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Edwin Howard Armstrong

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Edwin H. Armstrong
Developed and advanced the utility of FM technology.
Born(1890-12-18)December 18, 1890
New York, NY
DiedJanuary 31, 1954(1954-01-31) (aged 63)
Manhattan, NY
EducationColumbia University
Occupation(s)electrical engineer and inventor
Known forinventor of FM radio
SpouseMarion

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

Edwin Howard Armstrong was born in New York City, New York, in 1890. He studied at Columbia University and later became a professor there. He invented the regenerative circuit while he was an undergraduate 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 a "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. At the time, this action was the longest patent lawsuit ever litigated, 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

Columbia's Philosophy Hall. Armstrong developed FM radio in its basement laboratory.

Even as the regenerative-circuit lawsuit continued, Armstrong was working on another momentous invention. While working in the basement laboratory of Columbia's Philosophy Hall, he created wide-band frequency modulation radio (FM). Rather than varying the amplitude of a radio wave to create sound, Armstrong's method varied the frequency of the wave instead. FM radio broadcasts delivered a much clearer sound, free of static, than the AM radio dominant at the time. (Armstrong received a patent on wideband FM on December 26, 1933; his just rewards required much litigation at the end of his life, and beyond it.) [3]

In 1922, John Renshaw Carson of AT&T, inventor of Single-sideband modulation (SSB modulation), had published a paper in the Proceedings of the IRE arguing that FM did not appear to offer any particular advantage [4]. Armstrong managed to demonstrate the advantages of FM radio despite Carson's skepticism in a now-famous paper on FM in the Proceedings of the IRE in 1936 [5], which was re-printed in the August 1984 issue of Proceedings of the IEEE [6].

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 [7]. Thus Crosby's work supplemented Armstrong's paper in 1936.

Armstrong conducted the first large scale field tests of his FM radio technology on the 85th floor of RCA's (Radio Corporation of America) Empire State Building from May 1934 until October 1935. However RCA had its eye on television broadcasting, and chose not to buy the patents for the FM technology. [8] A June 17, 1936, presentation at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) headquarters made headlines nationwide. He played a jazz record over conventional AM radio, then switched to an FM broadcast. "[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. He added that several engineers described the invention "as one of the most important radio developments since the first earphone crystal sets were introduced." [9]

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 (160 km) away, despite the use of less power than an AM radio station.[10]

RCA began to lobby for a change in the law or FCC regulations that would prevent FM radios from becoming dominant. By June 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 receivers 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 the Yankee Network and his costly legal battles brought ruin to Armstrong, by then almost penniless and emotionally distraught.

Death

Alone and depressed over the FM patent dispute, Armstrong, dressed in his coat and hat, jumped to his death from the thirteenth floor window of his New York City apartment on January 31, 1954. His suicide note to his wife said: "May God help you and have mercy on my soul".[11][12] His widow Marion, who had been Sarnoff's secretary before marrying Armstrong, renewed the patent fight against RCA and finally prevailed.[13][14]

Legacy

It took decades following Armstrong's death for FM broadcasting to meet and surpass the saturation of the AM band, and longer still for FM radio to become profitable for broadcasters. 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

Armstrongs house, circa 1975. It was demolished in 1983 due to fire damage.

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."

Philosophy Hall, the Columbia building where Armstrong developed FM, was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2003 in recognition of that fact. Armstrong's home in Yonkers also received designation in both the NHL and the National Register of Historic Places, but both were withdrawn when the house was later demolished.[15][16]

See also

Patents

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

Further reading

  • Brodsky, Ira. "The History of Wireless: How Creative Minds Produced Technology for the Masses" (Telescope Books, 2008)
  • Lawrence Lessing, Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong, Philadelphia, J.B. Lippincott Company, 1956.
  • Tom Lewis, Empire of the Air: the Men Who Made Radio, New York: HarperCollins: 1991.
  • Empire of the Air was also the title of a related Ken Burns documentary which aired on PBS in 1992.[17]
  • Süsskind, Charles (1970). "Armstrong, Edwin Howard". Dictionary of Scientific Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 287–288. ISBN 0684101149.
Wikiquote has quotations related to Edwin Howard Armstrong.

References and notes

  1. ^ There was a dispute regarding who invented superheterodyne radio. For example, Walter Schottky claimed that he had independently invented super heterodyne radio too.
  2. ^ Tom Lewis, Empire of the air: the men who made radio. New York : E. Burlingame Books, 1991.
  3. ^ Dana M. Raymond: Air War: Legal Battles Over FM Radio
  4. ^ J.R. Carson, Notes on the theory of modulation, Proc. IRE, vol. 10, no. 1 (February 1922),pp. 57-64
  5. ^ E.H. Armstrong, A method of reducing disturbances in radio signaling by a system of frequency modulation, Proc. IRE, vol. 24, no. 5 (May 1936),pp. 689-740.
  6. ^ E.H. Armstrong, A method of reducing disturbances in radio signaling by a system of frequency modulation, Proc. IEEE, vol. 72, no. 8 (August 1984),pp. 1042-1062.
  7. ^ M.G. Crosby, Frequency modulation noise characteristics, Proc. IRE, vol. 25, no. 4 (April 1937), pp. 472-514.
  8. ^ http://users.erols.com/oldradio/eha65.htm
  9. ^ United Press report, "Radio Set-up Eliminates All Noise," Ogden Standard-Examiner, June 18, 1936, p1
  10. ^ Current Biography 1940, pp.23-26.
  11. ^ "Edwin H. Armstrong, Inventor, Dies in Plunge". The Hartford Courant. February 2, 1954. Retrieved 2008-11-21. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  12. ^ "Died". Time (magazine). February 8, 1954. Retrieved 2008-06-21. Edwin Howard Armstrong, 63, electronics genius, one of the fathers of modern radio; by his own hand (a jump from his 13th floor apartment) after writing a note to his wife which concluded: "May God help you and have mercy on my soul"; in Manhattan. In 1913 he worked out the regenerative circuit, which outmoded crystal receiving sets with a sensitive vacuum tube system; his superheterodyne circuit, developed in 1918 while serving in France, is still the basic circuit of AM radio. In 1939, he perfected a method for eliminating static (now known as FM). A professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University for the last 20 years, the earnest, driving inventor earned millions of dollars in patent royalties, died a rich man. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  13. ^ "Esther Armstrong, 81, the Wife Of Inventor of FM Radio System". New York Times. 1979-08-10, Friday. Esther Marion Armstrong, the wife of the late Maj. Edwin Howard Armstrong, a leading American inventor, died Wednesday at the Exeter (N.H.) Hospital, after a brief illness. She was 81 years old and lived in Rye Beach, N.H. {{cite news}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  14. ^ "Armstrong Suit Over FM Settled. R.C.A. and N.B.C. to Pay '$1,000,000' Ending Action Begun by Late Inventor". New York Times. 1979-08-10, Friday. Retrieved 2007-07-21. The Radio Corporation of America and the National Broadcasting Company have settled for "approximately $1,000,000" claims against them by the estate of the late Maj. Edwin H. Armstrong. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  15. ^ Sheire, James (July, 1975). "National Register of Historic Places Inventory/Nomination: Edwin H. Armstrong House". Retrieved 2008-01-25. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help) (includes 1 photo)
  16. ^ "Withdrawal of National Historic Landmark Designation: Edwin H. Armstrong House". National Historic Landmark summary listing. National Park Service. Retrieved 2008-01-25.
  17. ^ Empire of the Air | PBS

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