Edwin Howard Armstrong

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V.

00:00:15
Speaker 2: Wilson.

00:00:16
Speaker 1: So I'm a little bit on an inventor kick again at the moment, So yah, get ready for more in the coming weeks. Today's inventor is somebody I stumbled across and I kind of marveled at having never heard of him because he worked in a field that I have studied many of the other people. Little did I know that I was walking into a hotbed of science, legal drama. And then I got excited, But then I got bummed because I also was way too deep into this one to switch gears when I discovered the very very bummer part of this story. So we are going to give a trigger warning as we approach that very bummer part. And as usual, it's not something we're going to linger on or spend a lot of time on. But there is a death by suicide in this episode. So Edwin Howard Armstrong is not exactly a well known inventor, but his work in radio literally changed communications around the globe. I think we could also say we might not have our jobs if he didn't do what he did, Yeah, because we work for a company that does a lot of radio. His most famous invention, which was FM radio, became a source of constant frustration for him though after he had developed it. So we're going to talk about various inventions. We will give some basic layman's explanations, but in terms of breaking them down in terms of how they work at the nitty gritty level. If you want that, you got to go somewhere else for it. I'm sorry. And as we'll see in the course of the story, people not understanding the way things work scientifically, and particularly electrical engineering and radio, caused a lot of problems for Armstrong in his life. Edwin Howard Armstrong was born to Number eighteenth eighteen ninety in New York City in the Chelsea neighborhood. His father, John, worked in publishing for Oxford University Press, and his mother, Emily, had been a school teacher until she married John. Like a lot of kids born in the late nineteenth century, Edwin was fascinated by all the modern technology around him, particularly as a child growing up in Manhattan, where a lot of the latest technology quickly found a lot of use He loved trains and just about anything mechanical. His family moved to Yonkers, New York when he was fourteen. He was always really curious about science and scientists, but it was the news of the first wireless message sent across the Atlantic by Italian physicist Gulielmo Marconi that really got Armstrong excited and set him down what would be his path in life. Edwin Armstrong was so inspired by Marconi's invention that he decided that he too, wanted to invent the things. Edwin was a shy kid. Also, I should point out that I have seen some biographies that referred to him as Howard, which was his middle name. I don't know which he went by. We're going by Edwin just because that is his first name. We may be incorrect in that, but he was either way a shy kid, and he readily became absorbed in electrical and radio projects that he could work on on his own. He apparently turned the family attic into like his own lab, which he used for years and years. Because unlike a lot of kids, he did not lose interest in these efforts, and he did not move on to other things. He retained his passion for tinkering and discovery his whole life. He did do other things as a teenager, like he played tennis, but the drive to invent that was ever present. He built crystal sets so basic radio receivers up in that attic that could only pick up Morse code. There was really nothing else for them to capture, and the weak's signal that he was able to get on those crystal sets made him intent that he should figure out how to boost it.

00:04:02
Speaker 2: After finishing his studies at Yonkers High School in nineteen oh nine, Armstrong enrolled at Columbia University in the Engineering School. Part of the reason he went to Columbia was that it was close to home, he could commute to school, and he wouldn't have to break down any of his ongoing experiments and projects that were underway in the family's attic. Radio in particular, had become a big focus of Edwin's curiosity and work. He noted later of choosing to concentrate his energies in this field. Quote somehow, for reasons I cannot recollect, the decision favored wireless. Now, of course, radio in nineteen oh nine was not really a thing in the sense that we would consider it Now, this is when telegraphy and Morse code were still kind of at the forefront. No one was sending sound across airwaves, but they were very close. The first radio broadcast happened on January thirteenth, nineteen ten, when an inv named Lee DeForest broadcast a week signal from the New York Metropolitan Opera house of Enrico Caruso singing. So not only was radio an entirely new concept for Armstrong to jump into, but some of its most exciting developments were happening in the city where he was working on his own projects and going to school. DeForest had invented a device called an audion in nineteen oh six, and he patented that in nineteen oh seven. The audion was a radio tube DeForest had built on work that had been in process for a while to get this tube to work. It consisted of a cathode filament, an anodeplate, and a wire that sat between the two. If you look at a photograph of one of the first audions, you'll see what looks like a light bulb with wires coming out of it. The current between the filament and the anodeplate could be modulated using that wire. Called a grid and that could amplify sound. And while it worked, it did not work great. Additionally, DeForest is sometimes described as having arrived at his invention strictly through experimentation. He didn't really have a firm enough grasp on the electrical science at play to explain why this worked.

