Choosing wireless
At first he was a bit hazy as to just what field of invention he would enter. He was torn between an interest in wireless telegraphy, which had burst upon the world only 10 years before in 1895, and in X-rays, those subtle emanations which had been discovered in the same year by the German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen. For a time he pored over everything he could find on both subjects. Not long after entering Yonkers High School in 1905, he made up his mind. "Somehow, for reasons I cannot recollect," he wrote much later, "the decision favored wireless."

This decision may have been influenced as much by solid practical considerations, already strongly developed, as by more romantic, idealistic ones. Two figures in his books had particularly inflamed his interest. One of these was Michael Faraday, the English blacksmith's son and poor bookbinder's apprentice who, in 1831, discovered electrical induction--the principle of the dynamo--and laid much of the foundation for the electrical power industry, just then beginning to come to the fore. Faraday went on to become a towering figure in physics, electromagnetism, chemistry and the world of science. His powerful, unschooled mind, which moved intuitively among electrical abstractions as if they were visible currents of matter, so impressed young Armstrong that he took the great Victorian as his lifelong model and guide.

The second figure to rivet his attention was Guglielmo Marconi, a contemporary with an entirely different background from Faraday's, but with similar powers of mind. It was Marconi who, in 1895, experimenting with the mysterious "Hertzian waves" discovered a few years before by the German Heinrich Hertz, had been the first to send these electromagnetic ripples purposefully through space for any distance. As recently as 1901 he had succeeded in sending the first wireless signal across the Atlantic from Poldhu, England, to St. John's, Newfoundland. He was even then pushing his experiments further, organizing wireless companies and spreading the excitement of wireless through the international air. Marconi himself was a dashing figure, the son of wealthy Irish-Italian parents, educated at the ancient University of Bologna. He moved about in some of the earliest and fastest Continental motor cars, and conducted some of his later long-distance experiments from his rakish private yacht, the Electra. The Italian government made him a Marchese, and he was soon to be honored for his discoveries with the Nobel Prize in physics.

Armstrong Family Archives

Edwin Howard Armstrong at age 7.

To the youth in Yonkers, the life of invention held out alluring promises. In particular, wireless was so new and unexplored an art that it seemed to offer a trackless territory in which even a boy might make discoveries. It was not merely the surface glitter of a Marconi that attracted him, though that rich life of adventure, raising an antenna kite in a gale over Newfoundland and cruising the Cape Verde Islands to catch some faint signal from beyond the antipodes, was in aching contrast to the placid life of Yonkers. Beside this must be placed the stern, square-jawed visage of Faraday, beckoning him to the long life of the inquiring mind. In the high attic room on Warburton Avenue, in the turret under the cupola roof with its sweeping view of the sky and rolling river, as from a captain's bridge, the boy hugged these figures to him, and burned to set off into the unknown. Where did the tinder come from for such a spark to ignite? The geneticists do not yet say.

"Buzz" Armstrong is born
Soon after these incendiary occurrences the big attic room in Yonkers began to fill with hand-wrapped spark coils, homemade interrupters, iron-filing coherers and other esoteric trappings of the early wireless telegrapher's art. At all hours of the day and night then the steady, staccato chatter of telegraph key and buzzer might be heard drifting down from the top floor. The family nicknamed him Buzz, and it became difficult to get him down for meals or for any of the usual family functions. He discovered a rich source of telegraphic lore in the neighborhood in the person of one Charles R. Underhill, an engineer and sometime inventor for the old American Telegraph Company, whom he avidly sought out and talked wireless with by the hour, beginning a friendship that was to last for many years. Underhill was a lucky find, for he not only had a sound and basic understanding of electrical and wireless matters but he had the patience to communicate it. He was the author of a handbook and several texts, which Howard prized, and he gave Howard several pieces of apparatus which were difficult for a boy to get hold of, acts of kindness never to be forgotten.

Other boys in the neighborhood and in the whole eastern area were beginning to be gripped by the wireless craze. There was Bill (William T.) Russell over in Hastings-on-Hudson, Tom (Thomas J.) Styles, who lived not far from the Armstrong place, and Randy (Carman Randolph) Runyon, Jr., who in 1908 had built one of the earliest amateur wireless stations in the area in his home at 87 Locust Hill Avenue, Yonkers. Howard made lifelong friends of this trio, joined later by others, and he was soon a legend among them. They communicated by Morse code, met casually at one another's homes and filled the air with the impenetrable jargon of wireless. Howard easily took the lead. His grasp of principles even then was astonishing. And he had about him an enigmatic quality, an unpredictableness, a quiet air of derring-do which, then as later, fascinated and attracted nearly all who came to know him.

He first met Runyon one day in 1909 when he dropped over to Locust Hill Avenue to have a look at the station he had been picking up on his wireless set. Howard sat down and for two hours discussed, with complete absorption and a running diagram drawn on an old piece of paper, a transformer he had built according to some large industrial design. Runyon could not even begin to follow him through the mazes of the diagrams, the formulas and calculations that went with it. "The only trouble with it," Howard said finally, "is it's too big to get out of the house." Runyon was then about to enter Cornell University and did not see much of Howard until after his college days and the great war that was destined to interrupt many young men's lives. Even in the gregariousness of boyhood, Howard was absorbed in his own pursuits in his own way.

