Radio: No Interference

Edwin Howard Armstrong, bald, blue-eyed, well-heeled professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University, has made a tidy fortune for himself by inventing the super-regenerative and superheterodyne radio circuits. For the last 25 years he has been working on the problems of static, interference, tube noises and fading. Some time ago, in an effort to get perfectly clear reception, he devised a system of frequency modulation in the transmitter. According to standard broadcasting technique, which relies on amplitude modulation, this was heresy.

Frequency modulation can be described as changing the length of the...

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