Major Edwin Howard Armstrong.
1890 - 1954.
Edwin Howard Armstrong was born in New York City, New York, on December 18, 1890. He was the first child in the family. His father, John Armstrong, was vice president of the United States branch of the Oxford University Press and his mother, Emily Smith Armstrong, had been a teacher in the public schools.
The family moved to the suburban town of Yonkers, N.Y., where they lived in a house on a cliff overlooking the Hudson River. Next door was the home of Armstrong’s maternal grandparents. The members of the two families were a gregarious lot, and Edwins' childhood was a happy one filled with large gatherings of relatives, many of whom were teachers. His great uncle, Charles Hartman, principal of New York City Public School 160 would quiz Edwin to encourage his mental agility.
Edwin was a shy boy. Interested from childhood in engines, railway trains, and all mechanical contraptions, he decided to become an inventor when he was fourteen. Edwin was only eleven when Marconi made the first trans-Atlantic radio transmission. Enthralled, the young lad began filling his bedroom with a clutter of homemade wireless gear. His imagination was fired by the Boy's Book of Inventions and by that first wireless signal across the Atlantic. 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. Edwin joined in the hunt for improved instruments. He built a maze of wireless apparatus in his family's house and began the solitary, secretive work that absorbed his life.
Edwin explored many paths in his attempts to strengthen the received sound. Reaching up into the air to better catch the broadcast signals, he flew, from the upper stories of the house, large antenna kites which he had built with the help of his Yonkers friend, Bill Russell. He constructed a 125 foot antenna pole in the back garden, his younger sister Edith, nicknamed "Cricket", helped in the construction, holding guy wires, handing him buckets of paint as he swung aloft in a boatswain’s chair etc. Neighbours watched with awe and apprehension. His mother, however, had complete faith in her son. When a neighbour telephoned to say that Howard was at the top of the pole and it made her nervous to watch, “Don’t look, then,” was his mothers' reply. He worked with every new device that came along, 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.
Edwin graduated from Yonkers High School in 1910 and commuted, by motorcycle (an Indian, a graduation gift from his father), to Columbia University's School of Engineering to pursue his studies further. At Columbia, he came under the influence of the legendary professor-inventor, Michael I. Pupin, who served as a role model for Edwin and became an effective promoter of the young inventor.
Edwins' first important invention occurred while still an undergraduate in 1912. Using the Audion tube, which had been invented in 1906 by Lee De Forest, Edwin made exhaustive measurements to find out how the Audion tube worked, as no one, even De Forest himself, understood how it worked and because it was a really poor amplifier. Edwin devised the regenerative, or feedback, circuit in which part of the current at the plate was fed back to the grid to strengthen incoming signals. Testing this concept in his turret room at home, he began getting distant stations so loudly that they could be heard without earphones. He later found that when feedback was pushed to a high level the tube produced rapid oscillations acting as a transmitter and putting out electromagnetic (radio) waves. Thus this single circuit yielded not only the first radio amplifier but also the key to the continuous-wave transmitter that is still at the heart of all radio operations. This youthful invention opened the age of electronics and had profound effects on Edwins' life. It revolutionised wireless radio communication because it could amplify weak radio signals without distortion far more effectively than other radio receivers of that time. De Forest heard of Edwins' work and immediately directed his own research into regenerative techniques. He quickly filed patents on variants of the technique and, in 1920, started attacking Armstrong's patents on it. De Forest was infuriated that such a young man had used his own tubes better than he had.
De Forest merits a paragraph here since his only success was the Audion tube, and he was determined to gain control of its use. He was backed up by AT&T, who stood to gain enormously if they could control a fundamental circuit of radio. The patent fight lasted fourteen years, cost over a million dollars, and went in front of the Supreme Court several times. De Forests' entire evidence of priority was a 1912 note in a lab book that a particular circuit emitted a howl when tuned a certain way. The howl was because feedback caused the circuit to oscillate, but he didn't understand that and didn't pursue it. AT&T's lawyers, however, managed to get a sympathetic ruling from a technically ignorant judge in Philadelphia. Given one such ruling, they could beat any appeals by saying that judgement had already been rendered. They beat the Supreme Court appearances by so obscuring the issues that the Court refused to hear the case. So they broke Edwins' patent. AT&Ts' publicists also went into high gear, and to this day you'll see De Forest, not Armstrong, credited with the invention of regeneration (not on this site, I like to tell it how it was! Brian).
Edwin graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 1913 and returned to Columbia as an instructor and as assistant to professor Michael Pupin. In 1915 Armstrong presented an influential paper on regenerative amplifiers and oscillators to the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE), for which they awarded him their first ever Medal of Honour in 1917.
