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we weren't in the hardware side of anything, either in the phonographs or in radio. When television came along, I wanted us to be up front and to be a factor. Bill finally got interested in that and then went cheap. I wanted to buy Dumont [Brothers]. Dumont was as good an engineering product as RCA was. It was run by a man who was totally an engineer and had no marketing sense at all. I thought we could supply the marketing side; he could supply the engineering side. I knew we had a good product. Bill and Alan B. Dumont just didn't mix at all. It was oil and water. We went over to the factory and looked at the plant. There was just no simpatico at all. In the meantime, some one of Bill's friends in the Wall Street area had told him about a company up in New England that was in the receiver tube business. Maybe you remember these little tubes that you had to put in.
Sure. I'm older. [laughs]
They made tubes and they had a branch or division in Long Island City that made television sets. You wouldn't have heard of the brand. I didn't even know the brand existed. It was called Air King. They were the supplier to Sears Roebuck under the name of something else that Sears Roebuck called it. I didn't even know they made them for Sears. It was a price-driven company. It wasn't an engineering-driven company. If somebody else made it they copied it. In the receiving tube business, if RCA made a new tube, Hytron copied it and sold it for less. Paley thought that was the company we should buy. I didn't look up. If I had been stronger, I could have stopped it. I didn't stop it. I was eager to get into it. I was so self-confident that we had the laboratory up in Connecticut that could do the design work, I felt I knew enough about marketing and advertising that I could give them the shove they needed there and that we could become a world-class operator in television and begin to match RCA.
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