Patent Problems and Intellectual Property: “The Indigestion of Success”

Aside from love, one of the great emotions humans can experience is the thrill of discovery and achievement – being the first to reveal more of nature’s immutable laws governing the cosmos or doing something no one else has been able to do. Some aspects of life inevitably go together – a coupling of cause-and-effect, if you will. Sometimes, we simply cannot have one thing without another. The claim that “there is a price to be paid for everything” seems a truism which ably illustrates that contention of coupled cause-and-effect. In that vein, man’s finest intellectual achievements or physical accomplishments materialize only after significant vested effort is expended. Our personal life experiences leave no doubt that hard work is a necessary, though not sufficient, prerequisite for great success…in any venue. We understand that. Not so obvious is the other price often associated with intellectual achievement and intellectual property, a price which is extracted after the fact – the tedious, ongoing, and costly effort required to establish and maintain the legal rights to the intellectual property behind any significant achievement.

I call this second price to be paid for success “the indigestion of success” which is often so severe as to result literally in ulcers if not merely pervasive, never-ending discontent.

The “indigestion of success” begins with proving one’s priority of invention while establishing patent rights, and it continues seemingly forever while vigilantly protecting those rights against usurpers. The motivation to defend one’s intellectual property is typically financial, but, understandably, the battle becomes distinctly a matter of personal principle as we will see…and the consequences can be tragic. It is difficult to overstate the high price – both financially and emotionally – of defending intellectual property and priority, yet this surcharge on success is inevitably demanded of inventors, engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs. The list of such examples is varied and fascinating, stretching far back in recorded history. Gaileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, and Michael Faraday, three of the greatest physicists of all time were each affected by priority controversies during their careers – especially Newton, as we shall see. In the realms of engineering and business, Thomas Edison, Howard Armstrong (radio’s greatest inventor/engineer), Robert Noyce (of integrated circuit fame), and Steve Jobs of Apple Computer were all enveloped by priority controversies and patent battles. Even the Wright brothers, the well-documented founders of modern aviation paid a stiff price defending their marvelous invention, the controllable “flying machine.”

The Wright Brothers: Hard Work, Triumph, then Disillusionment

I just finished reading David McCullough’s new book, The Wright Brothers, which relates the incredible story of the two brothers from Dayton, Ohio – bicycle mechanics/salesmen who created the first true “flying machine”…in their spare time! McCullough is a consummate teller of true stories, but the story of these two men tests the line separating fact from fiction because their stunning success seemed so improbable. The truth is, the Wright Brothers “invented” and successfully flew the first full-sized, self-powered, controllable airplane – a staggering accomplishment for two young men with no formal technical credentials. Their ultimate success was rooted in a fascination at the prospect of manned flight coupled with a single-minded, driven determination to do whatever it takes to accomplish their dream of flying. The two brothers constitute the very best examples of self-made men… engineers and flyers, in their case. Their accomplishments are so thoroughly documented as to seem unassailable and safe from thieves who would steal in the courts of patent law, yet it was not quite that simple. It never is. Author McCullough paints a clear picture on his pages of just how technically challenging their task actually was. What also emerges is the sad turn of events their triumph became once the airplane was designed, tested, documented, and patented. Wilbur Wright, the brilliant engineering mind for whom no technical challenge seemed too large, died early in 1912 at the young age of forty-five years. The official cause of death was typhoid fever, but it seems Wilbur’s spirit was dying for quite some time before his body expired. In May of 1910, the brothers, who did all their own flying from the project’s onset in 1900, went up together in their Wright Flyer for the very first time – some seven years after Orville’s first flight at Kitty Hawk. Their disciplined methodology throughout the project dictated that, should there be an accident, at least one of them should survive to carry on the work. Their flight together that day seemed their tacit acknowledgement that they had completed their life’s dream; all that remained was to form and grow a profitable company which would carry on their work and insure a comfortable livelihood for the brothers and their immediate relatives.

