In Memory of Maj. Edwin Howard Armstrong

Dec. 18, 1890 - Feb. 1, 1954

On the fiftieth anniversary of his death, fybush.com/NorthEast Radio Watch pauses from our usual routine for a few days to pay tribute to Major Edwin Howard Armstrong. one of the greatest inventors broadcasting - and the world as a whole - has ever known.

Armstrong would be remembered as a genius today even if his work had ceased with the invention of regeneration and the superheterodyne receiver, which made it possible to tune AM stations clearly and precisely in a time when most radio reception was hit-or-miss. But Armstrong went on from there to give the world the gift of frequency modulation.

Today, we take FM for granted. Four out of every five hours of radio listening today are to FM stations, the audio on our TV sets is FM, and FM is a fact of life in two-way radios as well. But when Major Armstrong stepped out of the 13th-floor window of a New York City hotel room in the early morning hours of February 1, half a century ago, the eventual success of FM was anything but a given.

In 1954, a New York City FM license could literally have been had for the asking - indeed, several stations had returned their licenses to the FCC in the last five years - but you'd have been hard-pressed to find anyone with a receiver to pick up the signal. Could Armstrong have imagined on that frigid night that within a generation, an FM station would be on top of the ratings in New York - or that 50 years later, the FM licenses that the FCC couldn't give away in 1954 would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars each?

(Indeed, less than two months after Armstrong's death, his associates signed off Armstrong's own FM station, W2XMN, for good, leaving the massive three-armed tower on the New Jersey Palisades standing to this very day as a legacy to the Major.)

And if his last years hadn't been wrapped up in lawsuit upon lawsuit - if he hadn't been driven to suicide by the avarice and competitive jealousy of his era's largest corporate broadcaster - what other gifts might Major Armstrong, just 63 years old, have given to the world in his remaining years?

We can only wonder...and mourn.

So before you click here for the rest of this week's fybush.com, we hope you'll spend a minute or two this weekend - as you flip on that "FM" dial in your car, perhaps? - to remember Major Armstrong, without whom broadcasting today would be unrecognizable.

(If you'd like to learn more about Major Armstrong, we heartily recommend Empire of the Air, by Tom Lewis; the companion Ken Burns documentary from 1992; the out-of-print Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong, by Lawrence Lessing; Donna Halper's brief biography on Barry Mishkind's Oldradio site; Mike Katzdorn's Armstrong site; the Armstrong Foundation; and our own Tower Site of the Week tribute to Armstrong's Alpine Tower, the living legacy of Armstrong's work, which proved its value again as a backup site for New York City TV and FM after September 11.)

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