By DAVID SARNOFF
President of the Radio Corporation of America

SIDE by side with the development of radio and television, human ingenuity is evolving another method of aerial correspondence. I refer to the immediate transfer by radio of facsimile documents through the ether. Man writes a letter and—presto! —its exact image appears somewhere 3,000 miles away. The technical problem of transmitting photographs, letters, telegrams, and printed pages of newspapers in facsimile through the ether is solved already within certain limits. The facsimile transmission of documents presents fewer problems than television, because it need not be instantaneous and is not synchronized with sound.

Ether delivery will one day be developed so that I will be able to write a letter at my desk and have that letter transmitted in facsimile almost instantly to Australia. My correspondent in Australia should be able to reply within a few minutes. Then it would not take more time to transmit his reply than to dictate the letter.

Men may read their home paper, reproduced electrically, on board of an ocean liner or an airship. We have not reached this point as yet, but it is a development that will come within our lifetime.

The wealth of the earth may be exhaustible, but we have not even tapped the treasures of the air. In the future man’s blessings and man’s wealth may come to him from above. Even today we exploit the air not merely for transportation and communication; we actually extract from it nitrogen to fertilize our crops. There are other elements in the aerial ocean only waiting to be released. The cosmic ray may unlock new unsuspected sources of energy.

The air is full of “static” electricity. Today static is only a nuisance. Some day a battery may be invented to convert static electricity and to make it dynamic. It may snatch out of the air energy that can be harnessed to many uses. Pushing onward, we may draw directly energy from the sun and light from the moon.

Who can foretell the next move, or tell if the new inventions will bring happiness, good will, and peace to man?

The radio, television, and other modern scientific devices cannot change the fundamentals of human nature.

I do not share the terror of the mechanical age, preached by some philosophers and endorsed by the befuddled economists. They tell us that we are becoming the slaves of the machine, they frighten us with the cry of “technocracy,” and insist that every new mechanical device throws thousands out of work who will never find employment again. To me, this seems arrant nonsense. Civilization means elimination of unnecessary labor. The sewing machine and the vacuum cleaner save millions of women from backbreaking toil. The tractor makes the farmer’s life bearable. The automobile lends wings to us all. The airplane is our magic carpet.

It would be madness to slow up invention because of a mistaken philosophy. Our trouble is not that mechanical science moves too rapidly, but that the governmental and social sciences move too slowly. They fail to keep step with progress.

If man is to live up to his destiny, he must recognize the necessity of constant movement in a dynamic world. Man’s primary difficulty, I repeat, is his slowness to adjust himself socially and economically to the speed of mechanical progress. We must make our social and political forces move faster.

We do not need the totalitarian state, the complete submergence of individualism, demanded by the “isms” of the day. There is, there must be, a democratic formula for ending the barren conflict between politics and economics. In such a conflict politics temporarily wins, because the politician can transform his will into law. But in the end economics wins, because its immutable laws supersede the man-made laws of dictators. The conflict between the two, while it lasts, creates prejudice and disorder and leads—unless checked—to the survival of the unfittest.

What the world needs most is a new philosophy, providing the laborer, the financier, and the statesman with a common ideal and a common objective. We must learn to live and to let live. We must accept reasonable restrictions of personal freedom while preserving its essence, and we must admit that all people are entitled to better things and a higher standard of living.

Man will find his way to a more abundant future, the future I prophesy, not by defying, but by applying the forces of science. In a world reorganized to vibrate within certain wave bands, human intelligence will be able to distribute equitably nature’s bounties from above and below, and make princes of paupers. Science will create for us a new heaven on a new earth!

—As told to George Sylvester Viereck, in Liberty Magazine under title of “After Television—What?”

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