00:06:16
Speaker 1: This is going to come up again later. But here's the thing. Edwin Armstrong did understand the science, or at least he was determined that he was going to figure it out. This time in Armstrong's life was written about by J. H. Moorcroft in nineteen twenty two in an article titled What Everyone Should Know about Radio History. The section on Edwin includes the following quote. He was not an especially brilliant student. In fact, in many of his courses he did rather poorly. The writer knows because Armstrong was one of his students. The characteristics of alternating current machinery in general did not prove very enticing to the young student, not because he was lazy or indifferent, but because he had a hobby and a vision. He was experimenting at his home with wireless apparatus and trying to find out how the three electrode audion of DeForest worked. If DeForest confessed in public that the action was too mysterious for him to explain, then Armstrong would explain it for him, which he promised to do and did very shortly. That very shortly was no joke. Edwin had it all figured out when he was still a college student. He was able to invent a circuit that created much more robust amplification. Armstrong had figured out during school break that he could run a signal through the audion and then back into its input to create what he called positive feedback. His resulting circuit was called a regenerative circuit, sometimes also called a feedback circuit, and it worked by a reported factor of thousands. Then Armstrong realized that if he turned his regenerative circuit to its highest level of amplification, it became an oscillator and its own waves in or the words, it was a broadcasting transmitter. This early success had been made possible in part by Armstrong's mentor, a man named Michael Pupin, who was a professor in the electrical engineering department and who had seen something really special in Armstrong. Poupin had allowed the student to use his lab. He had recognized the reasons that the regular curriculum failed to interest Armstrong, and he was also Edwin's champion when it came to other professors at school and administrators who thought he was just being arrogant or that he wouldn't apply himself. Coming up, we'll.

00:08:38
Speaker 2: Talk about Armstrong's first hurtle of many in his career, and that was paying for a patent application. But first we will take a quick sponsor break.

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Speaker 1: Naturally, Armstrong wanted to file a patent now application for his invention of this circuit, and he asked his father for help with the money for the application fee, but John Armstrong refused, voicing concerns that he didn't want his son to get sidetracked from finishing his education. Edwin was really disheartened by his father's response, but he was also an undeterred. He just turned to other family members and even friends for money, and he promised that he would repay them for any financial help they could offer. And then he also had to sell his bike that was how he commuted to school. But to him, all of this was worth it. He filed his patent application in nineteen thirteen, the same year he graduated from Columbia. Armstrong was immediately offered a position as an assistant at Columbia, and as an employee, he was able to install a large demonstration antenna on campus to show Poopen and others just how powerful his regenerative circuit was. He reportedly picked up signals from as far away Hawaii with it.

00:10:01
Speaker 2: During World War One, Armstrong's reputation in the science community landed him in Paris, where he worked for the US Army Signal Corps. In a lab there in Europe, he invented another circuit, the superheterodyne radio circuit, also called a superhead. A superhead circuit changes a radio signal frequency from the frequency it's received at to a lower frequency using a mixer and oscillator. This results in an output that can be more effectively filtered and processed. In terms of war applications, this meant that weak signals could be cleared of background noise and amplified. Armstrong had been allowed to use the Eiffel Tower as part of his experimentation. Today, the superhead is still a massive part of daily communications all over the globe. In nineteen fourteen, Armstrong received his patent, but the very young Armstrong did not have a lot of time to be happy about it before he found that he had a much older detractor of his work in Lee DeForest. DeForest had actually seen one of Armstrong's demonstrations and had seen how Armstrong's work had made his audion truly function as an amplifier, but in his opinion, that meant that he DeForest should be the one to get credit. For a decade and a half, these two men would go back and forth in papers, public statements, and after the war lawsuits over who should get credit for inventing the regenerative circuit. DeForest's argument was that from the beginning he had heard what he described as a howling sound in his audion, and he realized after seeing Armstrong's demonstration that he had accidentally created positive feedback. This assertion was not really supported by any of DeForest's own writing about his invention. Prior to having seen Armstrong's work, he never made any notes about a howling noise or mentioned it to anybody, But he decided that he also needed to file patent applications for what he claimed was his invention. This resulted in Armstrong's patent being held in stasis for a while as things were hopefully going to get sorted out. But they did not sort out. They got a lot more contentious.

