According to a documentary entitled “Empire of the Air,” Edwin Armstrong attacked his wife one morning with a fireplace poker and struck her in the arm. She proceeded to move in with her sister, and Armstrong was much too troubled to find strength to face it all. He put on a full outfit and with a two-letter suicide note in his pocket, jumped out of the window into 13 stories of downward plunge. The New York Times recorded that his suicide letter concluded with, "God keep you and Lord have mercy on my Soul."
After his death, a friend of Armstrong estimated that 90 percent of his time was spent on litigation against RCA. Upon hearing the news, David Sarnoff, leader of the RCA, supposedly remarked, "I did not kill Armstrong." Edwin Howard Armstrong is a genius in the field of communication technologies, but his weariness ultimately took it's toll.