Edwin Howard Armstrong

Edwin Howard Armstrong was a brilliant electrical engineer who invented two foundational radio technologies: the superheterodyne receiver and frequency modulation (FM) radio. The superheterodyne circuit is still used in nearly all modern radio and television receivers. His invention of FM radio provided static-free, high-fidelity audio.

Armstrong conducted much of his early research while he was a student and later a professor at Columbia University. He utilized the university's laboratories in New York City to develop his radio circuits. He eventually set up his own experimental FM transmission station in Alpine, New Jersey.

Armstrong's life ended tragically because he spent decades fighting massive, expensive legal battles against major corporations like RCA over FM radio patent rights. The legal and financial toll, combined with the feeling that his work was stolen, led to his suicide in 1954. He died without seeing the full commercial triumph of FM radio.

Armstrong first discovered the principles of frequency modulation and demonstrated it publicly in the mid-1930s. His 1933 patents laid out the wide-band FM system that drastically reduced static. It was a massive improvement over the dominant amplitude modulation (AM) technology of the time.