DX RX The Doctor of DX prescribes the answers to your problems, low and high, near and far. A how to of what for, by Mike(aka Billy)Graham, K7CTW

---

A Brief Historical Review of Amateur Radio in the U.S.
Part IV - E.H. Armstrong

In a previous installment of this series, we saw that by the early 1920s the commercial use of radio as a broadcast medium and its attendant monetary implications began to rapidly overtake and ultimately overshadow its use as a means of point-to-point wireless communications, or as an experimental medium for amateur enthusiasts

Clearly, the work and rivalry of Westinghouse Broadcasting and its nemesis, General Electric, the precursor to RCA, of which Sarnoff was to become its first Chairman, fueled the rapid development of commercial broadcasting, not only in the U.S., but throughout the world. And Lee deForest, with his invention of the Audion and some other subsequent work, was important. However, much of deForest's work has been tainted by scandal and by allegations of piracy of ideas from the work of others, most notably Armstrong. Only Armstrong's brilliant scientific work and researches stand out cleanly as having laid the foundation for the technical development of modern radio as we amateurs know it.

Edwin Howard Armstrong, the eldest of three children, was born on December 18, 1890 in New York City. His father, John Armstrong, was a salesman for the Oxford University Press in New York and eventually became Vice President of its American branch. His mother, Emily (Smith) Armstrong, was a former school teacher in the New York City school system. Both parents were strict Presbyterians and their lifestyle was upper middle-class with the strong Victorian influence of that period. These were people who believed in the "certainties of rock-solid Republican nationalism, financial mobility and stability, and the assurance of unlimited opportunity."³ In 1900 the family, together with Emily's extended family, relocated further up the Hudson to Yonkers to escape the city, crime, the influx of immigrants, and to nurse back to health the young Howard, who had been ill for several years. They chose two homes next to one another on a prominent bluff overlooking the Hudson River, and it was there that Howard Armstrong spent the remainder of his youth.

In 1904, after returning from a trip to the home office in London, Howard's father presented him with a book titled "The Boy's Book of Inventions: Stories of the Wonders of Modern Science". Apparently the book had a most powerful and immediate effect on young Howard, as he immediately decided to become an inventor. The following year his father brought him another book on inventions, and this one detailed the story of Marconi. In both books the authors stressed that an inventor's work was that of a gentleman whose inventions were for the good of mankind. Any work done which borrowed upon the work of others was always acknowledged and due credit was given. "The implications were clear: with the creations of the inventor, America would realize its true greatness in the new century."⁴ Ideally, these inventors worked alone or with a small team of personal assistants in a private laboratory, not in the giant conglomerate labs which would begin to dominate the commercial world of the twentieth century. There were great personal and financial rewards for the inventor who succeeded. It was in this idyllic setting of Victorian principles and ideals, together with the strong influence of the Presbyterian work ethic, that young Armstrong spent his formative years, and it was these influences which would govern his life, work, and his untimely death.

As a student at Yonkers High School, Armstrong began serious investigations into radio and built a 125-foot tower on the grounds of the family home. And as we previously discussed, in his Junior year at Columbia University, Armstrong made his first significant discovery, of regeneration and self-oscillation in audions. ⁵ In 1913 he received his engineering degree, filed for a patent on his invention, and returned to Columbia University as an instructor and assistant to professor Michael Pupin.

Extract from Regeneration Patent

It is interesting to note that, even though deForest had invented the audion (the first and only authentic invention of his), deForest was never able to satisfactorily explain how an audion operated. But because of the extensive and meticulous research Armstrong had done on the audion while developing his regenerative circuit, he was not only able to explain the action of the audion, but was the first to do so and published his findings in the Dec. 12, 1914 issue of Electrical World.

With the onset of World War I, Armstrong was commissioned an Officer in the Army, sent to Paris, and was assigned to research detecting very weak enemy signals. Investigating an earlier technique called heterodyning which had never been developed, Armstrong soon devised a complex receiver circuit with a sensitivity previously unheard of. This he called the superheterodyne circuit, and today it is still the basic circuit around which most receiver systems are designed and built. For his significant contributions to the art and the war effort, he was awarded France's Legion of Honor Medal and promoted to Major.

After the war, he returned to Columbia University. In 1920 he sold rights to his two major circuits to Westinghouse, and later sold rights on a lesser patent, the superregenerative circuit to the newly formed RCA Corporation. With the success of broadcast radio, he was soon a millionaire, but continued at Columbia, and later succeeded Pupin as Chair of the Electrical Engineering Department. With success came love, and he married Marion MacInnes, secretary to RCA Chairman, David Sarnoff, on December 1, 1923.