Before his new circuit could gain wide use, and while awaiting improvements in the vacuum tube, the United States was plunged into World War I and Edwin was commissioned as a Captain in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and sent to Paris. On his way to France October 1917, Edwin met another man who would remain a lifelong friend, Captain H J Round, an engineer with the British Marconi Company. It was this meeting that would set the stage for Edwins' work on his superheterodyne circuit. One of the tough problems facing the Allies was the reception of signals in the very high frequency range of 500,000 to 3,500,000 cycles (500kHz - 3.5 MHz). It was suspected that the Germans were using these high frequencies to keep their signals out of tuning range of Allied Intelligence. Edwin learned that the British were far ahead of the Americans in the development of vacuum tubes suitable for such high frequencies, and that Round had devised a method, using tubes of his own design, to receive at frequencies of up to 1,200,000 cycles 1.2 MHz).
Edwin was assigned to detect shortwave enemy communications, if they were there, and thereby created his second major invention. Adapting a technique called heterodyning found in early wireless, but little used, in 1918 he designed a complex eight valve (tube) receiver that, in tests from the Eiffel Tower, amplified weak signals to a degree previously unheard of. He called this the superheterodyne circuit, and although it detected no secret enemy transmissions, it is today the basic circuit used in 98 percent of all radio and television receivers. He played a key role in the commercialisation of this invention during the early 1920s. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) used his superheterodyne patent to monopolise the market for this type of receiver until 1930. The superheterodyne eventually extended its domain far beyond commercial broadcast receivers and even proved ideal for microwave radar receivers developed during World War II!
Edwin returned to Columbia University after the war having attained the rank of Major and the ribbon of France's Legion of Honour. By this time radio broadcasting was ready to erupt and it would be no exaggeration to say that the inventions of Edwin Armstrong were in a big way responsible for this enormous growth. But he was in no way finished with his inventing yet! In 1920 he sold rights to his two major circuits for $335,000.00 to Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. Later he sold a lesser invention, the super-regenerative circuit, to the newly organized Radio Corporation of America (RCA) for a large block of stock. Upon the success of early radio broadcasting he became a millionaire but he continued at Columbia University (for a salary of one dollar a year, since his patents paid him much more than the university could) as a professor and eventual successor to Pupin. He never taught classes, but they were honoured to have him on their rolls.
On December 1, 1923 Edwin married Marion MacInnes, the secretary of David Sarnoff, the president of RCA and founder of NBC. The couple had no children.
Edwin had set out earlier to eliminate the last big problems of radio: static. Radio then carried the sound patterns by varying, or modulating, the amplitude (power) of its carrier wave at a fixed frequency (wavelength), a system easily and noisily broken into by such amplitude phenomena as electrical storms. By the late 1920s Armstrong had decided that the only solution was to design an entirely new system, in which the carrier-wave frequency would be modulated, while its amplitude was held constant. Undeterred by current opinion -- which held that this method was useless for communications -- Armstrong in 1933 brought forth a wide-baand frequency modulation (FM) system that in field tests gave clear reception through the most violent storms and, as a dividend, offered the highest fidelity sound yet heard in radio.
Although tried in the 20s FM (Frequency Modulation) had been rejected, as it was shown that a narrow-band FM signal would always sound worse than an AM (Amplitude Modulation) signal of the same power. Edwins' insight was that an FM signal didn't have to have a narrow range of frequencies. It could vary over a wide range, say five times as wide as an AM signal, and have a far better signal-to-noise ratio. The first tests in the 20s for FM had been correct, but confining. By relying on experiment and physical reasoning, Edwin got beyond the equations and laid the foundations for information theory, which quantifies how bandwdith can be exchanged for noise immunity. He first got FM working in 1933 and showed it to RCA, who had most of his licenses, but they were unimpressed (RCA had at that point made vast investments in AM, all of their transmitters and all of the millions of radios that they had sold used it, and the investment was not depreciated). Radios were now commodities, and sold entirely based on price, not quality. RCAs view was that consumers didn't care what the music sounded like from their radios, they just wanted to get it as cheaply as possible. They spent a couple of years evaluating the FM technique and then declined to license it.
On November 5, 1935, before the New York section of the Institute of Radio Engineers, Edwin presented his paper "A Method of Reducing Disturbances in Radio Signaling by a System of Frequency Modulation", his FM system was thus disclosed to the radio engineering community. The presentation was accompanied by a demonstration of FMs' capability by receiving a transmission from Randy Runyon's amateur station (WQAG) transmitting from Yonkers. The demonstration was a complete success but the engineering community, in general, was not enthusiastic because the new system required a basic change in transmitters and receivers. The system was not embraced with any alacrity by the established radio industry so Edwin went ahead with licenses to smaller companies. He designed the complete system of transmitter, antennas, and receivers, and set up pilot broadcasting services in New York and New England. In 1937 the first FM radio station, W2XMN, a 40 kilowatt broadcaster in Alpine, New Jersey went on the air. The signal (at 42.8 MHz) could be heard clearly 100 miles (160 km) away, despite the use of less power than an AM radio station. People were entranced, this was the highest quality medium for music of the day, much better than the phonographs, and before the Germans perfected recording tapes. RCA immediately struck back by petitioning the FCC to give the FM frequency assignments (around 50 MHz) to television, which was just starting up at the time. Their attack was so obvious, that the FCC chairman gave the whole band from 44 to 50 MHz to FM. This would have been TV Channel 1, and it's still missing from the American TV dial and also required TV sound to be carried as FM. RCA offered Edwin a million dollars for his FM patents, but no subsequent royalties. Edwin refused, every other licensee paid royalties, and he felt that giving such a deal to RCA would be unfair to the companies that had actually worked with him instead of against him. Before this battle could really get heated up, though, a somewhat larger struggle, World War II, began.