By 1912, two years had passed since Wilbur Wright had last done what he truly loved to do: Piloting the Wright Flyer while perfecting its design. His weeks and months the past two years were spent on business trips to New York and Washington and in courtrooms defending the patent portfolio he and Orville had assembled as the backbone of their new Wright Company… for the manufacture of airplanes. In author McCullough’s account, Orville took note of Wilbur’s restless discontent with the tedium and exasperations of establishing their company, noting that after a day spent in offices dealing with business and patent matters, Wilbur would “come home white.”

Wilbur, himself, wrote of the patent entanglements: “When we think of what we might have accomplished if we had been able to devote this time to experiments, we feel very sad, but it is always easier to deal with things than with men, and no one can direct his life entirely as he would choose.”

Within several years of Wilbur’s death, Orville Wright had sold the Wright Company to others, preferring a peaceful, retiring life to one spent constantly battling corporate demons and those who would usurp the brothers’ past and future accomplishments. His mission for the remainder of his long life: To represent his brother while defending the less materialistic aspects of the Wright brothers’ legacy. I believe I would have done precisely the same, were I in his shoes. Other notable, historical figures in similar circumstances made sadly different decisions when faced with the indigestion of success and the never-ending need to protect intellectual property. The two examples that follow vividly illustrate just how bad these matters of priority and intellectual property can become, especially for the most-principled of participants.

Edwin Howard Armstrong: Radio’s Greatest Inventor/Engineer and Tragic Victim of His Own Success and the Patent System

For radio and electrical engineers who know the history, Edwin Howard Armstrong is the tragic hero of early “wireless” and a victim of the radio empire which he helped to create. Howard Armstrong was the quintessential radio engineer’s engineer – bright, motivated, creative…and stubbornly persistent. He exuded personal integrity. The very qualities which made him the greatest inventor/engineer in the history of radio, led to his downfall and suicide in 1954. Howard Armstrong surfaced in 1912 as a senior electrical engineering major at Columbia University with an obsessive interest in the infant science of “wireless” radio. He was a fine student with a probing, independent mind that suffered no fools. In 1912, while living at home in nearby Yonkers, New York, and commuting daily to Columbia on an Indian-brand motorcycle, he invented a way to greatly increase signal amplification using a single De Forest Audion vacuum tube by feeding part of the tube’s marginally amplified output back to the input of the device where it was amplified over and over again. This technique is now known in the trade as “regeneration,” or positive feedback. Along the way, young Armstrong had made great strides in understanding the technology behind Lee De Forest’s recent invention of the Audion tube, insights far beyond those De Forest himself had offered. While tinkering with the idea of signal regeneration in his bedroom laboratory early on the morning of September 22, 1912, he achieved much greater signal amplification from the Audion than was possible without using regeneration. The entire household was abruptly awakened by young Armstrong’s unrestrained excitement over his discovery, and an important discovery it was for the infant science of “wireless radio.” Regeneration was patented by Armstrong in 1913/14 and was used, under license from him, in countless radios during the early years when radio sets with more than one tube were very expensive to produce, due to the high cost of tubes.

Armstrong’s 1914 patent on the regenerative receiving circuit – one of the foundations of early wireless radio and a gateway to efficient tube-based radio transmitters, as well. Armstrong’s historic, handwritten chronological account of inventing the regenerative circuit – page one of six; likely written around 1920 to serve as evidence in the litigation with De Forest over Armstrong’s regeneration patent. Note the Sept. 22, 1912 date of his triumph (near the bottom).

In 1914, Lee De Forest stepped forward to challenge Armstrong in court over Armstrong’s patent, claiming that he, De Forest, was the legitimate inventor of regeneration. The litigation in the court system over regeneration went back and forth, lasting twenty years and finally ending up in the United States Supreme Court. Shockingly, De Forest was handed the final decision by the court, but the substantial body of radio engineers across the nation in 1934, who were well aware of the “radio art” and its history, were not buying De Forest’s claim. They fully supported Armstrong as the legitimate inventor – the same view held today. The twenty-year patent litigation battle over regeneration was the longest in U.S. patent court history. Unfortunately, that was only the beginning of Armstrong’s troubles with the patent courts and those who would take advantage of his work.