On another day he appeared at Tom Styles' home to borrow some heavy glass Leyden jars, for what purpose he did not say, and proceeded to lug them up the long steep hill to his own place. Leyden-jar condensers--tin-foil-lined glass jars storing static electricity, charged by rubbing a brass ball and rod in contact with the inner foil--had figured in many of the earliest experiments in electricity and were still one of the few readily available sources of heavy electrical discharges. He had some private need for such jolts of power. For weeks the jars were strung out in series in the attic corridor, being laboriously charged and discharged to carry out his experiments. On another occasion, he got Bill Russell to help him build several big antenna kites, with which he sought to improve reception. These were no ordinary kites, but sturdy structures seven feet tall, requiring a windlass to reel them in and out of the upper-story windows on Warburton Avenue. They were invariably flown in the stormiest weather. When the wind was high enough, they were often left tethered outside to fly through the night.

His measures to gain more knowledge were invariably like that, direct and massive. When, in 1910, he set out to build a permanent antenna mast of his own, it had to be the highest in the region, and his building methods were for months the talk of the neighborhood. First he set two closely bolted two-by-fours upright in concrete in the lawn. Then, using a block-and-tackle and a bosun's chair, he hauled himself and another length of two-by-fours to the top of this, tied himself fast and clamped the second length upright on the first. A second rigging previously attached to the top of the new section was ready for the next operation. Thus he moved up by stages, running heavy guy wires out at intervals to act as braces until he had raised the mast, almost by his own bootstraps, some 125 feet in the air. His only assistant was his youngest sister Edith, whom he called Cricket, who helped in holding the guy wires and in passing up paint when he got around to painting it--inevitably getting a partly filled bucket of paint on her head before the operation was over. For many years the mast remained a landmark in the area. Howard liked nothing better than to haul himself to the top of it in his bosun's chair, a favorite mode of transportation, to make adjustments or simply to look about.

One day a lady in the neighborhood telephoned his mother to ask whether she knew that Howard was working at the top of the mast in such a high wind that the tip was actually bending. It made her nervous to watch him, she said.

"Don't look then!" said Mrs. Armstrong, who was as indomitable as her son and trusted him from an early age to be as sensible and self-reliant as herself.

Honing his ear for sound
Howard Armstrong had entered the new field of wireless in just those crucial years when the whole future of wireless communications was thus laboriously to be decided. Boys sat for hours with headphones clamped to ears, straining to hear and transmit the stuttering dots and dashes of the Morse code. Nothing more intelligible was to be heard from the crude, discontinuous spark-gap transmitters and even more primitive receivers of the day. The receiver usually consisted of a coherer, a tube of metal filings that suddenly cohered and passed a feeble current when struck by a high-frequency signal from the air, but which had to be tapped to loosen the metal particles in order to receive the next signal. To hear these weak signals, operators wore painfully tight earphones. Frequently they had to hold their breath, for often the mere act of suspiration was enough to drown out those ethereal whispers from outer space. Howard had persuaded his family to allow him to move his bed into the attic so that he could listen far into the night when things were quiet and when, for some unknown reason, reception was at its best.

Even at best, there was little to listen to through the sough and surge of atmospherics, only a few commercial and military wireless stations, an occasional ship at sea and the banal, high-keyed stutterings of fellow amateurs in the immediate Hudson River community. It was in these long vigils, however, that Armstrong developed an ear remarkably sensitive to small sounds in the ether, to the subtle nuances and small effects of changes in his equipment. Late one night in 1908, in his senior year in high school, he roused the whole family to come and listen to the faint, heady signals he had pulled in from the Navy Station at Key West, Florida, signals that had invisibly winged their way some 2,000 miles through the empty, silent reaches of the night sky.

A tolerant family
The family was tolerant of, even if it did not quite understand, everything that went on in the attic. Howard drew his willing younger sister Cricket into the tedious job of winding tuning coils, which he required in interminable lengths and varieties, but otherwise he went his own mysterious way. School was quite subsidiary to his one absorbing passion. He was quick enough to make better than average grades, but, except in the sciences that impinged on his interests, he was rated only a fair student. He was best of all in algebra and solid geometry, high in advanced drawing, chemistry and American history, but only fair in physics. He got on famously with Frank Baker, his physics teacher, however. Baker allowed him to build a wireless receiver and antenna high atop the school, and it was still a proud part of the physics department's apparatus 15 years later when Howard had overleaped all that was then known about wireless.

The Houck Collection

Armstrong's Western Electric Company membership card.

