The Corporation and the Twentieth Century

241. Rosen (1980, p. 91).

242. Maclaurin (1949, p. 134).

243. Reich (1977, p. 226). In fact, some radios were made by a third outfit, the Wireless

Specialty Apparatus Company, which had been owned by United Fruit. Units produced by Wireless Specialty counted against GE’s 60 percent allotment. The entire process of standardiza- tion ultimately took almost five years (Wenaas 2007, p. 130).

244. Maclaurin (1949, pp. 127–29). It was also possible to buy some technology from inven- tors like Armstrong and de Forest, who had retained some rights in their own inventions, but the amounts involved were small.

Notes to Chapter 5 595

245. Barnouw (1966b, pp. 115–17).

246. Aitken (1985, p. 498).

247. Winerman and Kovacic (2011, p. 734). Once again the issue was nonstandard contract-

ing practices, and once again these weren’t the point. Because it controlled the patents on the vacuum tube, RCA had a property right to exclude others, and presumably it was already charg- ing a price for tubes that it believed would generate the largest rents. Putting pressure on the distributors was simply an attempt (not, it must be said, entirely successful) to price discrimi- nate by effectively raising the price of tubes to competitors while not at the same time raising the price of replacement tubes. The ability to extract rents caused the nonstandard contracting, not the other way around. As with the Bethlehem Steel acquisitions, the FTC dropped the case in light of its defeat in the Kodak case, expecting that the Department of Justice, with stronger enforcement powers, would pick it up. The DOJ did just that, initiating a Sherman suit in May 1930. This resulted in a consent decree in 1932 that forced the company’s erstwhile owners to divest and set up a patent cross-licensing agreement with them (Anonymous 1933). RCA became a fully independent company.

248. Maclaurin (1949, pp. 111–36).

249. Sterling and Kittross (1978, pp. 67–68).

250. Graham (1986, p. 41). On this point see also Reich (1977).

251. Chandler (2001, p. 5).

252. And I have (Langlois 2013b).

253. Nelson and Winter (1977). It is for this reason, Merges and Nelson (1990) argue, that

patents in complex-systems products should always be construed narrowly not broadly.

254. Baldwin and Clark (2000, 2006) make the argument more formally when they suggest that a given set of innovative activities—of economic experiments—are more valuable in a market than in a single firm: the value of a portfolio of options is always greater than the value

of an option on a portfolio.

255. Using contemporary data from the Census of Manufactures, Scott and Ziebarth (2015)

show that there were essentially no economies of scale in manufacturing radios. 256. Langlois and Robertson (1992).

257. Maclaurin (1949, p. 140).

258. Lueck (1995).

259. Minasian (1969).

260. Hoover v. Intercity Radio Co., 286 Fed. 1003 (App. D.C. 1923). 261. Minasian (1969, p. 397).

262. Barnouw (1966b, pp. 174–75).

263. Hazlett (1990, pp. 149–52).

264. Rosen (1980).

265. Rosen (1980, pp. 72–73).

266. Twight (1998, p. 261).

267. United States v. Zenith Radio Corp., 12 F.2d 614 (N.D. Ill. 1926). 268. Rosen (1980, p. 94).

269. Twight (1998, p. 256).

270. Rosen (1980, p. 102).

271. Rosen (1980, p. 99).

272. McChesney (1993, p. 17).

596 Notes to Chapter 5

273. In 1943, some Texas station owners had been waiting three years for the Commission (by then called the Federal Communications Commission) to allow them to transfer ownership of their station. When the wife of a young congressman offered to buy it, authorization was forthcoming in 24 days. The congressman soon intervened to save the FCC’s budget request. His name was Lyndon Baines Johnson, and he and his wife Lady Bird became rich as owners of radio and later television licenses (Caro 1990, pp. 88–94).

274. Barnouw (1966b, p. 215).

275. McChesney (1993, p. 25).

276. Barnouw (1966b, p. 216).

277. Pool (1983, chapter 6).

278. Quoted in McChesney (1993, p. 27). 279. Allen (1931, p. 69).

280. Samuel H. Williamson, “What Was the U.S. GDP Then?” Measuring Worth, https:// www.measuringworth.com/datasets/usgdp/ (accessed September 20, 2018).

281. Robert A. Margo, “Hourly and Weekly Earnings of Production Workers in Manufactur- ing: 1909–1995,” Table Ba4361-4366 in Carter et al. (2006), http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ISBN -9780511132971.Ba4214-4544 (accessed August 17, 2022). These are nominal figures, but in fact the CPI was essentially the same in 1919 as in 1929.

282. Fogel (2000, p. 126).

283. Jacoby (1985, p. 172).

284. Wright (1987, p. 335).

285. Bakker, Crafts, and Woltjer (2017, Table 7, p. 34). Gordon (2010, Table 4) does not break

the data down exactly by decade but has comparable numbers. 286. Jovanovic and Rousseau (2005).

287. Kendrick (1961, Table D-1, p. 464).

288. David (1990); Devine (1983).

289. Bakker, Crafts, and Woltjer (2017).

290. Gras (1939, p. 281).

291. Lebergott (1993, p. 113). The idea that the “wash line”—owning a washing machine—