that described a circuit that "could only make it howl",,.

Conflicting Rulings and Judicial Error

Initial court decisions by Judges Mayer and Manton favored Armstrong, praising his clear thinking and imaginative mind,. However, Armstrong’s stubborn refusal to settle and waive legal costs allowed the litigation to drag on through Patent Office interferences,. In 1924, a D.C. appeals court ruled for de Forest by broadly interpreting the term "electrical oscillations" to include audio-frequency howls, effectively granting him rights to the high-frequency radio applications he hadn't actually understood,.

The Supreme Court and Cardozo's Blunder

The case eventually reached the Supreme Court twice,. In 1934, Justice Benjamin Cardozo authored a definitive opinion in favor of de Forest,. The decision was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of physics, as Cardozo incorrectly assumed that altering plate voltage could vary frequency—a concept that engineers and scientists immediately recognized as absurd. Despite the legal defeat, the engineering community remained loyal to Armstrong; when he tried to return his IRE Medal of Honor, the Institute refused to accept it, reaffirming him as the true inventor.

The Corporate Toll

By the time the litigation ended, the individual inventors were being subsumed by the power of the corporation. RCA had nothing to lose regardless of the outcome, as it held licenses for both inventors' work, but the victory for de Forest allowed RCA to collect royalties for an extra ten years beyond the expiration of Armstrong's original patent,. The reservoir of bitterness created by these suits remained with both men for the rest of their lives.

Chapter 9: The Godlike Presence

The Cathedral of Commerce

In 1933, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) moved its headquarters into the seventy-story skyscraper at 30 Rockefeller Center, a building designed as a "monument to the importance of radio in American life". The structure was a marvel of the era, containing over 10 million bricks and seventy-five elevators capable of ascending sixty-two stories in less than forty seconds. Sarnoff’s executive suite on the fifty-third floor featured white oak paneling, fluted Corinthian columns, and a secret door leading to a private barber chair and shower. Most significantly, Sarnoff secured the exclusive right to place the bold red neon initials "RCA" atop the building, a branding privilege denied even to the Rockefeller family’s own companies.

The Strategic Triumph of David Sarnoff

Sarnoff’s control over Rockefeller Center was born of a crisis; he had saved the project by moving RCA, NBC, and RKO into the space after the Metropolitan Opera pulled out during the Depression. Simultaneously, Sarnoff navigated a massive federal antitrust suit filed in 1930 that threatened to dismantle the radio patent pool. He turned this "lemon" into "lemonade" by negotiating a settlement in 1932 that forced General Electric and Westinghouse to divest their RCA stock, granting RCA complete independence. This shift effectively removed Sarnoff’s mentor, Owen D. Young, from the board, leaving Sarnoff as the "one captain on the bridge".

Radio in the Depression Era

Despite the economic collapse, radio became a "godlike presence" in American homes, serving as a vital means of escape. By 1933, there were over 19 million sets in use, and listeners would often sacrifice food or furniture before parting with their radios. The era was defined by programs like Amos ’n’ Andy, a blackface comedy duo so popular that movie theaters would stop films to broadcast their show over loudspeakers. Commercial sponsorship became the industry standard, moving away from Sarnoff’s original vision of radio as a public service.

Political and Cultural Influence

President Franklin D. Roosevelt revolutionized political communication with his "fireside chats," using radio to explain complex banking crises directly to the people and bypass hostile newspapers. While demagogues like Father Coughlin and Huey Long used the airwaves to spread populism and unrest, Sarnoff attempted to elevate the medium by hiring Arturo Toscanini to conduct the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1937. Meanwhile, Lee de Forest remained embittered, publicly asking what broadcasters had done with his "child" by dressing it in "rags of ragtime" and "audio jitterbug".

Chapter 10: Armstrong and the FM Revolution

The Quest to Eliminate Static

By the early 1930s, Edwin Howard Armstrong had spent twenty years attempting to solve the problem of static, which he viewed as the final "stone wall" of radio. Traditional mathematical wisdom, led by Bell Labs’ John Renshaw Carson, insisted that static was an inherent part of the radio spectrum and that narrowing the bandwidth was the only solution. Armstrong ignored these "wisdoms" and instead experimented with wide-band frequency modulation (FM). He discovered that by widening the band and using a "limiter" circuit to strip away amplitude variations, he could create a signal that was entirely static-free and possessed high fidelity.

The Laboratory Revolution

Working with a small team including Thomas Styles and John Bose, Armstrong built an entire FM system from scratch in Columbia’s Marcellus Hartley Laboratory. In 1933, he demonstrated this system to David Sarnoff, who recognized it not as an invention but as a "revolution". Subsequent field tests at Westhampton Beach and Haddonfield, New Jersey, proved that FM could transmit music with a tonal range of 50 to 15,000 cycles—far superior to AM’s 5,000-cycle limit—and could even multiplex multiple signals on one carrier.

Corporate Resistance

Despite the technical triumph, Sarnoff was hesitant to adopt FM because it threatened RCA’s dominance in AM and competed for the capital needed to develop television. Sarnoff's "supplantive" theory held that television would naturally kill radio, rendering a "better" radio system irrelevant. In 1935, RCA ordered Armstrong to remove his FM equipment from the Empire State Building to make room for television tests. Undeterred, Armstrong sold his RCA stock to build his own 425-foot transmitting tower at Alpine, New Jersey, at a cost of over $300,000.