The Tragedy of Edwin Howard Armstrong

Howard Armstrong was one of the last, great, lone-inventor/engineers. He was long affiliated with his alma-mater, Columbia University, and had extensive business/patent dealings with giant corporations, such as RCA and Philco, which drew their life-blood from his inventions and the industry which he helped to create. By licensing his many important patents to these corporations, Armstrong became a very wealthy man. At one time, he was the largest stockholder in the giant RCA Corporation. Despite such wide-spread affiliations, he was, by temperament, an independent thinker in the lone-inventor mold. As radio entered the late nineteen thirties, men-of-action like Armstrong were becoming obsolete, increasingly overrun by corporate bureaucracies and their in-house armies of engineers. Radio was now out of the hands of the lone-inventor, becoming the exclusive domain of the moneyed corporations with influence at the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) in Washington. Armstrong increasingly found himself defending his legitimate patent rights against large corporations which were treading on those rights, battling their great financial resources and their legions of corporate lawyers. As he continued to lose rightful patent royalties to corporate violations of his patents, he stubbornly fought back fueled by his personal principles of fair play, all the while dissipating his once-great financial security to fund the necessary lawyer’s fees. Armstrong was a man of principled integrity; he could have capitulated, retreated, retired comfortably, and lived out his life, but he chose to fight.

Ultimately, those ceaseless legal battles wore him down, bankrupted him, and destroyed his long marriage. On May 5, 1954, he stepped from his New York apartment window to his death thirteen stories below. In an ironic sense, he fell victim to the industry and the changing times he helped to create. He also was victimized by the very qualities which made him great: Intellectual independence, principled integrity, and the stubborn will to persevere. There are many lessons to be learned from Howard Armstrong’s life-story. The lone crusader was crushed by the corporate “Goliaths” he helped create. Final postscript: After Armstrong’s death, his estranged wife, Marion, took up her husband’s ongoing patent battles with the Goliaths of the radio industry. She eventually prevailed in every single case!

Inventor of the Calculus: Isaac Newton or the German Mathematician, Gottfried Leibniz?

History’s most ardent defender of his intellectual property also happened to be the greatest scientist/mathematician of all time, Sir Isaac Newton. As vindictive as he was brilliant, Newton waged one of history’s most vicious priority battles with Gottfried Leibniz over credit for the development of the calculus, that ubiquitous, indispensable mathematical tool of the engineer and scientist. Newton formulated its fundamentals in 1665/66, the famous “miracle year” spent at his mother’s homestead in isolation from the great plague which swept through England at the time. Newton’s peerless scientific self-discipline tended to completely desert him when challenged by others on matters of intellectual priority which he felt belonged to him. Leibniz and Robert Hooke were two men who famously felt the full force of Newton’s rage in such matters. For Newton and his circumstances, there was no real money at stake – only prestige and ego, and Newton’s ego was well-developed… and sensitive. Today, both Newton and Leibniz are credited with independently developing the calculus – essentially true, although it appears certain that Leibniz had unauthorized access to some of Newton’s early personal papers on the subject. In that sense, Newton is regarded as the “primary” developer of calculus. Leibniz never quite recovered from the savage and telling effects of Newton’s vindictiveness which was well publicized in scientific circles and which reduced the great Newton to unprincipled deceits in his efforts to discredit his rival. In Newton’s mind, much more was at stake than mere money: For him, personal satisfaction and the ego-satisfying prospect of scientific immortality were far more important motivators. In his defense, one could argue that, for Newton, the long-term stakes riding on his efforts to receive due credit for his brilliance were much higher than most. Nevertheless, when all was said and done, Newton’s personal reputation suffered significantly even if his scientific reputation remained unsullied over the dispute with Leibniz.

What Would You Do?

If you were ever in the position of enjoying a significant personal success that had already conferred substantial wealth upon you, yet huge wealth beckons you or whoever else takes the enterprise still further – what would you do? Like Orville did, I would have heeded Bishop Milton Wright’s early admonition to his children (paraphrased here) that greed is bad and leads to grief; be content with sufficient money to sustain a comfortable life and require nothing more beyond that than the normal pleasures of life and living. The Bishop also warned against temper and ego. The Bishop was a very wise man; the brothers received some very informed guidance.

