It was an idea that consumed him. To bring the wonders of radio—not just simple code, but voice, and someday even music—loud and clear into every American home. Just the thought of it made his heart race.
Howard’s prized possession was a strange glass tube, placed in a position of honor on his attic workbench. He’d saved his pennies and sent away for it by mail, after reading all about it in the back pages of an inventors’ magazine.
The thing was called an Audion—and while the flashy ad had promised miracles, in retrospect, Howard had to admit that the copy had been very short on actual facts. Even its inventor—a man named Lee de Forest—seemed to have very little concept of the Audion’s practical use.
But Howard knew his savings hadn’t gone to waste. Like Jack with his magic beans, he sensed a mystic potential in this odd glass tube and believed with all his heart that it was the pathway to an undiscovered realm—one that Edwin Howard Armstrong knew he was born to explore.
Six Years Later
October 1912
In the closing months of his twenty-second year, Armstrong still sat in that same chair in his attic lab, but many things had changed. He was now a student at Columbia, excelling in the engineering program under the tutelage of the great physicist Michael Pupin. Most of his boyhood dreams were in the process of being realized, but one had continued to elude him throughout his college years.
Tonight, however, he thought with a smile, that just might change.
Between classes Howard had continued his obsessive work with the Audion, commuting to Manhattan every day by motorcycle so that he could return to a long night of experimentation in his workshop at home. That evening he could feel in the air that all his hard work and sacrifice was about to pay off.
He stared hard at the circuit he’d just constructed—a design that had come to him in a flash of inspiration—and thought back to how he’d arrived at this point.
Current radio signals were far too weak to be heard without headphones pressed against the ears—even at a moderate distance. Mere audio amplification wasn’t enough—that only made the faint signals fade into the background noise. The answer had to be to somehow amplify the signal itself, not just the resulting sound.
The Audion produced only a modest improvement in the faint signals, but what if . . . what if the output of the Audion were fed right back into its input again? Electrons travel at the speed of light—he could feed the signal back a hundred times, a thousand times, even twenty thousand times, all in the blink of an eye, and the Audion would compound its tiny amplification with every single pass.
That electronic snowball effect was the very idea that Howard was about to put to the test.
Armstrong sat in the dim candlelight, making final adjustments. When all was ready he set the tuning capacitor all the way to the bottom of the band and turned a potentiometer that he’d labeled regeneration ever so slowly clockwise. Near the middle of the range he backed it off as a high-pitched squeal began to develop.
So far, so good. Now, with the delicate touch of a safecracker, he twisted the metal tuner knob gently up the scale.
Silence.
Again, and then again, another fraction of a turn.
Still nothing.
He sighed heavily and, for the first time in months, felt the nervous tic flaring up at the corner of his eye. He was dog-tired from another day of hard study and a night spent on this fruitless work. Maybe it was finally time to throw in the towel, focus on finishing his degree, and save this wandering experimentation for his idle retirement years.
In frustration, he tweaked the control hard, one last time.
A deafening tone pounded into his ears and he tore off the headphones in surprise. He could still hear it, though, loud and distorted, from where the ’phones dangled down at the end of the cord.
Stunned, his ears ringing, Armstrong reached out for the switch that would route the sound from the headphone jack into the tall amplifying horns he’d mounted beside his desk.
The windows rattled from the blast of clear, strong sound that suddenly filled the room. It wasn’t just sound—it was a signal.
He stumbled his way down the stairs to the second story, pounding on every door he passed until he burst into his eldest sister’s room.
“I’ve done it!” Armstrong yelled. “I’ve done it!”
“Done what?” she answered, her voice registering her sudden fright over what he might be talking about. “Howard, have you set the house on fire again?”
“Come with me now! You have to hear this!”
But she could already hear it, even from the floor below. As he ran up the stairs with his sister close behind, the Morse code continued booming into the attic, clear as a bell.
“Remember this night, sis,” he said. “This is the night you’ll tell your grandchildren about: the night that radio changed forever.”
“It’s so loud!” she shouted back, with her hands cupped over her ears. “Where’s this guy transmitting from anyway, our kitchen?”
Armstrong held up his hand for silence, his eyes growing wide as he mentally translated the incoming dots and dashes.
“Honolulu,” he whispered. “It’s coming from Hawaii. Five thousand miles away.”
• • •
Michael Pupin, Howard Armstrong’s self-appointed mentor, often felt like a fretting mother hen. Armstrong could be strong-willed, even obstinate, and he often showed little regard for his own safety, either physically or legally. But Armstrong was also, hands down, the most brilliant student he’d ever taught—maybe the most gifted and principled man he’d ever met. Given that Pupin had worked with the greatest names of his day, that was saying a lot.
“Howard?”
Armstrong didn’t answer. He was working away in his corner of the lab at Columbia, in the basement below Philosophy Hall, up to the elbows in a new receiver he’d spent months perfecting.
“There’s a little Christmas party tonight, Howard. Some of the students were asking if you’d come.”
“Busy,” Armstrong said.
