EDWIN HOWARD ARMSTRONG, born December 18, 1890, was pre-eminent electrical engineer, who through his extraordinary inventions, FM radio among them, contributed immeasurably to the advancement of wireless communications and broadcasting.
A brilliant engineer well ahead of his time, Edwin Armstrong fought all his life to champion the inventions that made modernradio possible. In contrast to many inventors (Edison included), Armstrong had a distinctly analytical mind. Instead of working by trial and error, he would proceed methodically toward identifying the root cause of a problem in order to find a path toward a solution. He placed his physical intuition above everything else, and in fact mistrusted results based only on mathematics; he knew well that those are only as good as the assumptions behind them, which do not always correctly model the physical world.
Edwin Howard Armstrong was born in Chelsea, New York City, in 1890. Shy as a child, perhaps because of a tic left by a bout of rheumatic fever, he often played alone. At fourteen, after his family moved to Yonkers, he became fascinated by the stories of great scientists and inventors, in particular those of Michael Faraday and Guglielmo Marconi. He resolved that he, too, would be an inventor. Like many boys his age at the beginning of the century, he became fascinated with the new art of wireless and began building crystal sets—the simple receivers that marked the beginning of the wireless age. Back then Morse code was the only thing one could listen to, and to make out the faint signals one had to wear headphones in a quiet room. He resolved to find a way to increase the volume of those signals and to pick them up from the greatest possible distance.
Armstrong graduated with a degree in electrical engineering in 1913 and was offered a position of assistant the same year. He hung a huge antenna between Philosophy, Havemeyer, and Schermerhorn halls and was able to demonstrate to an amazed Pupin reception of signals from as far away as Honolulu. More demonstrations followed, including one to a visiting group of engineers from American Marconi. This group included David Sarnoff ’66HON, who was to become Armstrong’s friend and, later, his nemesis. The beaming student tried to patent his invention. His father, worried that this sort of extracurricular activity would interfere with his son’s progress toward graduation, refused to give him the money. Armstrong had to borrow from relatives and friends and even had to sell his beloved red motorcycle—a high school graduation gift that he had been using to commute between Yonkers and Columbia. He applied for a patent in 1913, and this patent was issued the following year.
Armstrong was the victim of a world in which, as he eloquently put it, “men substitute words for realities, and then talk about the words.” Next time you turn on your FM radio or your cellular phone, think of that—and of him.In 1955, the Union Nationale des Télécommunications in Geneva added Armstrong’s name to the list of such great men of electricity and telecommunications as André-Marie Ampère, Alexander Graham Bell, Michael Faraday, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Heinrich Hertz, William Thomson Kelvin, Guglielmo Marchese Marconi, James Clerk Maxwell, Samuel F.B. Morse, Michael Pupin, and Nikola Tesla. A U.S. postal stamp was issued in his honor in 1983. He was inducted posthumously to the Consumer Electronics Association Hall of Fame in 2000, “in recognition of his contributions and pioneering spirit that have laid the foundation for consumer electronics.”
SOURCE: Columbia Univ. Mag.
Near Shore Radio 