© All Rights Reserved. Please do not distribute without written permission from Damn Interesting.
In 1934, much of the world was in the grip of the Great Depression. Unemployment was an epidemic, and many businesses struggled desperately to survive. One notable exception to these economic troubles, however, was the radio industry. Broadcasters in the US were making upwards of two billion dollars a year, and they owed much of their success to the innovations of a brilliant man named Edwin Armstrong. Twenty years earlier he had significantly improved the sensitivity and quality of radio receivers with his invention of the regenerative circuit in his junior year of college, and he went on to further improve them with his Super Regenerative circuit and Super Heterodyne receiver. These laid the foundation for the success of radio broadcasting— in fact, almost any radio you buy today will still incorporate these innovations. But in 1933, Armstrong brought about an even more revolutionary change in the broadcasting business: FM radio.
In spite of these brilliant technical achievements, Armstrong saw little financial benefit from his inventions. Many of his ideas were plundered by unscrupulous people, a trend which ultimately led to Armstrong’s tragic and premature death.
The first of Armstrong’s technology troubles began in 1922 when he lost a patent lawsuit for the rights to the regenerative circuit. A man named Lee De Forest had patented the same invention in 1916— two years after Armstrong’s patent was granted— and sold the rights to AT&T. A long and bitter legal dispute followed, which progressed all the way to the US Supreme Court. Utterly failing to grasp the technical facts in question, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of De Forest, and stripped Armstrong of his patent. Despite the scientific community’s certainty that Armstrong was the inventor of the regenerative circuit, Armstrong lost the patent battle which spanned twenty-one years, thirteen court rulings, and thirty judges.
In the meantime, between court appearances and legal meetings, Armstrong continued to innovate. He started to work on the “static problem” which plagued early radios, despite some colleague
