Radio Revolutionary

Just before Christmas in 1913 three engineers from the American Marconi company crowded into a cluttered basement room in Philosophy Hall at Columbia University to see a young man demonstrate his new invention, a regenerative, or feedback, circuit, which he confidently declared had made possible the most effective wireless receiver in the world. This was a time of extravagant claims—and not a little fraud—about the new technology coming to be called radio, and the visitors were suspicious as they heard a wireless telegraph transmission from the Marconi company’s station three thousand miles away in Clifden, Ireland, a station normally picked up with great difficulty in the eastern United States. That the inventor, a recent graduate of Columbia named Edwin Howard Armstrong, had hidden the receiver in a black box made the listeners all the more skeptical. But a few days later, after confirming the authenticity of the messages, the assistant chief engineer of the party, a young man named David Sarnoff, declared the invention “the most remarkable receiving system in existence.” This occasion marked the first meeting of Armstrong and Sarnoff, men who were to become two of the most { important figures in radio. Each was to have a profound influence upon the other when their careers became intertwined.

The history of radio in the United States is one of strong and often eccentric personalities. Armstrong, as one friend described him, was “all focussed in one direction.” Son of the American representative of the Oxford University Press, he was born in 1890 and grew up in Yonkers, New York. At the age of fifteen, after reading a copy of The Boy’s Book of Inventions , he declared his intention of becoming an inventor in the field of radio. Soon he had filled his attic bedroom with coils, coherers, crystals, Leyden jars, and condensers, and he busied himself experimenting with electrical circuits. In the still of the night, when signals were clearest, he listened to faint sounds from transmitters as far away as Key West. In 1910 he erected single-handedly a 125-foot vertical antenna in his yard.

Almost nobody at the turn of the century had the prescience to understand the potential of a technology so new, imprecise, and as yet unsophisticated as radio. It seemed more a hobby for amateurs than a serious commercial venture. Transmissions were limited to laboratory demonstrations or experimental efforts over distances of less than two hundred miles. Wireless communications had begun only a few years before: Heinrich Hertz had successfully transmitted electromagnetic waves across a room in the late 1880s; Guglielmo Marconi had sent his first wireless message across the Atlantic in 1901, an accomplishment that was shortly understood to be due partly to the reflection of radio signals off the upper atmosphere—a discovery that was crucial to all later work in radio. With the hope of increasing the capability of wireless receivers, Lee De Forest was developing the first three-element vacuum, or audion, tube at the very time young Armstrong was reading tales of great inventors.

Aside from radio, Armstrong developed few passions: tennis, fast cars, and high places. Tennis he played whenever he could, spending hours charging his barrel-chested six-foot frame about the court. To indulge his craving for speed, he would travel to the private Long Island Motor Parkway, where for the fee of a dollar he drove at speeds of up to a hundred miles an hour. He liked 1 nothing more than to climb hundreds of feet to the tops of radio transmission towers or to install radio equipment on the roofs of tall buildings. For relaxation he read books about mountaineers.

Armstrong’s stubbornness and interest in difficult problems led him to his most important inventions. He realized that receivers and transmitters might benefit from radical design changes, and he challenged virtually every fact of radio technology that others accepted. As his technical papers reveal, he enjoyed showing up the experts, be they eminent professors at Columbia University, where he studied electrical engineering; mathematicians, whose elegant solutions and theorems he inherently distrusted; or, later, heads of corporations whose commercial interests ran counter to what he was trying to develop.

The idea for the regenerative, or feedback, circuit came to Armstrong in a moment of revelation while he was mountain climbing in Vermont in 1912, between his junior and senior years at Columbia. Upon his return to the university he built the circuit and thereby greatly enhanced De Forest’s audion as a detector for wireless signals.

Resembling a small light bulb fitted with a grid placed between the filament and a metal plate, De Forest’s 1906 audion tube had helped amplify a radio signal but did little else; a half dozen years later the inventor was still struggling to make the tube practical. Understanding the tube’s capability even better than De Forest did, Armstrong found that by looping the signal from the audion plate circuit back to the grid via suitable coupling coils, he could increase amplification enormously. And when he increased the feedback beyond a critical level, the tube became a transmitter.

