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no one powerful on the other side of
the change. The Causbys were just farmers. And though there were no doubt many like
them who were upset by the growing traffic in the air (though one hopes not many
chickens flew themselves into walls), the Causbys of the world would find it very hard to
unite and stop the idea, and the technology, that the Wright brothers had birthed. The

Wright brothers spat airplanes into the technological meme pool; the idea then spread like
a virus in a chicken coop; farmers like the Causbys found themselves surrounded by
"what seemed reasonable" given the technology that the Wrights had produced. They
could stand on their farms, dead chickens in hand, and shake their fists at these
newfangled technologies all they wanted. They could call their representatives or even
file a lawsuit. But in the end, the force of what seems "obvious" to everyone else--the
power of "common sense"--would prevail. Their "private interest" would not be allowed
to defeat an obvious public gain.
Edwin Howard Armstrong
is one of America's forgotten inventor geniuses. He came to the great American inventor
scene just after the titans Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. But his work in
the area of radio technology was perhaps the most important of any single inventor in the
first fifty years of radio. He was better educated than Michael Faraday, who as a
bookbinder's apprentice had discovered electric induction in 1831. But he had the same
intuition about how the world of radio worked, and on at least three occasions, Armstrong
invented profoundly important technologies that advanced our understanding of radio.
On the day after Christmas, 1933, four patents were issued to Armstrong for his most
significant invention--FM radio. Until then, consumer radio had been
amplitude-modulated (AM) radio. The theorists of the day had said that
frequency-modulated (FM) radio could never work. They were right about FM radio in a
narrow band of spectrum. But Armstrong discovered that frequency-modulated radio in a
wide band of spectrum would deliver an astonishing fidelity of sound, with much less
transmitter power and static.
On November 5, 1935, he demonstrated the technology at a meeting of the Institute of
Radio Engineers at the Empire State Building in New York City. He tuned his radio dial
across a range of AM stations, until the radio locked on a broadcast that he had arranged
from seventeen miles away. The radio fell totally silent, as if dead, and then with a clarity
no one else in that room had ever heard from an electrical device, it produced the sound
of an announcer's voice: "This is amateur station W2AG at Yonkers, New York,
operating on frequency modulation at two and a half meters."
The audience was hearing something no one had thought possible:
A glass of water was poured before the microphone in Yonkers; it sounded like a glass of
water being poured. . . . A paper was crumpled and torn; it sounded like paper and not
like a crackling forest fire. . . . Sousa marches were played from records and a piano solo
and guitar number were performed. . . . The music was projected with a live-ness rarely if
ever heard before from a radio "music box."
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As our own common sense tells us, Armstrong had discovered a vastly superior radio
technology. But at the time of his invention, Armstrong was working for RCA. RCA was
the dominant player in the then dominant AM radio market. By 1935, there were a
thousand radio stations across the United States, but the stations in large cities were all
owned by a handful of networks.
RCA's president, David Sarnoff, a friend of Armstrong's, was eager that Armstrong
discover a way to remove static from AM radio. So Sarnoff was quite excited when
Armstrong told him he had a device that removed static from "radio." But when
Armstrong demonstrated his invention, Sarnoff was not pleased.

I thought Armstrong would invent some kind of a filter to remove static from our AM
radio. I didn't think he'd start a revolution-- start up a whole damn new industry to
compete with RCA.
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Armstrong's invention threatened RCA's AM empire, so the company launched a
campaign to smother FM radio. While FM may have been a superior technology, Sarnoff
was a superior tactician. As one author described,
The forces for FM, largely engineering, could not overcome the weight of strategy
devised by the sales, patent, and legal offices to subdue this threat to corporate position.
For FM, if allowed to develop unrestrained, posed . . . a complete reordering of radio
power . . . and the eventual overthrow of the carefully restricted AM system on which
RCA had grown to power.
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RCA at first kept the technology in house, insisting that further