 “If I were giving a young man advice as to how he might succeed in life, I would say to him, pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio.”

 – Wilbur Wright

Click here to get to last week’s post, The Brothers Wright had “The Right Stuff”

Michael Pupin: From Immigrant to Inventor

I love a success story built on hunger, determination, and hard work. There are few immigrant stories more evocative than that of a young Serbian sheepherder who arrived in New York in March of 1874. To afford a steerage ticket aboard the ship Westphalia sailing from Hamburg, young Mihajlo Idvorsky Pupin had to sell “my books, my watch, my clothes, including the yellow sheepskin coat and the black sheepskin cap.” He arrived alone at Castle Garden, New York, with the clothes on his back, a red fez cap, a few changes of underwear, and five cents in his pocket. There was no money left to purchase a blanket and mattress for his steerage bunk, and, based on  images he had seen of half-naked Indians in New York State, he counted on being warm enough there even without his prized sheepskin coat. He almost froze to death crossing the Atlantic; hugging a warm smokestack on Westphalia’s deck during cold sleepless nights on the ocean was all that saved him.

   

His autobiography, From Immigrant to Inventor, was published by Scribners in 1924 and won the Pulitzer Prize. Over the years, the book has had multiple editions and many printings. My first copy of the book was the 1930 ninth printing of the second (popular) edition. A number of years ago, I purchased the 1924 third reprint of the first edition – a nicer copy, one signed by the author at Princeton (most certainly at the University) in Jan.,1926.

        

That Princeton signature in my copy of the book evokes vivid images in my mind for the reasons which I now relate. In 1914, forty years after arriving penniless in America, Pupin was invited to Princeton to deliver a talk on the subject of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia – an important topic bearing on the outbreak of World War One. While there, Pupin pointed out to his host at Princeton the campus elm tree in front of venerable Nassau Hall under which, almost forty years prior, a wandering, road-weary immigrant paused for a sun-dappled nap after spending his last coins on a small loaf of bread. He recalled in his autobiography: “After finishing the loaf, I basked in the warm rays of the mellow April sun, and fell asleep and dreamed that in the building where the students went there was a large assembly of people who had gathered there for the purpose of conferring some academic honor upon me.”

Nassau Hall (1756) – Princeton University

The dream was eerily prescient; by 1914, Pupin was on the faculty of Columbia University in New York, having graduated from there on an academic/athletic scholarship with honors in 1883, nine years after arriving in America. He subsequently earned a PhD  in physics at the University of Berlin, studying under Hermann von Helmholtz, one of the finest minds of nineteenth-century physics. Pupin returned to Columbia University in 1899, lecturing in mathematical physics. He was instrumental in forming Columbia’s new department of electrical engineering – a portent of things to come in applied science.

In addition to joining the faculty at Columbia University in 1899, Pupin won fame and fortune at the turn of the century by incorporating into telegraph transmission lines what were then called “Pupin coils.” Long transmission lines suffer signal loss and distortion, and Pupin’s implementation of a new idea, originally proposed by Oliver Heaviside, minimized the deleterious effects thus making long-distance lines feasible. This was mother’s milk for the infant technology of telecommunications. The purchase of Pupin’s patent by AT&T insured his fame…and, indeed, his fortune.

Michael Pupin was a scientific man of extraordinary character, vision, and energy – a romantic poet, too. I read From Immigrant to Inventor  a number of years ago, and now, as I thumb through the book to refresh my memory for this post, I see I shall need to read it again. Many pearls of wisdom and insight greet my eyes as I scan the book. His thoughts and observations resonate so completely with me. For example, he also maintains that a major catalyst behind any serious study of science and mathematics is humanity’s desire to grasp the eternal “truths” inherent in nature – those natural laws which apply everywhere and always. Their true essence never changes – never becomes “obsolete;” only our incomplete, most recent interpretations of natural law change while being honed to an ever- sharper edge as we cut our way closer and closer to the bone of nature’s ultimate secrets. To know and understand nature’s laws is to grasp a subset of the greater body of eternal “Truth” which so motivates religious endeavors.

