Major Edwin Howard Armstrong

Major Edwin Howard Armstrong, called "The Major" by his friends (and "Howard" by his relatives), (December 18, 1890 - January 31, 1954) was an American electrical engineer and inventor. He received an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University. He was one of early broadcasting's pioneers. Holder of 42 patents, a respected professor at Columbia University (which established a foundation in his memory in 1955), Howard Armstrong was passionately committed to the improvement of radio technology. And although we have all benefited greatly from his work, he is not remembered the way radio's other pioneers are-- for some odd reason, men like Guglielmo Marconi or David Sarnoff or even his hated rival Lee DeForest receive much more credit than Armstrong ever did.

Armstrong was the inventor of the FM radio. He also invented the Regenerative circuit (invented while he was a junior in college at Columbia University, and patented 1914), the Super-regenerative circuit (patented 1922), and the Super Heterodyne receiver (patented 1918). Many of Armstrong's inventions were ultimately claimed by others in patent lawsuits. Armstrong's life is both a story about the great inventions he brought about, and the tragedy wherein those inventions' rights were claimed by others.

In particular, the regenerative circuit, which Armstrong patented in 1914, 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. This patent lawsuit was the longest ever litigated to its date, at 12 years. Armstrong won the first round of the lawsuit, lost the second, and stalemated in a third. Before the United States Supreme Court, 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.

Even as the regeneration-circuit lawsuit continued, Armstrong created another momentous invention: frequency modulation (FM, patented in 1933). Rather than varying the amplitude of a radio wave to create sound, Armstrong's method varied the frequency of the wave instead. FM radio receivers proved to generate a much clearer