Radio's premier inventor, Edwin H. Armstrong was responsible for the Regenerative Circuit (1912), the Superheterodyne Circuit (1918), the Superregenerative Circuit (1922) and the complete FM System (1933). His inventions and developments form the backbone of Radio Communications as we know it.

Armstrong decided to become an inventor when he was fourteen and began filling his bedroom with a clutter of homemade wireless gear. His imagination was fired by the Boy's Book of Inventions and by Guglielmo Marconi, who a few years before had sent the first wireless signals across the Atlantic.

In the summer of 1912 Armstrong devised a new regenerative circuit in which part of the current at the plate was fed back to the grid to strengthen incoming signals. Testing this concept in his turret room in Yonkers, he began getting distant stations so loudly that they could be heard without earphones. He later found that when feedback was pushed to a high level the tube produced rapid oscillations acting as a transmitter and putting out electromagnetic waves. Thus this single circuit yielded not only the first radio amplifier but also the key to the continuous-wave transmitter that is still at the heart of all radio operations.

As the 1920's wore on, Armstrong found himself enmeshed in a corporate war to control radio patents. His basic feedback patent had been issued on Oct. 6, 1914. Nearly a year later deForest filed for a patent on the same invention, which he sold with all audion rights to the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT & T). As radio began to boom, AT & T mounted a broad attack to overturn Armstrong's patent in favor of deForest's. The battle went through a dozen courts between 1922 and 1934. Armstrong, backed by Westinghouse and RCA, won the first round, lost a second, was stalemated in a third, and finally, in a last-ditch stand before the Supreme Court, lost again through a judicial misunderstanding of the technical facts.

The technical fraternity refused to accept the final verdict. The Institute of Radio Engineers, which in 1918 had awarded Armstrong its first Medal of Honor for the invention, refused in a dramatic meeting to take back the medal. And the action was reaffirmed in 1941 when the Franklin Institute, weighing all the evidence, gave Armstrong the highest honor in U.S. science, the Franklin Medal.

Armstrong in 1933 brought forth a wide-band frequency modulation (FM) system that in field tests gave clear reception through the most violent storms and, as a dividend, offered the highest fidelity sound yet heard in radio. But It took him until 1940 to get a permit for the first FM station, erected at his own expense, on the Hudson River Palisades at Alpine, N.J. It would be another two years before the Federal Communications Commission granted him a few frequency allocations.

When, after a hiatus caused by World War II, FM broadcasting began to expand. Armstrong again found himself impeded by the FCC, which ordered FM into a new frequency band at limited power, and challenged by a coterie of corporations on the basic rights to his invention. Facing another long legal battle, ill and nearly drained of his resources, Armstrong committed suicide on the night of Jan. 31, 1954, by jumping from his apartment window high in New York's River House. Ultimately his widow, pressing twenty-one infringement suits against as many companies, won some $10 million in damages. By the late 1960's, FM was clearly established as the superior system. Nearly 2,000 FM stations spread across the country, a majority of all radio sets sold are FM, all microwave relay links are FM, and FM is the accepted system in all space communications.

Armstrong was posthumously elected to the roster of electrical "greats" to stand beside such figures as Alexander Graham Bell, Marconi, and Pupin, by the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva. He was the great prose master of electronic circuitry, weaving its phrases and components into magical new forms and meanings.