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Speaker 1: So recall that DeForest had publicly stated that he couldn't really explain how his audion worked, and Armstrong, on the other hand, had completely grasped the science he had. As this rivalry was heating up, written papers about how his regenerative circuit worked and changed the function of the audion. There are pages and pages of back and forth between the two men in the proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers, after Armstrong had published a paper titled a Study of Heterodyne Amplification by the Electron Relay. In one letter, DeForest states, quote, I doubt if the simplicity of mister Armstrong's explanations of audion phenomena is satisfying to those who have extensively experimented with the audion. He then goes on to reference a number of behavioral phenomena of the device that Armstrong's work cannot explain, but they seem kind of like outliers or malfunctions, including one where all of the electrodes became incandescent. He then writes, quote, these are experimental facts and not theory, and mister Armstrong must search more deeply before the ultimate explanation of audion phenomena is revealed, which honestly sounds like he almost thinks it's kind of magical. He just does not understand what's happening, and he also states that Armstrong was misinterpreting some of his writing. In response, Armstrong wrote, quote in reference to doctor DeForest's discussion, I feel that he must have failed in some way to understand the present paper, because his discussion clearly seems to apply not to the present paper, but to some of the more fundamental and elementary matters which were published by me several years ago. Part of a problem, he notes, is that he Armstrong had backed another scientist, Fleming, when DeForest had claimed that he had also infringed on one of his ideas. It seemed that DeForest felt like everyone was stealing his work. Things got really heated when the AT and T company, which had purchased DeForest patents, got involved. This is when the lawsuits began. Armstrong won some judgments initially and then lost on appeal, and then additional suits were filed and appealed, and on and on for fourteen years from nineteen twenty to nineteen thirty four. This case went before the Supreme Court twice. In testimony, it was completely obvious to everyone that DeForest did not understand the science behind his own invention the audion, But in the end, a lack of understanding about the science and how it was described in the patents led to the Supreme Court justices ruling in faise of DeForest. That was something the scientific community was outraged about.

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Speaker 2: Perhaps most damning for DeForest was the fact that the Institute of Radio Engineers did not recognize the court's decision. The organization had given their medal of honor to Armstrong several years before the final court battle, but when the decision came down, Armstrong attempted to return it during one of the group's annual meetings. He was instead met with a standing ovation and a refusal to accept that return. The entire engineering community, and especially those who had worked in sciences related to radio, backed Armstrong publicly. So DeForest may have won that case, but he became an outcast in his industry in the process. Armstrong continued to be honored with awards for his work on the regenerative circuit as.

00:15:54
Speaker 1: All of this was playing out. After World War One, Armstrong had gone back to Columbia. He worked for physicist Michael Pupin as his assistant. Pupin, as we had mentioned earlier, had been one of Armstrong's teachers, and Edwin had just immense respect for him. Armstrong also sold the patent rights for the superheterodyne receiver as the radio boom was beginning in the nineteen twenties, and as a consequence, he found himself very wealthy very quickly, with ongoing income from stock that had been included in those patent purchase deals.