Everybody used FM during the war Edwin allowed the military to use his patents royalty-free for the duration, a gesture that no company could make and that even he, with his lab expenses, could barely afford. Mobile FM communications were of tremendous value in the thrusts and parries across Europe and the Pacific. He himself worked on continuous-wave radar, but didn't get anything deployed before the war's end. In 1945 RCA and a bloc of other radio companies convinced the FCC to move the FM band from 44-50 MHz to 88-108 MHz, where it is today. This single FCC action rendered all "Armstrong-era" FM sets useless overnight, and protected RCA's AM radio stronghold. Edwins' radio network did not survive the frequency shift up into the high frequencies, most experts believe that FM technology was set back decades by the FCC decision. To add insult to injury, the FCC also voted to severely limit FM broadcast power, and disallow radio relays from central stations to mountaintop antennas. This change was strongly supported by AT&T, because loss of FM relaying stations forced radio stations to buy (at exorbitant rates) wired links from AT&T. These machinations allowed AM to survive even down to the present day. No programming of any audio quality is offered on AM any more. It was obsoleted more than 60 years ago, but is kept alive by inertia and regulation!
Edwin brought a patent infringement suit against RCA in 1949. Edwin was called on to be the first witness and RCAs' lawyers kept him on the witness stand for an entire year with irrelevant questions. Another two years elapsed when RCA was called upon to reveal the mountain of research it had done on FM in the 30s. The capstone of this was when David Sarnoff claimed that RCA had invented FM all by itself without any help from Edwin. That claim made Edwin so incensed that he would no longer consider a settlement and, by 1953, Edwins' licenses and patents had all expired with no end in site for the dispute. His crushing legal bills and research expenses brought him to near bankruptcy. A bitter argument with his wife, Marion, on Thanksgiving day caused her to leave him and she went to live with her sister in Conneticut.
On January 31, 1954, aged 63, Edwin wrote a two-page letter to Marion and left it on his apartment desk. He dressed neatly in his overcoat, hat, scarf, and gloves, and walked out of the thirteenth floor window of his New York City flat. He hit a third story overhang, and so his body wasn't discovered until the next day.
Marion continued his suits though, unlike Edwin, she was willing to compromise. She settled with RCA for over a million dollars, then went after other companies that had also infringed his patents. She won all her cases and collected millions, although the last holdout, Motorola, didn't give up until the Supreme Court ruled against them in 1967, thirteen years after Edwins' death. With that final decision she had won all 21 law suits and established clearly and decisively that Edwin Howard Armstrong was the inventor of Frequency Modulation.
The Armstrong Medal (shown left and right) was established in 1935 by the Radio Club of America, with a special scroll which was presented to Edwin, and is bestowed by the Board of Directors of the Club upon any person within its membership who has made, in the opinion of the Board of Directors, an important contribution to the Radio Art and Science. This very special medal is not awarded every year, but only after careful study by the Board of the candidate proposed by the awards committee.
The Armstrong Tower, also known as Alpine Tower, in Alpine, NJ, still stands today and is clearly visible from across the Hudson River. Built for the first commercial FM transmissions in 1937 at Edwins' expense, it looks like a huge pylon with three crossbars and is still in use for directional radio services (including a mobile phone site). It was also used as a temporary transmitter site for some of New York Citys' television stations and FM stations after the September 11, 2001 attacks as the collapse of the World Trade Center, including its transmitting antenna put many stations off the air. At the base of the tower is a building originally used by Edwin for research and it now serves as a museum and contains artifacts from the development of FM radio technology. This building still has the name of the original transmitter written above the entrance, W2XMN.
Although he died believing he was a failure, Edwins' discoveries continue to affect radio technology decades later. In 1988, the Armstrong Memorial Research Foundation at Columbia University issued an informational booklet about his life and his many accomplishments, noting: "At least one of Armstrongs' three key inventions, the regenerative circuits, superheterodyne circuits and wide band frequency modulation, is a vital component of almost all current telecommunications equipment worldwide". While too few people today know his name, his inventions laid the foundation for much of our modern broadcast and communication technology.