The Rise of FM

In 1939, General Electric and the Yankee Network in New England began to break with RCA's stance, seeing FM as a way to compete with the major networks. Armstrong conducted a historic FM relay in 1940, transmitting a signal from Yonkers to Mount Washington without using a single inch of telephone wire, threatening AT&T’s monopoly on long-distance lines. Facing this momentum, RCA finally attempted to buy a non-exclusive license for $1 million in 1940, but Armstrong stubbornly refused, demanding the same 2% royalty rate he charged others.

Chapter 11: The Wizard War

Radio Goes to Combat

The attack on Pearl Harbor turned radio from a commercial utility into a military necessity. World War II was a "wizard war" fought with electronic instruments like radar and voice-operated mobile units. The U.S. Army Signal Corps, which entered the war with primitive, horse-drawn wire equipment, was forced to modernize. Despite internal resistance from traditionalists like Colonel Louis Bender, FM was adopted for tanks, jeeps, and walkie-talkies because it allowed clear communication in battle without the interference that plagued AM.

Armstrong’s Radar and Moon Bounce

Armstrong waived all FM patent royalties for the U.S. government for the duration of the war. He focused his research on continuous-wave FM radar, which eventually allowed the Army’s Project Diana to bounce a radio signal off the moon in 1946. This experiment proved that FM waves could penetrate the ionosphere, laying the groundwork for space communication and long-range detection of missiles.

General Sarnoff’s Command

David Sarnoff successfully lobbied for active military duty, serving as a special assistant to General Eisenhower in London. He coordinated the complex radio communications for the D-Day invasion, ensuring that 570,000 words could be transmitted across the Atlantic on the first day alone. Sarnoff’s efficiency in streamlining the Signal Corps supply service and his work in restoring European communications led to his promotion to Brigadier General in 1944, a title he used with immense pride for the rest of his life.

The Decline of the Lone Inventor

The war accelerated the institutionalization of research. RCA opened a centralized laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, where teams of engineers developed hundreds of new vacuum tubes under corporate direction. Lee de Forest attempted to contribute with a "dirigible bombing missile," but his mechanical guidance system was rejected by the military as an obsolete "Rube Goldberg" contraption. By the war's end, it was clear that the era of the individual pioneer was being subsumed by the power of the industrial corporation.

Chapter 12: “Until I’m Dead or Broke”

The Post-War Suppression of FM

After the war, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) dealt FM a "dreadful blow" by moving its frequency band "upstairs" from 42-50 megacycles to 88-108 megacycles. This move, encouraged by RCA and the major networks, made all existing FM stations and receivers obsolete. The FCC also adopted the "single market plan," which drastically cut the power of stations like Alpine from 40 kilowatts to 1.2 kilowatts, effectively preventing FM from competing with AM networks.

The Legal Battle of Attrition

In 1948, Armstrong sued RCA and NBC for patent infringement and for "deliberately" impairing the value of his inventions. RCA responded with a strategy of stalling and discovery. Their lawyers kept Armstrong on the witness stand for months, asking thousands of trivial questions about his check stubs and employment records to drain his financial resources. Armstrong’s legal fees rose to nearly $200,000 a year, while his royalty income plummeted because RCA had encouraged other manufacturers to use its own unpatented FM circuits.

Personal and Financial Collapse

By 1953, Armstrong was nearly bankrupt and suffering from failing health. His obsession with the lawsuit strained his marriage to Marion Armstrong, who suffered a mental collapse of her own. On Thanksgiving night 1953, during a violent argument over money, Armstrong struck Marion with a fire poker, causing her to flee the apartment. Isolated and feeling defeated by the corporate world, Armstrong wrote a final letter to his wife, removed his air conditioner, and jumped to his death from his thirteenth-floor window on January 31, 1954.

Chapter 13: Victories Great and Small

Marion’s Vindications

Following Howard's death, Marion Armstrong took charge of the estate and the litigation. In December 1954, she agreed to a $1,050,000 settlement with RCA, a move her lawyer Alfred McCormack called a "vindication of justice". She then spent the next twenty years winning landmark suits against Motorola and Emerson, proving in federal court that Howard had indeed been the true pioneer of FM and that the industry had systematically infringed upon his rights. These victories made her fabulously wealthy, allowing her to live in luxury and even reacquire the blue Hispano-Suiza in which Howard had courted her.

Sarnoff’s Final Years

David Sarnoff won his own final battle by introducing electronic color television, a $130 million gamble that initially lost money but eventually dominated the market. He built a museum-like library in Princeton to house the red-leather-bound volumes of his speeches and citations, cementing the legend of his career. In 1971, Sarnoff died after a three-year illness that had left him blind, deaf, and unable to speak.

The Final Curtain for De Forest

Lee de Forest lived long enough to gloat over Armstrong’s suicide but died in 1961 with just $1,250 in cash. He spent his final years as a "lone man dreaming of inventions," supported by a consultant fee from Bell Laboratories. His fourth wife, Marie, remained devoted to him, maintaining their joint checking account and talking to his portrait every day until her own death in 1987.

Epilogue: The Empire in Decline

The Fall of RCA

David Sarnoff’s intention to create a corporate dynasty failed. His son, Robert Sarnoff, was fired in 1975 after RCA lost nearly $500 million attempting to compete with IBM in the computer market. A succession of "bottom-line" managers followed, turning RCA into a bloated conglomerate that sold everything from rugs to chicken pot pies while neglecting its roots in electronic research. In 1986, General Electric purchased RCA and dismantled it, selling off its divisions to foreign companies. The iconic RCA logo was removed from 30 Rockefeller Plaza and replaced with the letters "GE," signaling the end of the empire Sarnoff had built.