Information about Edwin Armstrong

Edwin Howard Armstrong (December 18, 1890 – January 31, 1954) was an American electrical engineer and inventor. Armstrong was the inventor of the FM radio.

Birth and education

Edwin Howard Armstrong was born in Chelsea, New York, in 1890. He studied in Columbia University and later served as a professor there. He invented the regenerative circuit while he was a junior in college at Columbia University and patented it in 1914, the super-regenerative circuit (patented 1922), and the superheterodyne receiver (patented 1918).^[1]

Work and patent disputes

Many of Armstrong's inventions were ultimately claimed by others in patent lawsuits. In particular, the regenerative circuit, which Armstrong patented in 1914 as "Wireless receiving system," 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 Supreme Court of the United States, 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 ^[2]

FM radio

Even as the regeneration-circuit lawsuit continued, Armstrong was working on another momentous invention. While working in the basement lab of Columbia's Philosophy Hall, he created frequency modulation radio (FM, patented in 1933 as US patent 1941066 with the title of "Radio signalling system"). 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 1922, John Renshaw Carson (AT&T), who was the inventor of single side band (SSB), published a paper in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) that FM did not appear to offer any particular advantage ^[3].

Armstrong managed to demonstrate the advantages of FM radio despite Carson's negative review of FM's promise. Armstrong published a classic paper on FM in the Proceedings of the IRE in 1936 ^[4], which was re-printed in the August 1984 issue of Proceedings of the IEEE ^[5].

Today the consensus regarding FM is that narrow band FM is not so advantageous in terms of noise reduction, but wide band FM can bring great improvement in signal to noise ratio if the signal is stronger than a certain threshold. Hence Carson was not entirely wrong, and the Carson bandwidth rule for FM is still important today. Thus, both Carson and Armstrong ultimately contributed significantly to the science and technology of radio. The threshold concept was discussed by Murray G. Crosby (inventor of Crosby system for FM Stereo) who pointed out that for wide band FM to provide better signal to noise ratio, the signal should be above a certain threshold, according to his paper published in Proceedings of the IRE in 1937 ^[6]. Thus Crosby's work supplemented Armstrong's paper in 1936.

However, FM radio which threatened to destroy AM radio proved to be too revolutionary for the RCA (Radio Corporation of America), Armstrong's then employer. Armstrong was asked to remove his transmitting equipment from RCA's Empire State Building offices, in order to make way for television equipment after his 1935 demonstrations of the technology. A June 17, 1936, presentation at the FCC headquarters made headlines nationwide. "Dr. Armstrong played a jazz phonograph record," over conventional AM radio, then switched to an FM broadcast and gave his audience the sound of the future. "[I]f the audience of 50 engineers had shut their eyes they would have believed the jazz band was in the same room. There were no extraneous sounds," noted one reporter, adding that several engineers described the invention "as one of the most important radio developments since the first earphone crystal sets were introduced." ^[7]

In 1937, Armstrong financed construction of the first FM radio station, W2XMN, a 40 kilowatt broadcaster in Alpine, New Jersey. The signal (at 42.8 MHz) could be heard clearly 100 miles away, despite the use of less power than an AM radio station. ^[8]

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 (42-50 MHz), to (88-108 MHz), while getting new television channels allocated in the 40-MHz 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. His near obsession with radio and total involvement in the patent fight also destroyed his marriage, apparently one of the few close personal relationships Armstrong ever developed.

Alone and driven to despair over the FM debacle, Armstrong, dressed in full coat and hat, jumped to his death from the thirteenth floor window of his New York City flat on 31 January 1954.^[9] His widow Marion, who had been Sarnoff's secretary before marrying Armstrong, renewed the patent fight against RCA and finally prevailed in 1967^[10] 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.

Armstrong was of the opinion that anyone who had actual contact with 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").

Honors

In 1917 Armstrong was the first recipient of the IRE's, now IEEE Medal of Honor. For his wartime work on radio the French government gave him the Legion of Honor in 1919. 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". The ITU added him to its roster of great inventors of electricity in 1955. In 1980 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and was on a U.S. postage stamp in 1983. The Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame inducted him in 2000, "in recognition of his contributions and pioneering spirit that have laid the foundation for consumer electronics."

See also

• Armstrong Tower : tall lattice tower built and used by Edwin Armstrong in 1938.

Patents

Armstrong received 42 patents in total; a selection are listed below:

• U.S. Patent 1,113,149  : "Wireless receiving system"
• U.S. Patent 1,336,378  : "Antenna with distributed positive resistance"
• U.S. Patent 1,342,885  : "Method of receiving high frequency oscillation"
• U.S. Patent 1,424,065  : "Signalling system"
• U.S. Patent 1,941,066  : "Radio signalling system" (Note: This is the patent for FM.)

External links

• a Biography of Armstrong
• Photos and records relating to Edwin H. Armstrong, from the Houck Collection
• Katzdorn, Mike, "Edwin H. Armstrong"
• Halper, Donna, "Major Edwin Howard Armstrong" (Barry Mishkind website)
• Ammon, Richard T., "The Rolls Royce Of Reception : Super Heterodynes - 1918 to 1930".
• IEEE History Center's Edwin H. Armstrong : Excerpt from "The Legacy of Edwin Howard Armstrong," by J. E. Brittain Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 79, no. 2, February 1991
• Hong, Sungook, "A History of the Regeneration Circuit: From Invention to Patent Litigation" University, Seoul, Korea (PDF)
• Who Invented the Superhetrodyne? The history of the invention of the superhetrodyne receiver and related patent disputes
• Yannis Tsividis, "Edwin Armstrong: Pioneer of the Airwaves", 2002. A profile on the web site of Columbia University, Armstong's alma mater

References and notes

Further reading

• Lawrence Lessing, Man of High fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong, Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott Company, 1956
• Lewis, Tom. Empire of the air: the men who made radio. New York : E. Burlingame Books, 1991.

*Empire of the Air was also the title of a related Ken Burns documentary which aired on PBS in 1992. [1]

• Süsskind, Charles (1970). "Armstrong, Edwin Howard". Dictionary of Scientific Biography 1. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 287-288. 

Awards
Preceded by New award	IRE Medal of Honor 1917	Succeeded by Ernst Alexanderson
Preceded by John B. Whitehead	AIEE Edison Medal 1942	Succeeded by Vannevar Bush

Persondata
NAME	Armstrong, Edwin Howard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American electrical engineer and inventor
DATE OF BIRTH	November 18 1890(1890--)
PLACE OF BIRTH	Chelsea, Manhattan, New York City, United States
DATE OF DEATH	January 31 1954
PLACE OF DEATH	New York City, United States