Edwin Armstrong

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Image:EdwinHowardArmstrong.jpg Edwin Howard Armstrong (December 18, 1890 – January 31, 1954) was an American electrical engineer and inventor. Armstrong was the inventor of the FM radio. Armstrong was in the opinion that anoyone who had actual contact with the making of the development of radio understood that the radio art was the product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae (known today as part of "mathematical physics").

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Biography

Born in New York City, he received an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University. Armstrong was one of the most prolific inventors of the radio era, with a vision that was ahead of his time. He invented the Regenerative circuit (invented while he was a junior in college at Columbia University, and patented 1914), the Super-regenerative circuit (patented 1922), and the Super Heterodyne receiver (patented 1918). Many of Armstrong's inventions were ultimately claimed by others in patent lawsuits. Armstrong's life is both a story about the great inventions he brought about, and the tragedy wherein those inventions' rights were claimed by others.

In particular, the regenerative circuit, which Armstrong patented in 1914, was subsequently patented by Lee De Forest in 1916; De Forest then sold the rights to his patent to AT&T. Between 1922 and 1934, Armstrong found himself embroiled in a patent war, between himself, RCA, and Westinghouse on one side, and De Forest and AT&T on the other. This patent lawsuit was the longest ever litigated to its date, at 12 years. Armstrong won the first round of the lawsuit, lost the second, and stalemated in a third. Before the United States Supreme Court, De Forest was granted the regeneration patent in what is today widely believed to be a misunderstanding of the technical facts by the Supreme Court.

Even as the regeneration-circuit lawsuit continued, Armstrong created another momentous invention: frequency modulation (FM, patented in 1933). Rather than varying the amplitude of a radio wave to create sound, Armstrong's method varied the frequency of the wave instead. FM radio receivers proved to generate a much clearer sound, free of static, than the AM radio dominant at the time.

In proving the utility of FM technology, Armstrong successfully lobbied the FCC to create an FM radio band, between 42 and 49 MHz.

In the early 1940s, shortly before and during U.S. involvement in World War II, Armstong then helped to market a small number of high powered FM radio stations in the New England states, known as the Yankee Network. Armstrong had begun on a journey to convince America that FM radio was superior to AM, and, he hoped, to collect patent royalties on every radio sold with FM technology.

However, the FM radio which threatened to destroy the AM radio proved to be too revolutionary for the RCA (Radio Corporation of America), Armstrong's then employer. RCA began to lobby for a change in the law or FCC regulations that would prevent the FM radios from becoming dominant.

By June of 1945, the RCA had pushed the FCC hard on the allocation of electromagnetic frequencies for the fledgling television industry. Although they denied wrongdoing, David Sarnoff and RCA managed to get the FCC to move the FM radio spectrum from (42 to 49 MHz), to (88 to 108 MHz), while getting new television channels allocated in the 40-megahertz range.

This single FCC action rendered all Armstrong-era FM sets useless overnight, and protected RCA's AM-radio stronghold. Armstrong's 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.

This change was strongly supported by AT&T, because loss of FM relaying stations forced radio stations to buy wired links from AT&T.

Furthermore, RCA also claimed invention of FM radio and won its own patent on the technology. A patent fight between RCA and Armstrong ensued. RCA's momentous victory in the courts left Armstrong unable to claim royalties on any FM radios sold in the United States. The undermining of Yankee Network and Patent Court battle brought ruin to Armstrong, by then, almost penniless and emotionally distraught.

Driven to despair over the FM debacle, Armstrong jumped to his death from the thirteenth floor window of his New York City flat on 31 January 1954. His widow Marion renewed the patent fight against RCA and finally prevailed in 1967. It took decades following Armstrong's death for FM radio to meet and surpass the saturation of the AM band, and longer still for FM radio to become profitable for broadcasters. However, Armstrong's invention, and his genius, were ultimately proven in the marketplace by today's broad acceptance of the FM band.

In 1917 Armstrong was the first recipient of the IRE's, now IEEE, Medal of Honor. He received in 1942 the AIEEs Edison Medal "For distinguished contributions to the art of electric communication, notably the regenerative circuit, the superheterodyne, and frequency modulation". Recently, in 1980, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

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See also

Armstrong Tower

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External links

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References

  • Lawrence Lessing, Man of High fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong, Philadelphia, J.B. Lipncott Company, 1956

Patent

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