Ian said:
What did Armstrong invent?
A paradigm for personal tragedy of the highest order:
Edwin Armstrong
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Edwin Howard Armstrong (1890-1954) American electrical engineer and
inventor. He received an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering
from Columbia University.
Edwin Armstrong was one of the most prolific inventors of the radio era,
with a vision that was ahead of his time.
Armstrong was the inventor of FM radio. He also invented the
Regenerative circuit (invented while he was a junior in college, 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 DeForest in 1916; deForest 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 deForest 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, deForest
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 significant invention: frequency modulation. Rather than varying
the amplitude of a radio wave to create sound, Armstrong's method used
varying the frequency of the wave instead. Significantly, 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 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.
By June of 1945, the Radio Corporation of America, 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.
Coincidentally or otherwise, this rendered all Armstrong-era FM sets
useless overnight, while helping protect RCA's strong AM radio
stronghold. Armstrong's radio network did not survive the frequency
shift up into the high frequencies; some experts believe that FM
technology was set back decades by the FCC's decision.
Furthermore, RCA ultimately claimed and won its own patent on FM
technology, and won the ensuing patent fight between themselves and
Edwin Armstrong, leaving Armstrong without the ability to claim
royalties on FM radios sold in the United States. The undermining of the
Yankee Network and patent court fight left Armstrong virtually penniless
and emotionally destroyed.
In this state, Armstrong committed suicide in 1954 by jumping out of his
apartment window, depressed by what he saw as the failure of his
invention of FM radio. It took decades after Armstrong's death for FM
radio to meet and surpass the saturation of AM, and longer still for FM
radio to become profitable for its broadcasters. Ultimately, however,
the genius of FM technology was proven by its wide adoption today.
Quotes
"Anyone who has had actual contact with the making of the inventions
that built the radio art knows that these inventions have been the
product of experiment and work based on physical reasoning, rather than
on the mathematicians' calculations and formulae. Precisely the opposite
impression is obtained from many of our present day text books and
publications." - Edwin H. Armstrong
As someone pointed out,