00:16:27
Speaker 2: He also got married after the war. While working in Europe, Edwin met a woman named Marian McInnis. She was working as the secretary of a man named David Sarnoff, who was a friend of Edwin's from Columbia and would later go on to found the Radio Corporation of America or RCA. Armstrong gave Marion an early portable radio as a wedding gift, and the two of them, by all accounts, were very happy. Together with his newfound millionaire status, Armstrong could have retired early and just lived a life of leisure at that point, but he didn't. He was still fascinated with radio, and he was chasing a goal, which was radio without static. He used his own money to pay for research on the problem, which he tackled along with his mentor Poopem. He collected no salary from Columbia because he had worked a deal where in working for free, he was able to focus exclusively on his lab work and not have to be bogged down in any of the trappings of academia. That meant no administrative duties, no teaching schedules. In nineteen thirty three, Edwin Armstrong applied for four patents, all related to the issue of eliminating static from radio waves. Prior to this point, all radio was based on AM or amplitude modulation. In an AM broadcast, the frequency is constant. This is also called a carrier wave. The sound wave the audio that's being transmitted, is added to that frequency and the sound wave changes the amplitude of the wave. Amplitude is a measure of the strength or intensity of a wave. Sometimes people will also call it a height, but that's what they mean. So when you're tuning in AM radio, you are tuning to the frequency that's assigned to the broadcaster you wish to listen to. FM on the other hand, modulates the frequency, so obviously FM stands for frequency modulation. Those changes in frequency are what carry the signal, and when they shift the output device that's speakers get a hit of voltage that transmits the sound. So a station's call number or frequency actually has some play on either side of it to allow for those shifts that trigger the sound. It is a more complicated process, but the resulting sound is clearer an Armstrong's new system. With the modulated frequency of waves, the carrier wave was more impervious to interference from things like electrical storms.

00:18:55
Speaker 1: We know today that Armstrong's invention did change communications, but initially it did not seem destined for success, and we'll talk about why after we hear from the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going. One might expect that the superiority in fidelity that Armstrong's FM radio was able to produce would be readily embraced. It sounded so much better, But there were two problems. One was that there was a belief in the science community, based on some faulty science, that FM was not viable. They thought Armstrong had actually been wasting his time. The other problem was that even once its viability was apparent. It ran into the issue that new technology is often met with resistance, especially when it necessitates the need for new equipment, and that was exactly what happened with FM. To prove his FM radio worked, demonstrated it to the Institute of Radio Engineers in nineteen thirty five. That gave them a chance to hear this static free transmission from the remote location of Yonkers. He demoed different kinds of sound. There was speaking, of course, but.

00:20:13
Speaker 2: Also live music and things like water being poured into a glass. It was all clear as a bell, much clearer than an AM transmission.

00:20:22
Speaker 1: That resistance that we mentioned a moment ago two FM's adoption came quickly and aggressively. By the mid nineteen thirties, there were already a lot of radio stations broadcasting AM radio, and none of them wanted word to get out that there was a superior technology. Meanwhile, Armstrong was like, this should be free to everybody. One of the early signs that things were going to be really rough actually came from his friend David Sarnoff. Saranov had started RCA at this point, and Armstrong had promised RCA first look an option for any inventions he created, and to help Armstrong win his work, Sarnov had let the inventor use the top of the newly completed Empire State Building as a testing space. But when Armstrong started talking publicly about FM radio and its benefits, Saranov told him to take his equipment down and get off the Empire State Building. RCA was already positioned against Armstrong legally at this point, the company was involved in that series of patent cases against him in court, but up until this point, Armstrong and Sarnov had remained pretty friendly. Until the FM reveal.

00:21:35
Speaker 2: Some of the resistance against Armstrong's new form of radio was fairly specific to time and place. This was in the nineteen thirties, so the Great Depression is part of the context of this. Industry leaders like Sarnoff, who knew that Armstrong was working on the static problem, had anticipated that he was going to come up with something that improved on the existing A radio technology, which was also tied to the very new development of television. So when he showed up with a completely new system, it took people by surprise. Companies were trepidacious about investing when the markets were precarious. They believed that customers would be even less willing to buy things like new radios when there were already plenty of AM stations for them to listen to on their existing radios. So while there was a lot of pettiness in the mix, there were also some legitimate financial and economic concerns.

