1930's Media | Armstrong, Edwin Howard 189O-1954

INVENTOR OF FM RADIO

Last Great Inventor.

Edwin Howard Armstrong ranks with Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison as one of the greatest of American inventors. Like them, he was a gifted and original thinker, as responsible for modern radio as Edison was for the electric light or Bell for the telephone. Like them, Armstrong worked obsessively and held himself to high moral standards, Unlike them, Armstrong was born in a century when science was rapidly moving from the inventor's shed to the corporate laboratory. In a sense Armstrong was the last of the great nineteenth-century inventors, an individualistic genius who fit poorly into the modern technocracy. While Bell and Edison reaped the rewards of their skills in wealth and prestige and built modern corporations on their inventions, Armstrong spent his life defending his inventions from corporations and had his wealth and prestige stripped from him. By 1954,...