Genius but Weary

       Edwin Howard Armstrong. He has been my favorite topic, in lecture, so far. I’m a Psychology major as well as a Communications major so having some psychology in a communications topic was very interesting to me. Armstrong invented the regenerative circuit; although, he never received credit for it. In 1933, he was awarded a patent for inventing FM radio. According to lecture, Armstrong modulated a sequence instead of an amplitude making FM able to produce a much clearer sound (no static). Then comes the evil villain: the RCA. The Radio Corporation of America patented their own version of the FM. They denied Armstrong a massive fortune. And on 1954, Armstrong committed suicide. 

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.