“Howard, you told me you finished your patent applications, and I’d like to review them now.”
“On the table, over there.”
As Pupin waded through the legalese he identified a problem almost immediately.
“This is incomplete,” he said.
“Then talk to the paper pushers,” Armstrong replied. “I’ve spent too much energy on that mumbo jumbo already.”
“Too much energy? Howard, you’re a year behind in completing this filing. You have to protect yourself. This is important—”
“No,” Armstrong said, “this is important, this work right here in front of me.”
“This application describes a patent for a radio receiving system.”
“Yes—”
“But that’s only a small part of it,” Pupin continued. “You’ve shown me that your regenerative system can actually modulate a signal, and when you push it into oscillation, it becomes a transmitter as well. One unit that can both send and receive, clear enough for voice and even music.”
“I haven’t had time to perfect all that yet.”
“Perfection be damned, it’s the heart of the invention!” Pupin said. “With this idea the guts of a radio transmitter can be shrunk from the size of a closet down to a box I can carry in my hands.”
“When it’s ready, I’ll announce it.”
“You have a neighbor in Yonkers who’s a patent attorney, and a very good one. He’s of national renown. Why haven’t you asked him for his help?”
“I don’t trust lawyers.”
“Howard, listen to me. That Audion tube in your circuit is the work of a dangerous man—”
“Dangerous?” Armstrong laughed. “Lee de Forest? I’ve heard the man speak at the Institute of Radio Engineers. He doesn’t even know how his tube works.”
“It doesn’t matter if he knows how it works, it only matters what a judge and jury will believe.” Pu
pin came closer, and sat by Armstrong’s side. “I know for a fact that he pickpocketed the work of Reginald Fessenden, and then he tied him up in court for years. And de Forest won. Then he sued John Fleming, the man who invented the Fleming valve, the very basis of the Audion, and he won again. He shouldn’t have won, but he did. De Forest seems to thrive on legal wrangling, and I’ve heard it said that you’re the next name on his blacklist. You have too much to offer to waste your life in litigation. I don’t want that to happen to you.”
“It won’t happen to me,” Armstrong said. “Yes, my work incorporates the Audion. Does that mean de Forest invented regeneration? Could the caveman who first chipped out a stone wheel claim to be the father of the Model T Ford? It’s absurd.”
Absurd, yes, Pupin thought. But there were so few true geniuses to be found in the pages of history, and there has never been a shortage of opportunists and predators. Armstrong was a young man of great integrity, and such men can make the fatal mistake of assuming integrity in others.
He wanted to say more, but he knew that at some point the teacher must let the student venture forth from the safety of the nest.
“Don’t work too hard tonight, Howard,” he said.
“There’s no such thing as working too hard,” Armstrong replied, but by then his mentor had already left the room.
He surveyed his work one last time, then sat back and smiled.
Absolutely perfect.
Belmar, New Jersey
January 31, 1914
A very important man had contacted Armstrong for a demonstration of his latest receiver. Armstrong had been preparing for their meeting for weeks now.
He arrived early to set up, but when he pulled into the drive his appointment was already there, waiting for him.
To his surprise, Armstrong noted the man was around his own age, maybe twenty-one or twenty-two, but he was dressed to the nines like a Wall Street wheeler-dealer.
“I’m Edwin Armstrong,” he said, as the two shook hands. “My friends call me Howard.”
“And I’m the chief technology inspector and contracts manager for the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company,” the other young man replied. “I don’t have any friends, but my enemies call me Mr. David Sarnoff.”
They hit it off right away.
The conversation was easy, like a reunion of old acquaintances. They talked of many things as Armstrong opened the trunk and the two of them worked together to set up the equipment.
Sarnoff was a son of Jewish immigrants who’d come to America with little more than the clothes on their backs and hopes of a better life. A natural businessman, he’d been earning his keep since childhood, and overcoming every hurdle of prejudice and poverty as he clawed his way up the ladder. By the time he was fourteen he’d bought his own newsstand and put his four siblings to work for him. Now, less than a decade later, he held a position that would have been coveted by ambitious men twice his age.
Though their backgrounds and disciplines were very different, it turned out their dreams of broadcast radio were the same. Both believed the radio receiver would one day be a treasured fixture in every American living room. Sarnoff seemed to have a plan to actually make that happen.
“Wait a minute, I’ve heard of you,” Armstrong said, as he connected the feed line and completed his final checks. “David Sarnoff, yeah. When the Titanic went down, the newspapers said you stayed at the telegraph key for three straight days, getting messages out to the families. The reporters called you the wonder boy of radio.”
“That’s me.”
Armstrong looked him over again. “Is all of that really true?”
“Well, it wasn’t true back then,” Sarnoff replied, with a conspiratorial wink, “but brother, it sure is now.”
As Armstrong fired up the receiver, the two took turns tuning in far-flung stations and copying the incoming Morse code. They hit Ireland, Nova Scotia, Hawaii, and San Francisco—there seemed to be no limit to the range from which this amazing apparatus could receive.
