Format Lore

Major Armstrong, static slayer, and the patent battles that almost broke radio

Whenever I tune out an elevator playlist by streaming to my bluetooth headphones, I try to remember that Edwin Howard “Major” Armstrong was climbing masts in the snow so we could have that luxury.¹ He was the engineer who treated radio noise like a villain in a YA novel—one that could be defeated with persistence, a soldering iron, and occasionally a courtroom. So let’s fast-walk through his greatest hits in a rapid-fire listicle.

1. He invented the regenerative circuit because static was rude. In 1912 Armstrong looped a radio signal back through its own vacuum tube, turning faint transmissions into something loud enough to hear—basically inventing radio gain control while still in college.²
2. Superheterodyne receivers were his “what if we just remix the frequency?” moment. During WWI he mixed incoming radio waves with a locally generated signal, shifting everything to an intermediate frequency that was easier to filter. Every modern tuner still does this. Your car stereo owes him gas money.¹
3. FM radio wasn’t an accident, it was a rebellion. Armstrong wanted to erase static, so he pushed frequency modulation—huge deviation swings, quiet noise floor, richer bandwidth—while everyone else was clinging to AM because it was “good enough.”³
4. David Sarnoff and RCA were the final bosses. RCA loved Armstrong when he was inventing patents they could license. But when FM threatened their AM empire, Sarnoff allegedly slow-walked adoption and challenged Armstrong’s claims. It’s giving “we love innovation, unless it messes with our business model.”⁴
5. The Supreme Court said “nah” to his regeneration patent…after 20+ years. Lee de Forest argued he came up with regeneration first; decades of litigation ended with the Court siding against Armstrong in 1934, erasing royalties he’d counted on.²
6. He literally built a demo network to prove FM worked. Unable to get national support, Armstrong funded experimental station W2XMN in Alpine, New Jersey, stringing transmitters across the Hudson so people could hear hiss-free broadcasts for themselves.³
7. The patent suits drained him more than the engineering did. By 1953 he was juggling infringement cases against RCA and others, spending millions in legal fees. The technical victories felt Pyrrhic when the courtroom became the real battlefield.⁴
8. Legacy check: the entire FM dial is basically a thank-you note. After his death, his widow continued the lawsuits and eventually won settlements, and the FM band blossomed worldwide—proof that even when corporations drag their feet, good ideas eventually get airtime.¹

Armstrong’s story is messy and heroic: a guy who loved clean waveforms so much he took on the biggest broadcast conglomerate on Earth. The next time you dodge static by tapping a preset, know that a Major already fought that war for you.