Early FM Radio: Incremental Technology in Twentieth-Century America (review)

No story in U.S. broadcasting history is more evocative of the mythos of the lone inventor struggling against the conventional thinking of his time than that of Edwin Howard Armstrong and his ill-fated attempt to bring FM radio to American airwaves in the 1930s and 1940s. In Ken Burns’s 1991 documentary film Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, Armstrong’s story, largely based on Lawrence Lessing’s 1956 biography Edwin Howard Armstrong: Man of High Fidelity, gained its widest audience. Armstrong’s quixotic effort put him at odds with RCA, the unrivaled titan of radio research, production, and programming. Ignored, then opposed, by RCA, stymied by patent lawsuits, and frustrated by the FCC’s reassignment of the FM spectrum from 42–50 megahertz to 88–108 megahertz, Armstrong was unable to bring his wideband frequency modulation radio to the extensive public application that it seemed to promise. When in 1954 he took his own life, leaping from the window of his apartment building, the Icarian legend of an ambitious genius’s tragic fall, victim of his own talent and hubris, seemed to write itself.

How interesting, then, to read in Gary L Frost’s new book Early FM Radio, that this story is essentially untrue. The book’s subtitle, Incremental Technology in Twentieth-Century America, makes it plain that deconstructing the myth of Armstrong’s singular genius is a brief in a larger argument about how to comprehend the history of technology. Frost argues for a more nuanced understanding of how complex technological developments occur than can be accounted for in a story that orbits around a single inventor tilting against the arrayed forces of short-sighted government and corporations. Describing his approach as a “moderate social-constructivist . . . perspective,” Frost aims to demonstrate that “cultural, organizational, economic, and other contingent ‘social’ factors strongly shaped the design of broadcast FM radio at every step” (p. 9).

Technological developments, especially of the complex systems like those required in broadcasting, are more usefully compared to “collective artistic creativity . . . than scientific discovery” (p. 9). Tracing the role of collaborators and competitors and the constraints of “the natural limits of the material world, planned research, and happenstance” (p. 10), Frost provides a heretofore untold story of the wideband frequency modulation and its eventual near-perfection in the patents filed by Armstrong in 1933 and 1934. But the story doesn’t end there, as even Armstrong didn’t fully grasp the importance of his contribution at first, specifically the reduction of static inherent in frequency modulation.

Frost’s search for the early contributions to FM technology takes him as far back as 1902, when early patents filed in the United States and in Den-mark provide evidence that attempts at modulating frequency of radio waves rather than their amplitude began long before Armstrong’s work in the 1920s and 1930s (p. 18). Along the way, he indicates the pivotal moments when technological developments intersect with social and economic factors to create epochal change, as in 1906 when the crystal detector replaced the expensive and less-reliable coherer, opening the way for the explosion in amateur wireless experimentation and sociability in “local, regional, and national radio clubs” which, he argues, did more to “shape and spread the technology and cultural values of amateur radio” than any other institution (p. 30).

The central argument here is that an oversimplification of both the technological and the social complexities of the story has obscured important truths, including the “tremendous amount of useful work [performed] by dozens of people during the 1920s and early 1930s” (p. 47). The fundamental irony of the story of FM is that misunderstandings about the nature of static and other physical properties are tied up in Armstrong’s FM inventions and in the reluctance of RCA to invest heavily in bringing it to market. Armstrong’s patent applications “failed even to hint at two characteristics that later...