“I’ve seen enough,” Sarnoff said at last, laying his earphones on the table.
“Let me tell you how it works.”
“I don’t really care how it works.”
“But—”
“Howard, relax. This receiver you’ve made, it’s not just a breakthrough, like you said in your letter—it’s the most remarkable radio receiving system in existence. It’s a revolution.”
“So, that means . . .”
“That means I’m going to recommend that Marconi license your invention. And that, my friend—assuming all your paperwork’s in order—means you’ll be making as much every month as most people make in a year.”
“Say that again.”
Sarnoff smiled. “Probably five hundred dollars per month, Howard, for this invention alone. And I’ve got a feeling this is only the beginning.”
• • •
Twenty miles away, Lee de Forest paced the floor in his small studio.
In his youth, both Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi had turned down Lee de Forest’s generous offer to lend them his genius. That blowhard Marconi hadn’t even bothered to answer de Forest’s formal letter of introduction.
At twenty-eight years old and on the verge of greatness, de Forest had been fired from his job by the dolts at the American Wireless Telegraph Company. His crime? He’d refused to surrender all rights to his work and into the grasping hands of his greedy employer! He’d then bravely struck out on his own, only to see his dreams crushed again and again by unscrupulous partners and overzealous minions of the law.
Since the failure of his first company, he had ridden several more of them into the ground. Some of his new partners had been convicted for stock irregularities, and de Forest himself had only recently been narrowly acquitted on a trumped-up charge of fraud. The prosecutors had accused him of selling worthless pieces of junk—including his precious Audion!—and thereby fleecing hundreds of unsuspecting hobbyists by mail order.
Mistreated, disrespected, and misunderstood—such was the path of a genius in a backward world. Over the years he’d been twice married and divorced, and betrayed many times over by a series of businessmen who only wanted to use his brilliance for their ill-gotten gains. But at last he was free from all of them, and determined to make a fresh start.
Soon, he swore, he would show them. When de Forest was a household name, etched into history alongside those of Ohm, Volta, Faraday, Watt, Hertz, Joule, Henry, Galvani, and Ampère—then they would all be cursing the day they’d dared to disrespect him. This would be marked as the moment in history when Lee de Forest began his Phoenix rise into legend.
With the last of his dwindling savings, de Forest had begun to broadcast little short-range programs of music and news in the city. It was a humble rebirth, but a foundation he could build on. He had made a firm resolution that he wouldn’t be stolen from again. More than that, he would take back what was his from all those who sought to rob him of his rightful legacy.
Several months earlier, there’d been rumors floating around that some local upstart had used his Audion in a receiver of extraordinary design. Now that wop bastard Marconi had licensed the design, no doubt to rub salt in de Forest’s wounds, and he was soon to begin cranking out receivers like link sausages.
There was more. This young thief, fourteen years his junior, this Edwin Howard Armstrong, actually had the unmitigated gall to patent the stolen goods under his own name. When the true inventor, de Forest himself, had tried twice to submit his own registration for his new Ultra-Audion receiver, he was flatly turned down in favor of the younger man’s fraudulent precedent.
This could not stand.
Lee de Forest vowed he would win back his greatest invention, secure all rights to its use, and destroy this charlatan, Howard Armstrong—even if it took the rest of his natural life.
1917
Howard Armstrong stood outside the courtroom, waiting. He could feel the twitching in his neck and at the cor
ner of his eye, and he wished hard that for once he could just make it stop.
When Lee de Forest had filed this patent suit against him in 1915, the lawyers all assured Armstrong that the case would never get to trial. When it did get to trial, they told him it would all be over soon. Now, almost two years later, his bank account was almost empty and still the case showed no sign of resolution.
“Try to relax, Howard,” his attorney said. “You’ve got a big afternoon ahead on the stand.”
“How can I relax? Yesterday I had to listen to de Forest blather on for four straight hours. Any thinking man could tell that he doesn’t understand even the most basic principles of radio. He couldn’t even explain oscillation! And the judge sat there nodding his head through it all, as though what he was hearing made perfect logical sense!”
“The judge isn’t an expert.”
“Then where are the experts to testify on my behalf? Three days ago, the Institute of Radio Engineers awarded their first ever Medal of Honor to me for the development of the regenerative receiver—the very invention in conflict here. That’s how important this discovery is. My discovery. And those men and women at the institute, above all others in the world, they know who rightfully deserved it—”
“Nevertheless,” his attorney interrupted, “de Forest claims he discovered regeneration two years before you did. He just didn’t get around to patenting it.”
“Balderdash! So the fox catches a rabbit, and then waits two years to eat it? De Forest files patents like Carter makes pills. Any fool could see that if he knew how to create what I created he never would have waited.”
“And they’ll bring up the fact that you didn’t answer the allegations in the suit immediately.”
“My father had just drowned that very month, and I had to take up the support of my family. I couldn’t be bothered with this claptrap then, and I haven’t the time or the money or the patience to be bothered with it now! I must get back to my work—”