![]() ![]() ![]() “Static, like the poor, will always be with us,” lamented one.īut Armstrong found a way. Radio engineers, in fact, were resigned to it, and sought to reduce rather than eliminate static interference. Simple static electricity, such as that caused by lightning and electrical appliances, overwhelmed standard AM signals, and there appeared to be no way to get rid of it. One day in 1922 Sarnoff, frustrated over the problem of static interference with radio broadcasts, said to Armstrong, “I wish that someone would come up with a little black box to eliminate static.”Īrmstrong was well aware of the problem. Over the next decade, while Armstrong built his reputation as an inventor, Sarnoff rose to the top of RCA. Together, the regenerative and superheterodyne circuits made modern broadcasting possible and secured Armstrong’s place in the annals of telecommunications.Īmong the select audience to whom Armstrong introduced the regenerative circuit was David Sarnoff, the future president of the Radio Corporation of America. Out of his research came the superheterodyne, another circuit with greatly improved amplification which is still the standard in radio, television, and radar sets. Army Signal Corps, Armstrong was asked to find a way to intercept German military radio communications, which were transmitted in frequencies too high for Allied receivers. Six years later, as a captain in the U.S. The regenerative or “feedback” circuit, his first invention, amplified the strength of incoming signals hundreds of times, enough to do away with the bother of earphones and to pick up signals from across the Atlantic. In 1912, during experiments to increase his set’s reception power, Armstrong, then an electrical engineering student at Columbia University, devised an improvement over the existing Audion vacuum tube. ![]() His father sold Bibles and his mother was a schoolteacher, but from an early age Edwin Armstrong showed great aptitude for mechanical things, and by the time he was 14 he was set on a career in “wireless.” Like other amateur radio enthusiasts at the turn of the century, Armstrong put together crude sets from coils and tubes, and spent countless hours in his Yonkers, New York, home listening intently for the faint dots and dashes of faraway Morse code transmissions. His is a cautionary tale illustrating the power to cripple not just one man’s business, but an entire industry, when the state controls access to the basic resources that the industry develops. For Armstrong’s FM radio was nearly killed at birth by a combination of fearful competitors and government. What makes Armstrong’s centennial significant is that, more than any other person, he was responsible for the broadcasting revolution.ĭescribed as one of the last great free-lance “attic inventors,” Armstrong is credited not only with originating many of the devices that made it possible to transmit and receive long-distance radio signals, but also with developing one of the major modes of transmission-wide-channel frequency modulation, which we know popularly as FM.Īrmstrong’s story, however, goes beyond that of a great inventor cranking out new gadgets for the good of mankind from the isolation of a lab. Though his name is recognized by few today, his influence is literally all around us. This year marks the centennial of the birth of Edwin Howard Armstrong. ![]() Jorge Amador is a free-lance writer and editor of The Pragmatist, a current-affairs bimonthly. ![]()
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