Pupin rubbed elbows with Presidents Harding and Wilson and accumulated many significant honors during his lifetime. But his story is not defined by the “end game.” His real story is the road traveled, his elevation from penniless immigrant to a man who led such a productive life while influencing so much in twentieth-century America.

One of his star pupils at Columbia in the electrical engineering department was radio’s greatest engineer/inventor, Edwin Howard Armstrong. In 1912, as a senior at Columbia, Armstrong made one of the most important discoveries in radio’s long history – the usefulness of signal “regeneration” in radio receivers and in radio transmitters. He undoubtedly was guided somewhat by Pupin’s recent revelations regarding electric “tuning circuits.” The account of Armstrong’s discovery of regeneration – written in his own hand – mentions explaining his new, vastly improved radio receiver to Professor Pupin. For me, this document is a dramatic linkage between two of the most influential people in the history of radio and communications… with Columbia University as the stage-setting.

Near the bottom of the page:

“18. Sept. 1913. Explained operation of receiver to Prof. Pupin.
19. Oct. 1913. Demonstrated reception of signals from arc station at San Francisco to
Prof. Morecroft.”

I wonder if that elm tree is still there, in front of Princeton’s Nassau Hall!

Postscript: For more on Edwin Howard Armstrong and the history of radio, see the blog archives for my post of Nov. 24, 2013, Radio! The “World In a Box”; How It Came to Be  (click on link). 

Radio! The “World In a Box”; How It Came to Be

Imagine what life was like before there was a radio in every home! Society was accustomed to quiet evenings and self-entertainment – not all bad! News from the outside world was slow in coming. The advent of radio changed everything.

The Crosley “Pup,” is a one-tube radio introduced by the Crosley Corporation in 1925. Battery-powered and designed for earphone listening, the Pup retailed for $9.75! Its Armstrong regenerative circuit was manufactured under patent license from Edwin Howard Armstrong, radio’s greatest inventor/engineer. The particular working example, pictured here, came from my wife’s aunt and uncle after a major garage-sweep. Her aunt’s father brought this very radio home one evening in the mid nineteen-twenties; it brought the “world” and the magic of radio into the family household when “wireless” was still new.

Well before radio’s debut, Samuel Morse’s telegraph sent that famous first code message: “What hath God wrought,” over the Baltimore to Washington DC telegraph line in 1844 – using the dots and dashes of his own “Morse code.” Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone invention was first demonstrated in 1876 by Bell transmitting his spoken message to a nearby assistant over a telephone line: “Mr. Watson – come here – I want to see you.”

Those technologies were important steps in what was yet to come, but it was “wireless” radio that left giant footprints on America’s social fabric; radio was the great leap forward that led to the age of communication and life as we know it today.

Music, News, Entertainment! Radio Changed the Way We Live
The Beginnings of Mass Communication

Whereas radio’s inventor, the Italian, Guglielmo Marconi, visualized his brainchild as a point-to-point communications channel – much like the telegraph line or a pair of walkie-talkies in the hands of two individuals, others quickly saw radio’s real potential in “broadcasting.” The term derives from the farmer’s field during planting season where seeds for the year’s crops were “broadly cast” far and wide from a point-source…the farmer as he walked through the field. The concept of a point-source (radio transmitter) broadcasting far and wide to a large receiving audience was quickly adopted as radio stations rapidly came on the air. This application of radio soon morphed into a huge commercial enterprise which would see such icons as RCA, Philco, ABC, CBS, and NBC become household names. Other names like Edgar Bergin and Charlie McCarthy, Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, the Lone Ranger, and Jack Armstrong also became part of the national consciousness, joined later by the great big-band leaders, Goodman, Miller, Dorsey, and Shaw. Later, President Franklin Roosevelt used the airwaves and his fire-side chats to mobilize America’s resolve through the depression years.