He loved to build and to tinker with all kinds of mechanical things. Children in the Warburton Avenue neighborhood brought him their broken toys, for the "Armstrong boy" liked nothing better than to repair them. He had a kit of tools that, occasionally of a Saturday, he would tote over to a nearby highway, settle himself on the grassy roadside and wait about for hours, dreaming of wireless, on the chance that one of the cranky cars of the period, just beginning to appear in numbers, would break down and he could help in the repairs. One of his aunts discovered him there one day and complained to his mother that the neighbors would begin thinking her son was crazy. He still found time for tennis, training himself almost as rigorously in it as in wireless and becoming captain of the Yonkers High School team.

He also gave over hours at a time volleying a tennis ball at his sisters to improve their back-strokes, which he regarded as an indispensable part of their education. Meanwhile, the family life went on much as before, with its holiday gatherings, church activities and long summers in the country, shifted now to Lake Bomoseen in Vermont, where tennis was intensive.

The religious atmosphere still prevailed. One of Howard's friends, invited to stay to lunch one day, felt constrained to fill with chatter the long silence as they sat down to the table. When he ran out of material, Mrs. Armstrong, who had been waiting patiently, quietly said grace, not perfunctorily but at sober length. It was difficult to know what Howard thought of all this, for he was by then remarkably self-contained and no longer outwardly religious. Over his work table in the attic hung a framed and illuminated Biblical text, a gift from his mother, that read: "Call Upon Me in the Day of Trouble: I Will Deliver Thee." Sometimes as he was sweating over a stubborn problem in his maze of wires and paraphernalia, he would cast on this text an ironic and humorous eye.

A devoted amateur
The goal of all operators, then, amateur or professional, was to find some means of sending out and receiving wireless signals stronger, clearer, more continuously and over greater distances than ever before. It was the particular dream of amateurs, who, as so often in the sciences, were carrying on the most daring explorations, to be able to get signals over unheard-of distances. A few dreamed of sending out speech and music over these invisible waves, but reliable transmitters and, more importantly, sensitive receivers were quite lacking for broadcasting and receiving the continuous-wave power necessary for this feat. In 1906, Professor Reginald A. Fessenden of Harvard University, a little-recognized pioneer in the field, managed by means of a more powerful continuous-wave electric alternator of his own design to send out the first historic, halting broadcast of this kind. On Christmas night, 1906, wireless operators on ships plowing the North Atlantic were startled to hear in their headphones snatches of music, breaking through the colorless dots and dashes, from Fessenden's experimental station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts.

This was later duplicated by the amateurs, whose ranks were steadily growing, but equipment was still unbelievably crude, weak and unreliable. Early wireless lacked two important elements, and lacking these lacked nearly everything. The first was a means of generating continuous waves of sufficient power and high enough frequency to override distance and carry continuous tonal patterns. The second was a receiver that would not merely detect these weak waves at a distance but, by some means then totally unknown, amplify them, so that reception would not be intermittent and dependent wholly on skill and chance. Without these things, wireless was still in the dark ages.

Commercial wireless stations attempted to solve the first of these difficulties by building antennas hundreds of feet high and thousands of feet long, loading as much power into the transmitter as possible, as much as 500 kilowatts of power before this early phase of development was ended. The spark-gap was the dominant transmitter of the day, but a few continuous-wave types had appeared. Chief among these was the Fessenden-type alternator and the more widely used Poulsen-arc transmitter, invented in 1903 by the Danish scientist Valdemar Poulsen, who discovered that the intense, pulsating flame generated between carbon-rod electrodes in an arc lamp gave forth continuous electromagnetic waves that might be used to transmit wireless messages. The Poulsen arc, however, was severely limited and unstable in the frequency range, and it, as well as the spark-gap, lacked a satisfactory receiver. For that problem the industry had almost no solution. Some stations built elaborate soundproof rooms for their operators in order to insure quiet for hearing the whispering signals. The signals were so weak that sunlight and static through the daylight hours were sufficient to blot them out completely, hence the industry was struggling to sell a service that was not only laboriously slow but was available for no more than half the time.

Under these technical difficulties, nearly all wireless enterprises were financially rocky, and companies rose and disappeared in record time, many being no more than stock-selling schemes. All were based on selling message services in competition with the cable telegraph, a fixation that was to retard development even as late as the early 1920s. The wireless industry regarded the amateurs attempting to experiment in this field as simple nuisances, interfering with its message business. All the early years of the century were marked by pitched battles between the two camps, recorded in many legislative halls and newspapers of the period.

From the start, Howard Armstrong identified himself with the amateurs and insurgents. He was even then working on the receiver problem with a concentration and an extraordinary expenditure of hours that were to become typical. He was also occupied in the spring of 1909 with graduating from Yonkers High School. He was nowhere near the top of his class, but graduated "with great credit" and an average of 89.8. His future course long ago had been settled. As a graduation gift from his father he received a flashing, red Indian motorcycle on which he tore about the Yonkers heights that early summer and on which he proposed to commute daily in the fall to the Columbia School of Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering. He chose Columbia for shrewd and practical reasons. Its School of Engineering had a high reputation, and its proximity to Yonkers would allow him to live at home and continue his attic experiments. The most inventive and teeming years of his life were now immediately before him.