Inventing his regenerative circuit proved to be easier than having it accepted commercially, at least before broadcasting became a business. American Marconi and the Atlantic Communication Company bought the right to use it in limited applications; licensing the invention to smaller manufacturers proved more profitable. By 1922 the inventor had issued twenty-four licenses, and royalties reached some ten thousand dollars a month.

The idea for Armstrong’s second major invention came to him in another moment of insight, while he was stationed in France as a captain in the Army Signal Corps during World War I. Watching a German bombing raid, he pondered a way of locating the positions of airplanes by tracking the weak high-frequency waves emitted by the engines’ ignition systems. He envisioned a superheterodyne receiver, based on the electrical mixing of frequencies. The technique of mixing frequencies had been introduced to radio technology by the Canadian engineer Reginald Fessenden in about 1903. It was Armstrong, however, who developed its commercial practicality.

In the superheterodyne the incoming signal is mixed, or heterodyned, with the steady output of a local oscillator to produce a signal of intermediate frequency that can be much more cleanly and effectively amplified. Armstrong’s laboratory constructed an eight-tube receiver which included three intermediate-frequency amplifiers, a detector for converting the signal to an audio frequency current, and two audio frequency amplifiers. Over the next few years Armstrong designed some very elegant devices using this circuitry to achieve improved sensitivity and selectivity.

By the mid-1920s the regenerative receiver and crystal sets began to decline in popularity as the transitional Neutradyne receiver and its variations came on the market with better fidelity and amplifications; after 1930 there was widespread adoption of the “superhet” as wider patent licensing became available and it became easier to tune—with a single dial—than its predecessors. Today the superheterodyne constitutes the basic receiver in practically every radio.

When Armstrong returned to the United States after World War I, nearly everyone recognized him as foremost in his field. The Radio Club of America gave a dinner in his honor at New York’s Hotel Ansonia in 1919. His large, melon-shaped head, which had been prematurely balding before the war, had been made into a complete dome by an anthrax infection contracted in France; his firm mouth, long upper lip, and blue eyes, his modest and laconic speech, and the occasional involuntary twitch of his neck and shoulders (a reminder of a bout with chorea in childhood) remained unchanged.

Not all thought him preeminent, however. Just before the war Lee De Forest had claimed the prior invention of the regenerative circuit, and now he was eager to press his suit. The litigation quickly became acrimonious, taking up much of Armstrong’s time and energy until its resolution years later, and it helped determine his bitter attitude toward patent law. Fees for his defense lawyers began to force him into debt, and when, in 1920, the Westinghouse company offered him $335,000 for exclusive rights to the regenerative and superheterodyne circuits, Armstrong decided to sell. The sum was substantial; even after paying his creditors, Armstrong was now wealthy.

Armstrong’s next invention, the super-regenerative circuit, made him a millionaire. He developed it as a consequence of his litigation with De Forest. When preparing his regeneration apparatus for a demonstration to the court in 1922, Armstrong said, he “accidentally ran into the phenomenon.” The superregenerative circuit greatly improved the feedback process (although the device would not become fully practical for another decade). The Radio Corporation of America paid Armstrong $200,000 in cash and sixty thousand shares of stock for the invention. Later the corporation added twenty thousand shares for consulting work, making Armstrong the largest stockholder in the company. Just before the stock market crash of 1929 Armstrong sold most of his stock for $114 a share.

Armstrong’s association with RCA drew him close to the corporation’s president, David Sarnoff, and even closer to Sarnoff’s tall, charming, and intelligent secretary, Marion Maclnnis. He courted her in the manner of the twenties, taking her for drives on the Motor Parkway in a new Hispano-Suiza, on trips up the Hudson, and to dinner and theater parties. Perhaps it was this growing relationship that inspired Armstrong to perform his most daring stunt. On a May afternoon in 1923 he scaled the transmitting tower of RCA’s station WJZ, 450 feet above Forty-second Street. Hanging over the street from one of the aerial’s crossbeams, he posed for a photographer he had brought along. That evening he returned to stand atop the large, banded iron ball crowning the tower. Sarnoff was not amused, and for a while he barred Armstrong from his offices. Marion Maclnnis married Armstrong in December. For their honeymoon, they traveled in the Hispano-Suiza to Florida. His wedding present to his bride was the first portable superheterodyne radio—a huge mechanism that they lugged onto the beach with them.