Marconi first demonstrated wireless radio (Morse-code telegraphy) in 1896. The first wireless transmission of music and the human voice was heard on Christmas Eve, 1906, courtesy of an important radio pioneer, Reginald Fessenden. It took ten more years for technology developments in “wireless” to reach the critical mass necessary to birth the broadcasting industry. Two major technical developments occurred within those ten years which spurred radio’s meteoric rise and changed society forever. 

The “Audion” Vacuum Tube Amplifier/Oscillator

Most people have heard of “crystal set” radios. These were early receivers of radio signals which were “passive” in nature (no external power source), and very popular with young boys in radio’s early days. These receivers relied on unique electrical properties of natural crystal materials such as Galena to rectify and detect weak radio waves, rendering them suitable for earphone listening in the process. There was no amplification available in crystal sets to boost the weak signals from the receiving antenna, hence their performance was very poor.

Enter Lee De Forest and his Audion vacuum tube in 1906. De Forest is familiar to anyone knowledgeable about early radio. Although he was a central figure in early “wireless,” he is also regarded as somewhat of a “wheeler-dealer” and a charlatan by many who know the complete history. The short version of the story centers on his introduction of the Audion vacuum tube in 1906, an “active” (battery-powered) device which, after subsequent design improvements, provided the signal amplification/detection qualities necessary for radio to become practical. In the view of many, De Forest did not understand the workings, from an engineering point of view, of his own invention!

Edwin Howard Armstrong, “Explainer” of the Audion Tube and  Inventor of “Regeneration,” the Second Great Advance in Radio.
Howard Armstrong: The Tragic Victim of a Passing Age

For radio and electrical engineers who know the history, Edwin Howard Armstrong is the tragic hero of early “wireless” and a victim of the radio empire which he helped to create. He was the quintessential radio engineer’s engineer – bright, motivated, creative…and stubbornly persistent. He exuded personal integrity. The very qualities which made him the greatest inventor/engineer in the history of radio, led to his downfall and suicide in 1954.

Howard Armstrong surfaced in 1912 as a senior electrical engineering major at Columbia University with an obsessive interest in the infant science of “wireless” radio. He was a fine student with a probing, independent mind that suffered no fools. In 1912, while living at home in nearby Yonkers, New York, and commuting daily to Columbia on an Indian-brand motorcycle, he invented a way to greatly increase signal amplification using a single De Forest Audion tube by feeding part of the tube’s marginally amplified output back to the input of the device where it was amplified over and over again. This technique is now known in the trade as “regeneration,” or positive feedback. Along the way, young Armstrong had made great strides in understanding the technology behind De Forest’s Audion tube, insights far beyond those De Forest himself had offered. While tinkering with the idea of signal regeneration in his bedroom laboratory early on the morning of September 22, 1912, he achieved much greater signal amplification from the Audion than was possible without using regeneration. The entire household was abruptly awakened by young Armstrong’s unrestrained excitement over his discovery.

Regeneration was patented by Armstrong in 1913/14 and was used, under license from him, in countless radios during the early years when radio sets with more than one tube were very expensive to produce, due to the high cost of tubes. By 1914, De Forest stepped forward to challenge Armstrong in court over Armstrong’s patent, claiming that he, De Forest, was the legitimate inventor of regeneration. The litigation in the court system over regeneration lasted twenty years, finally ending in the United States Supreme Court. Shockingly, De Forest was handed the final decision by the court, but the substantial body of radio engineers across the nation in 1934, who were well aware of the “radio art” and its history, were not buying De Forest’s claim. They fully supported Armstrong as the legitimate inventor. The twenty-year patent litigation battle over regeneration was the longest in U.S. patent court history.

Here is the historic account of his invention, written in Armstrong’s own hand around 1920, the first page of an eight-page account of his discovery of regeneration – undoubtedly used to document his court-case.

 

At the bottom of the page, Armstrong sums up his triumph that morning:
“Great amplification obtained at once.”

