nceive and develop, but Farnsworth would not sell his patents. RCA took to the courts in a Video Communications: The Whole Picture strategy that eventually cost more than $2 million. Another $7 million went for research in an effort to get around Farnsworth's technology. Eventually, aware that they would fall behind in the global race for television, RCA gave Farnsworth his price. At age 34, he retired to a farm in Maine. Zworykin and Sarnoff, both Russians, went down in history as the fathers of American television. At the 1939 New York World's Fair, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) inaugurated the first RCA "high-definition" television set, which boasted 441 lines of resolution. In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt requested that his Secretary of Commerce convene an inter-agency committee to study how the U.S. should regulate electronic communications. The airwaves of the day were awash with signals. The committee recommended that Congress establish a single agency to regulate all interstate and foreign wire and radio communications including television, telegraph, and telephone. Congress, in turn, passed the Communications Act of 1934, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began operation on June 11, 1934. One of its important tasks was to manage the airwaves, which it did by allocating spectrum between competitors. The FCC also inherited the task of approving television standards. TELEVISION STANDARDS AND TECHNOLOGY The year 1934 marked the beginning of the standards wars. England was in the process of investigating a new television system-something with more than Baird's 30 lines of resolution. There were two contenders: Baird's system, now producing a mechanically-scanned non-interlaced 240-line television picture, and Marconi-EMI's all-electronic system that interlaced two fields to produce 405 image lines. The BBC placed the two systems in direct competition in a series of trials. In May 1937, it selected Marconi-EMI's system as its standard, and broadcast George VI's coronation to 60,000 peopl