Early in 1924 Armstrong returned to Columbia to continue an effort he had begun a decade earlier to eliminate static from radio. Conventional wisdom held the problem insoluble. “Static, like the poor, will always be with us,” the chief engineer of AT&T had declared. But Armstrong labored persistently, sometimes taking several months to set up an experiment that involved as many as a hundred vacuum tubes. He worked a seven-day week and usually a fifteenhour day, broken only by a lunch of a sandwich and a glass of milk. Though he held a chair of electrical engineering at Columbia, he taught no courses. His salary was one dollar a year.

Shortly before Christmas 1933 David Sarnoff returned to the same cluttered basement room of Philosophy Hall where twenty years earlier he had witnessed Armstrong’s demonstration of the regenerative circuit. Armstrong and Sarnoff had become friends, but not intimate ones. Armstrong was tall, slow-speaking, cerebral, and gentle; Sarnoff was short, talkative, and aggressive. Armstrong’s background was middle-class, Presbyterian, and American; Sarnoff’s, lower-class, Jewish, and Russian. In 1906 Sarnoff had become an office boy for the Marconi company. Later he rose to be the company’s chief telegraph operator, running a wireless station atop Wanamaker’s department store in New York, where on April 14, 1912, he relayed North Atlantic radio messages breaking the news of the Titanic disaster. That scoop brought radio—and Sarnoff—to the attention of the general public. From then on the enterprising Sarnoff was the self-appointed spokesman for and prophet of radio as a mass medium. When RCA was formed in 1919, he quickly assumed a leading role; by 1930 he was president.

Armstrong had called Sarnoff to the laboratory to witness a demonstration of his invention to eliminate static from radio. Sarnoff had long expressed the hope that an inventor would come forth with a “little black box” to do just that. What he found was not a simple device to be added to existing radios or transmitters, but an entirely new radio system: frequency modulation, or FM.

In the previous decade radio had become a major presence across the country. The number of homes with radios in 1922 stood at 60,000, with many of these radios home-built; by the Depression year of 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt broadcast his first fireside chat, the number was 19,250,000. Automobile radios were first introduced in 1930 and numbered 500,000 three years later. The use of Armstrong’s superheterodyne circuitry in receivers had grown rapidly. When people were not listening to the President, they were hearing shows with stars like Amos and Andy, Ted Mack, Fred Alien, and Bob Hope. On Broadway, Cole Porter acknowledged radio’s importance in the title song of his musical Anything Goes :

All “those little radios” worked on the principle of amplitude modulation. The invention Armstrong demonstrated to Sarnoff, however, introduced some fundamental changes. Modulation refers to the way in which voice and music information is impressed on a radio wave. In amplitude modulation (AM) the information signal varies the amplitude of the wave; what Armstrong proposed was a method of modulation that would vary the wave’s frequency. By analogy to waves of water, AM imparted the signal through changes in the heights of the waves; FM did so by varying the spacing of the wave crests. Since most noise affected wave height, or amplitude, much more than frequency, FM was much less vulnerable to interference. But FM would require entirely new transmitters and receivers and would need a fairly wide channel spacing—up to two hundred kilohertz—space for which was not readily available in the already crowded five hundred to sixteen hundred kilohertz AM band. The inventor proposed VHF (very high frequency) allocations, where plenty of room was available. It was in this part of the spectrum, furthermore, that FM’s promise of improved high fidelity might best be fulfilled.

Sarnoff was presented with an enormous dilemma. The industry had a considerable investment in medium-band AM, and a move simply to abandon it and switch to VHF FM seemed financially disastrous. It clearly represented a major threat to any company already committed to AM. Sarnoff hoped for some sort of compromise, though, and was not averse to a little experimenting. In March 1934, therefore, Armstrong’s equipment was moved to the top of the Empire State Building for definitive broadcasting tests. Receiving sites were set up first at Westhampton Beach, Long Island, New York, and then at Haddonfield, New Jersey.

