Edwin Howard Armstrong: Inventing FM Radio, Then Losing the War With RCA

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Edwin Howard Armstrong was born in New York in 1890. At about eight he developed Sydenham's chorea, then called St. Vitus' dance, which left a lifelong tic and kept him home for two years, and he built a backyard antenna tower in Yonkers that he rode in a bosun's chair. As a Columbia undergraduate he discovered that feeding a vacuum tube's output back into its input amplified signals enough to drive a loudspeaker, and he patented this regenerative circuit in 1914. Lee de Forest claimed priority from a 1912 notebook entry, and the Supreme Court ruled for de Forest, though the engineering institute refused Armstrong's attempt to return his Medal of Honor. In France in World War I he invented the superheterodyne receiver.

Sales of his patents made him RCA's largest individual shareholder. He married Marion MacInnis, secretary to RCA's David Sarnoff, after doing a handstand atop a 20-story antenna. Working in a Columbia basement, he developed wide-band FM to defeat static, but RCA ordered his equipment out of the Empire State Building. He built a 400-foot tower in Alpine, New Jersey, and the FCC gave FM a band in 1940, then moved it after the war from 42 to 50 megahertz to 88 to 108, stranding about 400,000 sets. He refused a flat one million dollars from RCA and sued in 1948. In January 1954, ruined and separated from Marion, he jumped from his 13th-floor Manhattan apartment.

• As a student he tricked a visiting Cornell professor into a severe electric shock.
• He built Marion the first portable radio for their honeymoon.
• His wartime radar work was later used in Project Diana to bounce signals off the moon.
• In 1953 he struck Marion on the arm with a fireplace poker after she refused to give their retirement money to the lawsuit.
• Marion fought his patent suits until 1967 and won, and NASA used his FM system to talk with Apollo astronauts.