However, the 20s were times of great turmoil in broadcasting and more and more there were major corporate wars to control broadcasting. And Armstrong was soon embroiled in these battles. His original patents had been issued on Oct. 16, 1914. A year later, deForest filed for a patent on the same invention, which he sold, together with all rights to his audion, to AT&T. With the coming of the broadcast boom, AT&T mounted an all-out campaign to overturn Armstrong's patents in favor of deForest's. In a classic case of corporate greed, and of stupidity and ignorance on the part of the U.S. Supreme Court, Armstrong was to wage a 12-year legal battle to preserve his integrity and his rights to his patents, which he ultimately lost. It cost him millions of dollars, and he subsequently lost all trust of the court system and large corporations. The reclusive Armstrong became even more so over the ensuing years. These injustices, which affected his health, his marriage, and ultimately cost him his life, were not righted until a decade after his death.

Members of the scientific community stood behind Armstrong and would not accept the verdict of the Supreme Court. In a dramatic meeting following the ruling, the Institute of Radio Engineers, which had in 1918 awarded Armstrong its first Medal of Honor for his invention, refused to take the medal back. Reaffirming this action, the Franklin Institute in 1941 reviewed all the evidence and awarded Armstrong the highest honor in U.S. Science, the Franklin Medal.

Even as distrustful as he now was of the corporate world, he stubbornly continued his research work. In the late 1920s he began extensive studies into discovering what, if anything, could be done to eliminate the "bane" of radio - static. Lightning and man- made static easily and noisily interfere with amplitude-modulated signals. Armstrong became convinced that the only solution was to devise an entirely new system, one which modulated the signal carrier and held the amplitude of the carrier at a constant value. And once again, as we have seen so many other times before, the scientific community held that such a frequency-modulated (FM) system would be useless for communications. Undeterred by these pronouncements, Armstrong set out to disprove them and, using his own money, in 1933 he built an experimental broadcast system, and began transmitting from atop the Empire State Building. In a series of tests extending from May of 1934 through October of 1935, the system was proven to be far superior to AM, eliminating static and providing Hi-Fi quality audio at the receiver. On November 5, 1935 Armstrong presented a paper to the New York Chapter of the Institute of Radio Engineers, announcing his discovery. Try as he might, however, the radio industry was not ready to accept FM. The U.S. was in the midst of the great depression, and the implication of the new system was that all the previously-built AM transmitters and receivers would have to be scrapped in favor of the new FM system. Additionally, the new system occupied 200 KHz of bandwidth, whereas AM signals only occupied 10 KHz. Undaunted, Armstrong built a 400-foot high tower on the Palisades of New Jersey at Alpine, across the Hudson from his family home in Yonkers, and finally received a license to begin transmitting commercial FM signals in the greater New York area following another 2-year battle with the FCC. The FCC allocated a 3 MHz band, 41-44 MHz, for the FM broadcast stations, and radio station W2XMN (later KE2XCC) went "on the air" on July 18, 1939 with a power of 30 KW.

W2XMN 400' Turnstile FM Tower

At the same time, Armstrong had been approached by the Army Signal Corps to adapt FM to mobile military communications. He spent the next two years volunteering his services at no cost to them. During World War II, he devised a highly superior long-range FM radar system for the services, but development of that system did not conclude until after the war.

Following the war, the FCC decided that the FM band would have to relocate to the 88- 108 MHz range, rendering obsolete 50 transmitters and half a million FM receivers. But the setback was short-lived. Soon all companies, save RCA and its child NBC, were paying royalties to Armstrong.

But the cost of maintaining his research center to remain free from corporate control was such that he was slowly going broke. He decided to sue RCA and NBC for patent infringements on his five basic FM patents, and on July 22, 1948 he went to court for the first time. The legal battle was exhausting and bitter, and Armstrong continued drawing inward more and more.

In what seemed like the last blow, Marion Armstrong left her husband of 30 years in November of 1953, and went to live with her sister in Connecticut. She could no longer cope with his constant legal battles and worsening personality. Only later did she learn of the extent of his financial straits.

No longer able to deal with the pressure, on January 31, 1954 Armstrong leapt to his death from his 13th floor apartment in Manhattan. And with his death came the expected closing of his beloved Alpine station on the Palisades. It ceased operation March 6, 1954 with the following remarks:

"This is Station KE2XCC at Alpine, New Jersey, concluding a special program in memory of Major Edwin H. Armstrong. This is the last program of our 15 years of broadcasting. To our faithful audience of music lovers we say: 'Thanks for your attention and your letters of praise and criticism. Good-bye and Good luck.'

As we now prepare to pull the switch and shut the station down, we salute the memory of Edwin Howard Armstrong." ⁶

..........And so do we.

¹ "DX Rx", Michael G. Graham, K7CTW, Nashua Area Radio Club, Oct. 1999.

² "Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio", Tom Lewis, 1991, Edward Burlingame Books, HarperCollins

³ ibid., p. 58.

⁴ ibid., p. 57

⁵ "DX Rx", Michael G. Graham, K7CTW, Nashua Area Radio Club, Sept. 1999.

⁶ The Harry Houck collection of E.H. Armstrong documents - excerpts from the Log of Radio KE2XCC, March 6, 1954.

Back to In this issue...