Move Over, Tesla: Make Room for Another Unsung Hero of Electronics
Nikola Tesla didn’t receive credit for his many achievements and inventions during his lifetime, but it’s difficult today to call him an unsung hero. Instead, I offer an inventor whose role in modern communication technologies are also essential, but who has yet to capture the attention of the average person, or even the average technophile: Edwin Howard Armstrong.
Like Tesla, Armstrong was an electronic genius, preferred to work alone, and didn’t mind breaking rules when they didn’t suit him. He locked horns with big corporations and spent much of his life enmeshed in patent battles. His invention of the frequency modulation — the FM radio band — revolutionized communications and paved the way for life in the 20th and 21st centuries.
This is not to take anything away from Tesla, who undeniably deserves the status of hero. His contributions to electricity and communication are fundamental to our modern-day electronic, communication, and digital landscapes. His invention of the alternating current (AC) motor and system of delivering electricity made every electronic device in our homes and workplaces possible. His genius qualifies him as the Leonardo Da Vinci of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Like Da Vinci, some of Tesla’s ideas were so visionary that they were never built. (Perhaps that was fortunate for the “Death Ray.”)
But the idea that Tesla is unknown or unappreciated — that’s a hard argument to make these days. Books, comic books, cartoons, graphic novels, video games and films have portrayed Tesla. Singer David Bowie portrayed the inventor in the 2009 movie, Prestige, and a recent episode of Doctor Who featured an encounter between Tesla, the Doctor, and her companions. There’s even a monument honoring Tesla in Niagara Falls, where he designed the first hydroelectric plant.
Edwin Armstrong, on the other hand, has been ignored by pop culture. Perhaps he wasn’t as good-looking or charismatic as Tesla. Certainly he wasn’t as eccentric or flamboyant. But his story is compelling, and we wouldn’t be watching Doctor Who at all if not for his innovations.
Born in 1890 in New York City, Armstrong was a generation younger than Tesla (b. 1856, d. 1943). As a child, he spent most of his time, in school and out, tinkering with wireless technologies. When he was high school senior in Yonkers, N.Y., Armstrong built a radio receiver so powerful and so tall that he was able to catch telegraph signals from Key West, Florida.
Armstrong attended Columbia University and started making major discoveries even before he graduated. As a lab assistant, he began studying the vacuum tube, a device that detected and amplified radio signals, thus extended their range. It had been patented as the Audion in 1906 by Lee De Forest, but De Forest didn’t understand how or why the Audion worked, nor did anyone else. As a result, manufacturing was inexact and the tubes were unreliable and often weak.
By 1911, Armstrong had solved the puzzle on how the tubes worked and developed a superior technology that amplified radio signals through circuit regeneration, resulting in stronger transmission and reception. Voices could now travel farther and be heard more loudly than ever before. His invention made possible the radio broadcast as we know it.
But Armstrong was young and inexperienced, and he didn’t document his work carefully. Due to financial problems and other distractions, he failed to patent or publish his findings until 1914. Meanwhile, De Forest filed for a patent for a similar system in 1913. This set the scene for legal battles that lasted more than a decade, with Armstrong losing the final outcome. A Supreme Court decision awarded De Forest the patent for the regenerative circuit. Regardless of the ruling, Armstrong is widely recognized as the inventor, and his continued research led to the superregenerative circuit, which he patented in 1922.
Two more of Armstrong’s inventions changed the game for both the radio industry and the listener. First was the superheterodyne, which made it possible to tune a radio to a precise frequency. To explain, imagine you’re a radio listener in the early 1920s, when radio broadcasts first began. Do-it-yourself radio receivers were popular, and they were notoriously difficult to operate. But even if you had a store-bought radio, you had to spend a great deal of time fiddling with dials, trying to tune in an audible and stable signal. The addition of superheterodyne reduced your dial-fiddling significantly. On a superheterodyne radio, you could tune in The Lone Ranger more easily and listen to the whole program without much adjustment.
Armstrong developed the idea for superheterodyne while he was serving in the radio corps during World War I. He filed his first patent for it in 1918. But apparently his invention was ahead of its time. Radio manufacturers were slow to include the technology in their receivers, and it wasn’t until the 1930s that superheterodyne became commonplace.
The second technology Armstrong developed not only rocked the radio world but also made television broadcast possible. That was the FM radio band. For the first few decades of radio, broadcasts were transmitted through amplitude modulation (AM), which was serviceable but often full of static and noise, no matter how precisely the frequency was tuned. Armstrong’s discoveries, patented in 1933, made frequency modulation (FM) usable. FM transmission eliminated static, allowed for stereo, and produced a better sound overall than AM.
But here again, Armstrong had to go up against the large communication corporations. By the 1930s, manufacturers were making radios designed with AM bands only. Radio stations also had only AM technologies. Adopting FM would require a complete overhaul of the established systems, and it was the middle of the Depression. The companies didn’t want to make the investment necessary to include FM. For a decade, Armstrong spent much of his personal money trying to make FM broadcast a reality but he was stymied by RCA and other radio companies, who felt threatened not only by FM but also by the growing technology of television. Armstrong eventually won the battle and FM radio took off beginning in the 1940s, only to be interrupted by World War II.
It wasn’t until the 1960s and 70s that most consumers in America regularly listened to FM radio. But in the meantime, people were using FM without evening knowing it because television broadcast companies used the FM band for sound transmission. The first satellites also transmitted using frequency modulation.
Armstrong’s story has a tragic ending, however. The patent litigation and conflicts with RCA wore him down mentally, physically, and financially. In 1954, he jumped from his 13th story bedroom window.
These days transistors have taken the place of the vacuum tube (except among some musicians who swear by the tube amp). Television broadcasts and streaming services now use digital transmissions, and much of radio operates by satellite or streaming also. But without Edwin Howard Armstrong’s genius and perseverance, the entire radio and television industry would not exist as we know it.
A hero? Yes. Unsung? Also yes. For a time, Armstrong’s boyhood home in Yonkers was a National History Landmark. The designation was withdrawn in 1983 and the house, which had not been well maintained, was demolished. He is remembered by some, however. The IEEE Communications Society, an association for engineers, has an annual award named in his honor, the Edwin H. Armstrong Achievement Award.
Reference
Lewis, Tom. Empire of the Air. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.
