Edwin H. Armstrong and his role in the development of radio communications paralleled America’s rise to greatness at the turn of the century. His story is at once inspirational and tragic.
That the nation’s 112 million mobile-phone subscribers can talk static-free is Armstrong’s doing. He is the father of frequency modulation-FM-technology that forms the basis of nearly all of today’s wireless communications. Armstrong-affectionately called “The Major” by friends-is also credited with inventing the regenerative circuit, the superheterodyne circuit and the superregenerative circuit. It was Armstrong who was super.
But as Armstrong’s life and times illustrated, innovation does not live in a vacuum.
In his day, there were nasty fights among mighty high-tech moguls over patents, corporate exploitation of technology and even regulatory policy. Lawsuits were many and long lasting. Egos of wireless titans-Armstrong, Lee de Forest and David Sarnoff-clashed. They were the Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Craig McCaws of the time.
Then, the high-tech corporate landscape was dominated by RCA, GE, Westinghouse, Zenith, Stromberg Carlson, Philco and Emerson.
New York City was the Silicon Valley of Armstrong’s day, and ham radio did for boy engineers what the Internet does today for twenty-something whiz kids in garages. In the early 1900s, the nation pulsed with wireless inventors, tireless and passionate. It was the first Golden Age of wireless technology. Wireless made national headlines. It was but a preview of the untethered technology’s unlimited potential.
Born on Dec. 18, 1890, in New York City, Armstrong was drawn to wireless from the start. Lawrence P. Lessing, Armstrong’s biographer, described it in all its color and feeling like this: “Armstrong decided to become an inventor when he was fourteen and began filling his bedroom with a clutter of homemade wireless gear. His imagination was fired by the Boy’s Book of Inventions and by Guglielmo Marconi, who a few years before had sent the first wireless signals across the Atlantic. But wireless telegraphy was still in a primitive state. Its crude spark-gap transmitters produced electromagnetic wave signals so weak that sunlight washed them out through most daytime hours, while its iron-filing or magnetic receivers were cruder still, requiring tight earphones and quiet rooms to catch the faint Morse code signals that were all the early wireless was capable of transmitting. As a student at Yonkers High School (1905-1910), Armstrong built an antenna mast, 125 feet tall, on the family lawn to study wireless in all its aspects. He worked with every new device that came along, among them the so-called audion tube invented in 1906 by Lee de Forest. But none of the instruments were able to amplify weak signals at the receiver, nor yet to provide stronger more reliable power at the transmitter.”
Armstrong, a Republican conservative with a radically liberal inventive mind, spent the rest of his life improving on radio’s early technological shortcomings, picking up 42 patents along the way. He served during World War I as a captain in the U.S. Signal Corps and taught at Columbia University.
“When he did something he did it thoroughly,” said Jerry Minter, president of New Jersey-based Components Corp. and a personal friend of Armstrong. Minter, who today oversees the awards program for the Radio Club of America, said Armstrong-like other wireless giants of the day-was not shy about speaking his mind. “There were people who resented his attitude.”
Much of Armstrong’s adult life was consumed by costly and seemingly endless lawsuits with RCA, de Forest and others. It took a heavy toll on Armstrong. His marriage, health and wealth suffered. Despondent and blocked from seeing FM wireless technology blossom into the great American success it would become, Armstrong committed suicide on Jan. 31, 1954.
In a tribute to Armstrong two years after his death, Harper’s Magazine writer Carl Dreher wrote: “Sometime during the evening or night of Jan. 31, Armstrong wrote a love letter to his wife, in pencil on two sheets of yellow paper. Then he put on his hat, overcoat, and gloves and jumped out of the thirteenth-story window. He fell to the third-floor terrace. No one heard him. The man who had done more to increase the clamor of the world departed from it without a sound.
“What words, what prayers, what music could have availed him more? Perhaps if there were a special liturgy for the inventor, it could say that he creates the future out of the ideas left by the dead and the dying, including himself. Then, except by specialists, his name is forgotten. Armstrong’s is the common fate; even now, only engineers and his friends remember him. But the forces of the past and the future worked in him, and if one measure of a life is this capacity to bridge time, the span of his life was high and long.”
