Ed Taylor

Ed Taylor grew up in Camden, N.J., the son of an RCA executive making the Taylor Family the first on the block to have television.

After Taylor graduated from high school, he enrolled in Lehigh University where he majored in civil engineering. When he finished his degree, AT&T Corp. offered him a job in its management training program.

Ed spent the next 16 years of his life working for AT&T. It would be in his work for the telephone company where his desire to chart new territory would begin. While at AT&T, he helped build a satellite uplink station, the first to transmit calls between London and the United States. The company spent over $100 million on the technology that allowed 90 people to talk all at once.

It was Dec. 27, 1976, that Taylor began distributing Ted Turner’s WTBS in Atlanta to cable systems via satellite. That created the first superstation. Ed helped Turner get the station’s signal on satellite, then paid $1 for the right to sell that signal to cable systems around the country. He made millions from those sales, and Turner made millions from the advertising dollars generated by that larger audience. Turner called it “one of the greatest $1 investments in American business history.”

Ed also started a channel with news photographs and announcers reading stories about those pictures. Ted Turner first said, “nobody was interested in 24-hour news,” but after seeing the results, he started Cable News Network (CNN).

Ed Taylor is a pioneer and a philanthropist. A pioneer in the communication business and a philanthropist for many good causes in Tulsa, Oklahoma.