Early FM Radio
eBook - ePub

Early FM Radio

Incremental Technology in Twentieth-Century America

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Early FM Radio

Incremental Technology in Twentieth-Century America

About this book

The commonly accepted history of FM radio is one of the twentieth century's iconic sagas of invention, heroism, and tragedy. Edwin Howard Armstrong created a system of wideband frequency-modulation radio in 1933. The Radio Corporation of America (RCA), convinced that Armstrong's system threatened its AM empire, failed to develop the new technology and refused to pay Armstrong royalties. Armstrong sued the company at great personal cost. He died despondent, exhausted, and broke.

But this account, according to Gary L. Frost, ignores the contributions of scores of other individuals who were involved in the decades-long struggle to realize the potential of FM radio. The first scholar to fully examine recently uncovered evidence from the Armstrong v. RCA lawsuit, Frost offers a thorough revision of the FM story.

Frost's balanced, contextualized approach provides a much-needed corrective to previous accounts. Navigating deftly through the details of a complicated story, he examines the motivations and interactions of the three communities most intimately involved in the development of the technology—Progressive-era amateur radio operators, RCA and Westinghouse engineers, and early FM broadcasters. In the process, Frost demonstrates the tension between competition and collaboration that goes hand in hand with the emergence and refinement of new technologies.

Frost's study reconsiders both the social construction of FM radio and the process of technological evolution. Historians of technology, communication, and media will welcome this important reexamination of the canonic story of early FM radio.

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Yes, you can access Early FM Radio by Gary L. Frost in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Technology & Engineering & Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Contents
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. List of Abbreviations
  7. Introduction What Do We Know about FM Radio?
  8. 1 AM and FM Radio before 1920
  9. 2 Congestion and Frequency-Modulation Research, 1913–1933
  10. 3 RCA, Armstrong, and the Acceleration of FM Research, 1926–1933
  11. 4 The Serendipitous Discovery of Staticless Radio, 1915–1935
  12. 5 FM Pioneers, RCA, and the Reshaping of Wideband FM Radio, 1935–1940
  13. Conclusion
  14. Appendix. FM-Related Patents, 1902–1953
  15. Notes
  16. Glossary
  17. Essay on Sources
  18. Index