This Inventor's Circuit Was So Valuable RCA Destroyed Him

In 1912, a Columbia University engineering student discovered how to amplify radio signals for the first time. Six years later, stationed in wartime Paris with the Army Signal Corps, he invented the superheterodyne receiver, an architecture that became the basis of virtually every radio, television, cell phone, and WiFi device built since. By 1933, he had added wideband FM, delivering static-free, high-fidelity audio that made AM sound primitive by comparison. But the president of RCA, the corporation that had profited most from his earlier patents, saw FM as a direct threat. What followed was a decade-long patent war built on legal delays, lobbied FCC frequency reallocations, and refused royalties, all designed to drain one man's fortune until there was nothing left. This is the story of Edwin Howard Armstrong, the circuits that still power the modern world, and the corporation that tried to bury them both.