What the experimenters showed was a truly substantial improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio with the new technique. An FM signal twice as strong as a noise pulse would suppress the pulse; in AM a signal had to be one hundred times as strong. Also, FM displayed a capture effect—that is, if two stations on the same frequency arrived at the receiving antenna with different signal strengths, the system would grab the stronger one rather than pick up both at once. The capture effect, together with the fact that VHF signals cannot be received farther than about fifty to seventy miles from a transmitter, suggested that FM stations in not-too-distant cities could operate on the same channel.

Thus, the advantage of FM resided not simply in its high fidelity, with which AM could compete, but in a combination of effects, the most significant of which was its spectacular ability to suppress atmospheric and internal electronic noise. In notes written in the receiving log at Westhampton Beach on June 9, 1934, Armstrong reported: “1 PM. W2XDJ signed off. All tests performed exactly according to Hoyle. This experiment concludes just twenty years of work on this problem…. An era as new and distinct in the radio art as that of regeneration is now upon us. After ten years of eclipse my star is again rising.”

In fact, the worst was yet to come. On May 21,1934, the Supreme Court resolved the long-festering and bitter battle over the invention of the regenerative circuit by deciding in De Forest’s favor (the matter was a complex issue of priority in which each side had presented a strong case). Though the Institute of Radio Engineers refused Armstrong’s offer to return the medal it had given him in 1918 for the regenerative circuit, it could not restore the inventor’s loss of dignity.

However serious the wound was, Armstrong would not let it deter him from his work with FM. But in April 1935 RCA asked Armstrong to remove his apparatus from the Empire State Building so that the company could use the space for its experiments with television. Not wanting to postpone the introduction of FM indefinitely, Armstrong then resolved to establish the medium himself, bankrolling it with his own money and licensing the patents to small companies, just as he had done twenty years before with regeneration. In preparation he enlarged his laboratory staff, moved into a spacious apartment overlooking the East River, which became both home and office, and secured additional patents on a number of improvements to FM. On July 18,1939, he began broadcasting from the first FM station, W2XMN, which he had built entirely with his own money in Alpine, New Jersey. That year General Electric began manufacturing—under Armstrong’s license—the first commercially available FM radios. By the end of the year the five-year-old Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had received 150 applications for permits to establish FM stations.

In 1940 RCA offered Armstrong one million dollars, with no payment of royalties, for his FM patents, but by now the inventor was stubbornly determined to hold onto them and continue licensing. Full commercial FM broadcasting was authorized by the FCC on May 22, 1940, and forty channels were allocated in the forty-two to fifty megahertz range. But then the commission began to express concern about sky-wave interference in the designated FM range—the possibility that signals reflecting from the ionosphere (a layer of electrified air in the upper atmosphere) would cause interference in receivers. This later became a major issue in battles between Armstrong and RCA.

In 1940, the National Television Systems Committee, which was recommending standards for television, chose to back FM for the television sound signal and AM for the picture. The FCC went along with this when it authorized commercial television service on July 1,1941. This use of FM was a coup for Armstrong, but the economic benefit for him was slight.

World War II halted FM aural broadcasting progress early in 1942, and Armstrong devoted himself to research in FM radar for the Signal Corps. By now RCA had an FM station on the air in New York that used a transmitter slightly different from Armstrong’s; by 1944 there were forty-seven FM stations in the country and five hundred thousand FM receivers.

At the close of the war a Radio Technical Planning Board (RTPB) representing industry interests was formed to advise the FCC on postwar standards and channel allocations. The board supported the FM frequencies that had been established earlier as well as the use of FM for television sound, but the FCC, citing a study warning of sky-wave interference, recommended moving the FM band to 92 to 106 in the megahertz range.

This proposal was generally favored by the television industry, which would gain flexibility from the higher channel allocation. But television manufacturers that also made FM radios, including Zenith and General Electric, opposed the move. Also against it were the Radio Technical Planning Board, existing FM broadcasters, and Edwin Armstrong. Nonetheless, the decision was made to move the FM band to 88 to 108 megahertz, where it remains today. The FCC allowed a number of stations to operate on both high and low FM bands during a transitional period until new receivers were generally available. But to the FM industry the “FM shift” seemed more like an FM bust, the major effect of which would be to render all existing FM radios and transmitters obsolete, thus crushing the industry and benefiting companies that had been late to get involved with FM.