00:22:36
Speaker 1: In response to the mix of detractors and some people who seemed to be just willfully ignoring his new tech. Like he could not get people to write about this new FM radio, Edwin Armstrong once again persisted he really believed in FM and he knew it was far superior, so he decided to build his own radio station to prove it. Was of course very expensive. The total cost of the construction, which took place over several years, was estimated to have been around three hundred thousand dollars, which, with that caveat that translating value over time is very imprecise, the estimates put that at pretty close to seven million dollars to day of his own personal money. And to make matters worse, then, the Federal Communications Commission refused to issue him a permit for it. In return, Armstrong told the FCC that he would just move to another country and let them lead the industry into static free broadcasting, and after that he did get his license. In nineteen thirty nine, he began broadcasting from the first FM radio station, W two XMN, which he had built in Alpine, New Jersey. Its signal traveled farther than the FCC had anticipated and with clearer transmission than any AM station could manage.

00:23:57
Speaker 2: The next year, RCA offered to buy ALFE since from Armstrong, but he was only willing to issue them a royalties based offer, and things did not go well. As Armstrong was ready to really start showing what FM could do. The United States entered World War II. Because he was still one of the foremost experts in the country regarding wireless communication, he was once again needed for research duty for the war.

00:24:24
Speaker 1: Then, when the war was over Edwin returned to what he considered his greatest achievement, FM, but things were only getting worse in his battle to control the technology. After he had turned down RCA's offer to buy a license, the company had just gone right ahead and developed their own FM technology without any sort of agreement with him, and they actually brought FM radios to market, which was something that violated his patents.

00:24:51
Speaker 2: Then, the FCC, which had come to acknowledge the superior fidelity that FM could provide, had assigned FM a new set of frequencies at the end of the war, claiming it was for the technology zone good. But this switch meant that all the existing radios were suddenly obsolete because they had been manufactured to tune into the old band. As part of this move, the maximum power of the new band was reduced from that of the old ones, so one of FM's primary benefits was basically erased. Additionally, corporate entities conspired to take down Armstrong's idea that FM should stay independent and not be owned by a corporation. Under the guise of promoting FM, RCA and other networks started broadcasting the programming that had been running on AM, but they didn't charge advertisers for their time on the FM broadcasts. That meant that independent FM stations had no real leverage to get advertisers to pay to run shows on their channel. They were getting FM ads for free from the big names already.

00:26:04
Speaker 1: Armstrong tried to fight all of this in Congress, and he had a number of politicians on his side. He accused specifically RCA and NBC with infringement on his patents. But though there were hearings, things dragged on with a lot of mostly irrelevant questioning, and there didn't seem to be any end or resolution in sight.

00:26:24
Speaker 2: As the nineteen fifties donned, the once wealthy Armstrong was in a much less robust financial situation than he had been earlier in his career. He had burned through his fortune trying to convince established radio stations that FM was a better option, and then to fight the many legal battles that came with it. He and Marian had traditionally held a party at Thanksgiving every year for all of Edwin's engineering friends. After everybody had gone home, on the night of the nineteen fifty three festivities, he and Marian had a fight, something that was really unusual in their thirty years together.

00:27:03
Speaker 1: The main crux of this argument seemed to be concerns for their future in retirement. Maryan's sister and her sister's husband had built a home in Connecticut on a farm, and Marian wanted for Edwin to semi retire and for them to also move to Connecticut. She had voiced concerns that all of these legal battles and the radio station and just all of it were draining what money they had down to a point where this dream was kind of slipping away. And after their argument in November nineteen fifty three, she left their apartment and went to stay with her sister, and the two of them remained apart through the rest of the holidays.

