Excerpt of The Boy Genius and The Mogul by Daniel Stashower
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Chapter One
The Death of Radio
"Oh, 'what price glory!' "
--Lee de Forest, on the Armstrong tragedy
By the spring of 1923, the Radio Corporation of America had put the finishing
touches on a magnificent broadcasting tower on the roof of the Aeolian Hall,
twenty-one stories above West 42nd Street in New York City. At the very top of
the tower, above a cross-arm that stretched thirty-six feet across, stood a
globe fashioned from strips of iron. It measured perhaps five feet in diameter,
and the strips of iron were widely spaced in the manner of a hollow, loosely
wound ball of yarn. The tower, along with a second broadcasting mast nearby, was
intended as a statement of RCA's dominance of the radio industry, throwing a
long shadow across Fifth Avenue.
On May 15 of that year, a tall, somewhat lanky man named Edwin Howard Armstrong
could be seen climbing the tower's 115-foot access ladder. Armstrong wore a dark
suit, a pair of glossy leather shoes, a silk tie, and a gray fedora pulled low
against a stiff crosswind. Earlier, he had swung upside down by his legs from
the tower's cross-arm. Now, scrambling to the top of the open sphere, he braced
one foot under a strip of iron and kicked the other into the air, waving
gleefully at a photographer on the roof below.
Armstrong had every reason to feel on top of the world. His innovative circuit
designs had transformed the radio industry, and made him a wealthy man at the
age of thirty-two. His high-wire posturing--an impulse he indulged whenever an
opportunity presented itself--was simply a giddy expression of his status at the
pinnacle of the broadcasting world. "Armstrong," asked an engineer who
witnessed one such display, "why do you do these damned fool things?"
"Because," Armstrong replied, "the spirit moves me."
David Sarnoff, then the general manager of RCA, was not amused. "If you
have made up your mind that this mundane world of ours is not a suitable place
for you to be spending your time in, I don't want to quarrel with your
decision," Sarnoff wrote in a letter to Armstrong, "but keep away from
the Aeolian Hall towers or any other property of the Radio Corporation."
Sarnoff had good reason to be concerned, as his fortunes were largely entwined
with those of Armstrong. Ten years earlier, on January 30, 1913, the
twenty-two-year-old Armstrong had brought Sarnoff to a rickety transmitting
station at Belmar, on the New Jersey coast. The station belonged to the American
Marconi Company, and Sarnoff, at the age of twenty-one, was Marconi's chief
inspector.
Sarnoff had come to this isolated station, which was little more than a crude
shack, to evaluate a powerful radio receiver unit, invented by Armstrong, that
employed a new type of regenerative feedback circuit that would become known as
the oscillating audion. Then as now, the primary function of a radio was to
convert radio waves into small electrical pulses which, when amplified, could be
converted into recognizable sound. At the time, however, distant radio signals
could seldom be heard above the ever-present crackle of background static from
naturally occurring electromagnetic waves. Armstrong had discovered a means of
cycling part of a received signal back and forth through the receiver and
amplifier, magnifying the strength of the signal many times over. Armstrong's
discovery, if it held up, would allow for radio communication over greater
distances than ever before.
It proved to be a bitterly cold night, but Sarnoff soon forgot his discomfort.
He watched with mounting excitement as Armstrong crouched over the receiving
unit and, after a moment's tinkering, pulled in a remarkable message:
"Lightning bad. Shall ground aerial wires." Sarnoff could scarcely
believe what he was hearing; the message had originated in Honolulu.
Excerpted from The Boy Genius and the Mogul by Daniel
StashowerCopyright 2002 by Daniel Stashower. Excerpted by permission of
Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of
this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from
the publisher.
