Edwin Armstrong

Edwin Armstrong was an American electrical engineer credited with several of the fundamental circuit inventions that made modern radio broadcasting possible, including the regenerative circuit, the superheterodyne receiver and, most significantly, wide-band frequency modulation, or FM radio, which he demonstrated in the early 1930s as a way to transmit sound with far less static than existing amplitude-modulated (AM) radio. Armstrong spent much of his later career in prolonged and costly patent litigation with RCA and its head, David Sarnoff, over rights to FM technology, disputes that RCA and other broadcasters were slow to adopt on commercial terms favorable to Armstrong. Worn down by the litigation, Armstrong died by suicide in 1954, though FM radio went on to become the dominant broadcast standard for music radio in the decades that followed.