Armstrong went on to make several major contributions to the radio art. The super-heterodyne receiver he designed in 1918 became the universal radio configuration for decades to come due to its superior performance. Through patent licenses with Armstrong, the super-het made RCA, the Radio Corporation of America, the biggest manufacturer in that highly profitable market, and it made Armstrong the largest stockholder of RCA during its early days of corporate glory and immense profitability in the mid-to-late nineteen-twenties.

Developing the System of FM (Frequency Modulation) Broadcasting

Incredibly, twenty-one years after harnessing regeneration, Armstrong went on to make yet another giant contribution to the radio art: FM (frequency modulation) broadcasting. In 1933, in the true tradition of the independent, lone-inventor, which he was, Armstrong introduced the entirely new system of FM broadcasting. Most radio engineers had said for years: “Radio static, like the poor, will always be with us.” The traditional AM (amplitude modulation) system of broadcasting suffered mightily in those early days of low transmitter power and poor reception from the annoying effects of static. Engineers had worked for years on the problem, to no avail. Armstrong took a very different and unlikely approach using wideband frequency modulation. In his revolutionary FM system, static was very greatly reduced. He, virtually by himself, designed and built the wideband FM system which was successfully demonstrated from the top of the Empire State Building in 1935 – essentially the same FM system we use today – a most remarkable achievement.

The Tragedy of Edwin Howard Armstrong

Howard Armstrong was one of the last, great, lone-inventor/engineers. He was long affiliated with his alma-mater, Columbia University, and had extensive business/patent dealings with giant corporations, such as RCA and Philco, which drew their life-blood from his inventions and the industry which he helped to create.  Despite such wide-spread affiliations, he was, by temperament, an independent thinker in the lone-inventor mold. As radio entered the late nineteen thirties, men-of-action like Armstrong were becoming obsolete, increasingly overrun by corporate beauracracies and their in-house armies of engineers. Radio was now out of the hands of the lone-inventor, becoming the exclusive domain of the moneyed corporations with influence at the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) in Washington.

Armstrong increasingly found himself defending his legitimate patent rights against large corporations, battling their great financial resources and their legions of corporate lawyers. As he continued to lose rightful patent royalties due to corporate violations of his patents, he stubbornly fought back, dissipating his once-great financial security to fund the necessary lawyer’s fees. Armstrong was a man of principled integrity; he could have capitulated, retreated, retired comfortably, and lived out his life, but he chose to fight.

Ultimately, those ceaseless legal battles wore him down, bankrupted him, and destroyed his long marriage. On May 5, 1954, he stepped from his New York apartment window to his death thirteen stories below. In an ironic sense, he fell victim to the industry and the changing times he helped to create. He also was victimized by the very qualities which made him great: Intellectual independence, principled integrity, and the stubborn will to persevere. There are many lessons to be learned from Howard Armstrong’s life-story. The lone crusader was crushed by the corporate “Goliaths”  he helped create. 

Postscript and Recommendation: Ken Burns’ Empire of the Air

If you would like to know more about the early history of radio, De Forest, Armstrong, and David Sarnoff of RCA, the Ken Burns DVD documentary feature, Empire of the Air, is outstanding. The history of early radio unfolds as a back-drop to the fascinating stories of the three cited individuals – all of this presented with an historical emphasis on radio’s influence on America. The film is illuminating and highly entertaining, not merely as the history of radio, but as a commentary on life in early twentieth-century America. The DVD is based on the book of the same name by Tom Lewis – also highly recommended.

In the Burns documentary, Armstrong’s niece is interviewed in her middle-age. As a young girl in 1912, she was awakened that night in the Armstrong household, the night he made his discovery of regeneration, and she describes the excitement. She added, “It makes me sad that his name isn’t better known. When I tell people my uncle invented radio….they ask, ‘Who was your uncle?’ When I say, Edwin Howard Armstrong, they say, ‘Who?’”

That makes me sad, too, motivating me to write this post – not just to benefit his memory, but to share his poignant story with you; there are so many life-lessons to digest. He was instrumental, through his genius and perseverance, in changing the way we live our lives today… big-time. Now you know.

A modern-day “wireless” fan (me) tuning-up the Crosley Pup!