Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio

7.4

Release Date: 1991-10-01

DocumentaryHistory

For 50 years radio dominated the airwaves and the American consciousness as the first “mass medium.” In Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, Ken Burns examines the lives of three extraordinary men who shared the primary responsibility for this invention and its early success, and whose genius, friendship, rivalry and enmity interacted in tragic ways. This is the story of Lee de Forest, a clergyman’s flamboyant son, who invented the audion tube; Edwin Howard Armstrong, a brilliant, withdrawn inventor who pioneered FM technology; and David Sarnoff, a hard-driving Russian immigrant who created the most powerful communications company on earth.

Official website :http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/empire/

CASTS

Jason Robards

Narrator (voice)

Erik Barnouw

Self - Historian

Susan Douglas

Self - Historian

Garrison Keillor

Self - Writer

Fred Allen

Self - Predicts Demise of Radio (archive footage)

Gene Autry

Self - Sings (archive sound)

John Barrymore

Hamlet (archive sound)

Winston Churchill

Self - Finest Hour Speech (archive sound)

Lee De Forest

Self - Objects to Quality of Radio Programming (archive footage)

Ralph Edwards

Self - Host of 'This Is Your Life' (archive footage)

SIMILAR

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