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September 7, 2027 will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast is going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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Television is more than moving pictures. There is sound, too. And the clear, static-free audio we take for granted owes its existence  to another of the electronics industry’s unsung heroes.

Popular as it was, radio in the 1920s suffered from one significant drawback. Atmospheric interference with radio signals often marred the reception with hum and crackle. 

Into the static-ridden world of radio came Edwin Armstrong.

Armstrong was instrumental in making radio a mass medium by virtue of two circuits that he invented: The ‘regenerative circuit‘ provided amplification; The ‘superheterodyne‘ circuit provided tuning.  Together, these breakthroughs helped radio evolve from its cats-whiskers-and-headphones infancy to a fixture in the world’s living rooms. 

When he sold his patents to the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in 1920, Armstrong became the company’s largest individual stockholder and a close friend of future CEO David Sarnoff. The two men often spent their evenings together in Sarnoff’s personal radio room, tuning in radio signals from around the world. One night Sarnoff wished aloud that somebody would invent a “little black box” that could eliminate all the static.  Ever the inventor, Armstrong took his friend’s wistful yearning as a personal challenge. 

Several years later, on January 11, 1935 Armstrong introduced his solution. But what Armstrong delivered was far more than a little black box. It was an entirely new kind of radio.

In its earliest form sound was encoded onto radio waves by causing fluctuations in the height of the wave.  That was called Amplitude Modulation, or AM.  

Instead of altering the height of the waves, Armstrong devised a way of encoding the audio by varying the spacing between them. The new method was called Frequency Modulation, or FM. 

Those who witnessed the first demonstrations of FM were stunned to hear crystal clear audio, entirely free of static, hiss, hum and crackle. Both music and speech came through as if they were being heard live in the same room. 

For David Sarnoff and RCA, Armstrong’s new kind of radio was as problematic as it was brilliant. Despite its obvious superiority, FM threatened to obsolesce all the radio equipment in the world. 

Furthermore, Sarnoff was determined to be remembered as the man who delivered television unto the world. By the time Armstrong introduced FM, Sarnoff had spent millions of dollars on RCA’s effort to evade Philo Farnsworth’s patents. The last thing he needed was a whole new kind of radio that would jeopardize RCA’s existing business.

Sarnoff faced three simultaneous challenges: First, he had to prove to RCA’s Board of Directors that there was a payoff coming for all the money he’d spent on television. Second, he wanted to forestall the adoption FM in order to maintain RCA’s domination in AM radio. And at the same time, he knew that the industry would have to use FM for the audio portion of television.

Only this time, Edwin Armstrong was not willing to sell his patents to RCA, as he had in 1920. And so begins one of the most tragic chapters in American tech history.

In 1941, the  National Television System Committee (NTSC) adopted the specifications that the nascent television industry needed to offer compatible hardware to the public.  In addition to 525 lines-per-frame and 30 frames-per-second for the video signal, the FCC mandated that FM be used for the audio portion of each TV channel.  

The adoption of television was put on hold with the advent of World War II, but once the war was over, the industry took off using those standards with little regard for Armstrong’s FM patents. 

Determined to earn his just rewards, Edwin Armstrong spent much of his fortune and the final years of his life in litigation with RCA. 

Broke and broken, the man once known for performing acrobatics atop his own towering radio antennas stepped out the window of his 13^th  floor Manhattan apartment on January 31, 1954. 

One of the most brilliant and accomplished inventors of the 20th century – a seminal figure in electronic communications – was dead at the age of 63, leaving his widow Marion to pursue his legacy for another decade.  

RCA did not settle with the Armstrong estate until 1967. But until television went entirely digital in 2009, the audio portion of every analog TV broadcast still relied on the technology he introduced in 1935. 

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