Sarnoff and RCA, meanwhile, were focusing mainly on television but continued to carry out their own research with FM. After being rebuffed in its attempt to buy out Armstrong’s patents, the company decided to try to get around them. RCA’s first commercial FM receiver, in 1946, used a supposedly new circuit to remove noise pulses, or unwanted amplitude-modulation signals. The circuit was very effective, but it could easily be seen as simply an adaptation of the limiter-discriminator component of Armstrong’s own FM system. Armstrong made an impressive argument to this effect in an ingenious paper before the Radio Club of America. The inventor already believed RCA would emerge a big financial winner—and he a big loser—as a result of the FM band change; now his dismay at the company and its chairman, Sarnoff, increased.

RCA’s tight control of its own radio patents provoked resentment among competing companies, and in 1946 Zenith repudiated an RCA license package, ceased to pay royalties, and brought triple damage suits against RCA, GE, and Western Electric, among which there had been interlocking patent-rights agreements. Litigation multiplied swiftly into suit and countersuit, and other manufacturers brought charges of patent infringement and restraint of trade against the big corporations.

So Armstrong was not alone when, on July 22, 1948, he filed suit in federal district court against RCA and other companies, charging them with infringing his five basic FM patents and violating the antitrust laws. The case was to be a test of endurance, a Dickensian legal battle that a single man—even an Armstrong—could not hope to win. Though represented by one of the finest Wall Street law firms, he found the opposition prepared to fight. “They will stall this along until I am dead or broke,” he said. Stall they did. Legal fees mounted steadily while at the same time income from patent royalties dwindled. The financial and emotional strain on Armstrong grew until it became too much.

By 1953 Armstrong was caught in a tragic drama from which he would not escape. His health deteriorated; his once-robust frame now appeared gaunt, and his face haggard, and the twitch in his neck and shoulder became more pronounced. The pressure proved too much for his wife; at Thanksgiving she left their apartment in New York City to live with her sister in Connecticut.

Late in January 1954 Armstrong confessed to his lawyer that he had “made a mess” of his personal life and said he was ready to settle a twenty-one-patent infringement suit that had just been instituted by him. But he could not bear defeat, and the thought of retiring a beaten man was abhorrent. On the night of January 31, Armstrong—then sixtythree years old—penciled a two-page note to his wife, Marion, concluding, “God keep you and Lord have mercy on my soul.” Fully dressed in his hat and scarf and overcoat and gloves, he went to the window of his apartment and plunged ten stories to his death.

His widow pressed on, continuing the litigation. One by one, favorable agreements and court decisions began to appear. Late in 1954 RCA agreed to a $1,040,000 settlement; the twenty-onepatent infringement suit was decided in Armstrong’s favor in September 1959. The legal proceedings did not come to an end until October 1967, when the Supreme Court refused to review a lower court judgment against Motorola. Eighteen years after he had brought suit and thirteen years after his suicide, Edwin Howard Armstrong had won.

Armstrong’s inventions and ideas have also triumphed. Today virtually every radio, television, and radar system employs the superheterodyne circuit. Frequency modulation has become the standard of high-fidelity broadcasting all over the world, thanks in part to subsequent developments in the high-fidelity industry and innovative regulatory procedures. Having declined in number between 1950 and 1958, FM stations in the United States began to multiply after the introduction of stereo on records. In 1961 the FCC authorized the modern stereo-FM system and extended an earlier authorization permitting FM stations to sell a background music service to banks, stores, and supermarkets. Finally, the FCC ruled in 1965 that FM stations broadcasting to audiences of more than one hundred thousand had to offer original programming at least half the time, rather than simply duplicate AM schedules.

These developments led to a dramatic increase in the number of FM stations, from 990 in 1961 to the current total of 4,965. The FM industry has been given an additional boost by the proliferation of receivers in automobiles. And improvements in solid-state engineering and microelectronics have lent a crowning touch to the fulfillment of Armstrong’s dream of realism in the transmission of sound. FM has reached a healthy adulthood, but only after a birth and early life whose turbulence its inventor could not survive.