00:27:39
Speaker 2: So heads up, we're getting to the death by suicide that we mentioned at the top of the show, and if you'd rather skip that, just jump ahead about three minutes. By the beginning of nineteen fifty four, Armstrong was, it is now believed, probably having a nervous breakdown. He had started to act unlike himself, to the point that friends were asking him if he was okay, and he told them he was just under the weather. On January thirty first, which was a Sunday, he spoke with his lawyer, Alfred McCormick, as he did every morning. He checked in on a friend whose wife was ill, and he made plans to have drinks with another friend, but Armstrong no showed on that date. Late that evening, he put on his hat and coat and he jumped to his death from the window of the couple's apartment the following morning. The news was reported in a brief statement which circulated in numerous papers and for several days after quote FM inventor dies in fall. Major Edwin Howard Armstrong, sixty three, inventor of the frequency modulation radio system, fell or jumped to his death from the thirteenth floor apartment to the third floor balcony of Riverhouse Apartment hotel today police reported. Police said that Major Armstrong left a two page note addressed to his wife, esther Marian, who was reported staying with friends in Granby, Connecticut. The note, it was learned, expressed the regret at dying this way and stated his love for his wife. Major Armstrong also invented the superheterodyne and super regenerative circuits, which are the basis of virtually all radio receivers. Armstrong was buried in Marion's family plot in Merrimack, Massachusetts.

00:29:15
Speaker 1: They had also been married there in Marymack. In the wake of her husband's death, Marion became a staunch defender of the twenty one patent suits that he had filed. Near the end of his life. The RCA and NBC infringement suit settled out of court with the networks, paying Armstrong's estate one million dollars. All of the other suits ended in judgments in Armstrong's favor.

00:29:39
Speaker 2: On March sixth, nineteen fifty four, Armstrong's FM station played the inventor's favorite music before a few closing remarks by his lawyer, and then went off the air for good. The Alpine, New Jersey, property where it was built was eventually purchased by his alma mater and former employer, Columbia University, which established the Armstrong Fields Stifle for Electronic Research there. In addition to the lab, the building now houses an exhibit of FM radio history. In nineteen fifty five, the International Telecommunications Union made Armstrong one of its honorees in recognition of his contributions to radio. One of their prior honorees was the man who is often cited as inspiring Armstrong's path as an inventor, Guglielmo Marconi.

00:30:27
Speaker 1: That's Edwin Armstrong.

00:30:29
Speaker 2: Do you also have some listener mail? I do.

00:30:32
Speaker 1: It's less sad than that. At the end. This is from our listener, Emily. Although I don't know it might make me cry, everything does, Emily writes. So I've been listening for a long time. I think I started listening before the two of you were the co hosts, so that tells you this note is a long time coming. Thanks for everything, seriously, thanks. There are so many episodes that I've loved and so much I've learned from you guys over the years. I'm always excited when you do an episode on some I've learned about in the past, especially if it's a place I've actually visited, and I assign your episodes for my literature students and my honors students as supplements to the text for reading. Thank you for being an educator, and also I'm super honored, she continues. I often sit and think I should write because so many of the episodes speak to me or to my experiences in so many ways. But your recent episode on the Library of Congress and your conversation about it on the behind the scenes episode finally gets me to do it. Like you, I am frequently absolutely dismayed at the state of things in the US, and I'm often at a loss for what to do. But your episode reinforced for me the idea that education, particularly in the humanities itself, is a form of activism. I do this at the local level as a college professor, and you guys do this for a much wider audience. Thanks for everything you do, and know that you're not alone in feeling dismay, but also in leaning into the importance of learning about the past. And then we get to pet tax. Here are my dog, Elsa, a two year old goldendoodle, and my sweet menace of a kitten named Bertie. She chirps a lot. While that is her official name, she gets called a lot of other things because my five year old son likes to change her name on a regular basis. She has been called, among other things, all off, buddy, kitty, bouncy, and Wushi Coushie, my son's name for whoopy cushions. Signed Emily, Emily, thank you for this beautiful letter. It's so sweet and I'm so honored. And also this dog. You guys got to stop saying I don't know if I have dog fever or what. Right now, something's going on because I see pups and I'm like, whoa. And I will always love a kiddie picture forever. I hope you hug those babies super tight. Thank you for being an educator, as I said, and I'm super honored that you would assign her stuff for your students. Yeah, that's all I got. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also subscribe to the show and become a PhD. And Stuff you Missing History Class like Emily, is on the iheartrate you app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.

00:33:08
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