Not of cheer but maybe something, to think about.

Excerpt from Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig.

Edwin Howard Armstrong is one of America’s forgotten inventor
geniuses. He came to the great American inventor scene just after the
titans Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. But his work in
the area of radio technology was perhaps the most important of any
single inventor in the first fifty years of radio. He was better educated
than Michael Faraday, who as a bookbinder’s apprentice had discov-
ered electric induction in 1831. But he had the same intuition about
how the world of radio worked,and on at least three occasions, Arm-
strong invented profoundly important technologies that advanced our
understanding of radio.

On the day after Christmas,1933, four patents were issued to Arm-
strong for his most significant invention-FM radio. Until then, con-
sumer radio had been amplitude-modulated (AM) radio.The theorists
of the day had said that frequency-modulated (FM) radio could never
work. They were right about FM radio in a narrow band of spectrum.
But Armstrong discovered that frequency-modulated radio in a wide
band of spectrum would deliver an astonishing fidelity of sound, with
much less transmitter power and static.

On November 5,1935, he demonstrated the technology at a meet-
ing of the Institute of Radio Engineers at the Empire State Building in
New York City. He tuned his radio dial across a range of AM stations,
until the radio locked on a broadcast that he had arranged from seven-
teen miles away. The radio fell totally silent,as if dead,and then with a
clarity no one else in that room had ever heard from an electrical de-
vice, it produced the sound of an announcer’s voice: “This is amateur
station W2AG at Yonkers,New York,operating on frequency modu-
lation at two and a half meters.”

The audience was hearing something no one had thought possible:
A glass of water was poured before the microphone in Yonkers; it
sounded like a glass of water being poured….A paper was
crumpled and torn; it sounded like paper and not like a crackling
forest fire….Sousa marches were played from records and a pi-
ano solo and guitar number were performed….The music was
projected with a live-ness rarely if ever heard before from a radio
“music box”.

As our own common sense tells us, Armstrong had discovered a
vastly superior radio technology. But at the time of his invention, Arm-
strong was working for RCA. RCA was the dominant player in the
then dominant AM radio market. By 1935,there were a thousand radio
stations across the United States, but the stations in large cities were all
owned by a handful of networks.

RCA’s president, David Sarnoff, a friend of Armstrong’s, was eager
that Armstrong discover a way to remove static from AM radio. So
Sarnoff was quite excited when Armstrong told him he had a device
that removed static from “radio.” But when Armstrong demonstrated
his invention, Sarnoff was not pleased.

“I thought Armstrong would invent some kind of a filter to remove
static from our AM radio. I didn’t think he’d start a revolution-
start up a whole damn new industry to compete with RCA.”

Armstrong’s invention threatened RCA’s AM empire, so the com-
pany launched a campaign to smother FM radio.While FM may have
been a superior technology, Sarnoff was a superior tactician. As one au-
thor described,

“The forces for FM, largely engineering, could not overcome the
weight of strategy devised by the sales, patent, and legal offices
tosubdue this threat to corporate position. For FM,if allowed to
develop unrestrained, posed…a complete reordering of radio
power…and the eventual overthrow of the carefully restricted
AM system on which RCA had grown to power.”

RCA at first kept the technology in house, insisting that further
tests were needed. When, after two years of testing, Armstrong grew
impatient, RCA began to use its power with the government to stall
FM radio’s deployment generally. In 1936, RCA hired the former head
of the FCC and assigned him the task of assuring that the FCC assign
spectrum in a way that would castrate FM-principally by moving FM
radio to a different band of spectrum. At first, these efforts failed. But
when Armstrong and the nation were distracted by World War II,
RCA’s work began to be more successful. Soon after the war ended, the
FCC announced a set of policies that would have one clear effect: FM
radio would be crippled. As Lawrence Lessing described it,

“The series of body blows that FM radio received right after the
war, in a series of rulings manipulated through the FCC by the
big radio interests, were almost incredible in their force and devi-
ousness.”

To make room in the spectrum for RCA’s latest gamble, television,
FM radio users were to be moved to a totally new spectrum band. The
power of FM radio stations was also cut, meaning FM could no longer
be used to beam programs from one part of the country to another.
(This change was strongly supported by AT&T, because the loss of
FM relaying stations would mean radio stations would have to buy
wired links from AT&T.) The spread of FM radio was thus choked, at
least temporarily.

Armstrong resisted RCA’s efforts. In response,RCA resisted Arm-
strong’s patents. After incorporating FM technology into the emerging
standard for television, RCA declared the patents invalid-baselessly,
and almost fifteen years after they were issued. It thus refused to pay
him royalties.For six years, Armstrong fought an expensive war of lit-
igation to defend the patents. Finally, just as the patents expired, RCA
offered a settlement so low that it would not even cover Armstrong’s
lawyers’ fees. Defeated, broken, and now broke, in 1954 Armstrong
wrote a short note to his wife and then stepped out of a thirteenth-
story window to his death.

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