Sarnoff Corporation

» see sarnoff.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

RCA set up its laboratories as a separate facility in 1942, on land near Princeton, and laid the cornerstone just before the attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1951 the place was renamed the David Sarnoff Research Center for the man who had been running RCA since 1930. It spent 47 years as a corporate central laboratory, almost all of them RCA's, which is a kind of job that barely exists now: a few hundred people with a budget and nothing to ship this quarter.

General Electric bought RCA in 1986 and spent two years selling the pieces. Lockheed took the government systems work and Harris took the semiconductor division. GE was already running labs at Schenectady and Syracuse, so a second research campus was surplus and it started looking for somewhere to put the Princeton building. The answer came from SRI International, the nonprofit research institute in Menlo Park, whose proposal to take the center as a donation GE accepted in 1986. The handover happened the following year. The name Sarnoff Corporation did not arrive until 1997.

As a company it sold research on contract and licensed what it invented, and it spun out ventures when something looked like a product. More than twenty of those companies were launched from the mid 1990s onward, among them Orchid Biosciences and Wavexpress. Headcount was 800 in 2001. After the venture money dried up it was 540 by 2006, and it never went back up.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what came out of that building ~

Two of the inventions carry IEEE Milestone plaques: the compatible color television system worked out between 1946 and 1953, and the liquid crystal display in 1968. The electron microscope and the CCD imager were developed there too. So was the CMOS integrated circuit process that nearly every chip in your house now uses. Herbert Kroemer did his mid 1950s work on heterostructure physics at those benches and shared a Nobel Prize for it in 2000. Thin-film deposition was worked out there as a way to coat the surfaces inside television camera tubes, and went on to be a semiconductor process.

~ the donation ~

The terms of the handover were stranger than a donation sounds. GE wanted the licensing work maintained, because an old antitrust consent decree had forced RCA to license its television patents cheaply at home while it sold them dearly abroad, and that portfolio needed a lab behind it to stay worth anything. So GE handed over nearly 300 acres of New Jersey with enough operating money attached to run the place for several years. The catch was a reversion clause: if the thing was not profitable five years after being cut loose, the land went back to GE.

It made money, and the deed transferred around 1995. The television licensing revenue was comfortably larger than the cost of running the place, and GE kept the surplus while the lab kept the patents alive.

~ the last letterhead ~

The David Sarnoff Library had been inside the building since 1967, holding RCA's own history of itself. In 2009 its board voted to break the collection up. The exhibits went to The College of New Jersey and the archives to the Hagley Museum in Delaware, with a 1946 RCA Victor television set ending up at the New Jersey State Museum. The library was dispersed fourteen months before the company was.

SRI put out the closing notice from Menlo Park on 3 January 2011: the integration of Sarnoff Corporation, its wholly owned subsidiary in Princeton, was complete. Curtis Carlson welcomed his new colleagues to SRI and celebrated their heritage of innovation. Mark Clifton, who had been Sarnoff's interim chief executive, became a vice president inside SRI's engineering group. I work on computer vision in Ankara now, on processors that have to fit inside something airborne, and the vision research this lab was doing in the 1990s sits somewhere up the family tree from that. sarnoff.com answered 404 for most of the 2010s and now times out completely.

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