Dreamers and Deceivers (6 page)

“I’ve seen enough,” Sarnoff said at last, laying his earphones on the table.

“Let me tell you how it works.”

“I don’t really care how it works.”

“But—”

“Howard, relax. This receiver you’ve made, it’s not just a breakthrough, like you said in your letter—it’s the most remarkable radio receiving system in existence. It’s a revolution.”

“So, that means . . .”

“That means I’m going to recommend that Marconi license your invention. And that, my friend—assuming all your paperwork’s in order—means you’ll be making as much every month as most people make in a year.”

“Say that again.”

Sarnoff smiled. “Probably five hundred dollars per month, Howard, for this invention alone. And I’ve got a feeling this is only the beginning.”

•  •  •

Twenty miles away, Lee de Forest paced the floor in his small studio.

In his youth, both Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi had turned down Lee de Forest’s generous offer to lend them his genius. That blowhard Marconi hadn’t even bothered to answer de Forest’s formal letter of introduction.

At twenty-eight years old and on the verge of greatness, de Forest had been fired from his job by the dolts at the American Wireless
Telegraph Company. His crime? He’d refused to surrender all rights to his work and into the grasping hands of his greedy employer! He’d then bravely struck out on his own, only to see his dreams crushed again and again by unscrupulous partners and overzealous minions of the law.

Since the failure of his first company, he had ridden several more of them into the ground. Some of his new partners had been convicted for stock irregularities, and de Forest himself had only recently been narrowly acquitted on a trumped-up charge of fraud. The prosecutors had accused him of selling worthless pieces of junk—including his precious Audion!—and thereby fleecing hundreds of unsuspecting hobbyists by mail order.

Mistreated, disrespected, and misunderstood—such was the path of a genius in a backward world. Over the years he’d been twice married and divorced, and betrayed many times over by a series of businessmen who only wanted to use his brilliance for their ill-gotten gains. But at last he was free from all of them, and determined to make a fresh start.

Soon, he swore, he would show them. When
de Forest
was a household name, etched into history alongside those of Ohm, Volta, Faraday, Watt, Hertz, Joule, Henry, Galvani, and Ampère—then they would all be cursing the day they’d dared to disrespect him. This would be marked as the moment in history when Lee de Forest began his Phoenix rise into legend.

With the last of his dwindling savings, de Forest had begun to broadcast little short-range programs of music and news in the city. It was a humble rebirth, but a foundation he could build on. He had made a firm resolution that he wouldn’t be stolen from again. More than that, he would take back what was his from all those who sought to rob him of his rightful legacy.

Several months earlier, there’d been rumors floating around that some local upstart had used his Audion in a receiver of extraordinary design. Now that wop bastard Marconi had licensed the design, no doubt to rub salt in de Forest’s wounds, and he was soon to begin cranking out receivers like link sausages.

There was more. This young thief, fourteen years his junior, this
Edwin Howard Armstrong, actually had the unmitigated gall to patent the stolen goods under his own name. When the true inventor, de Forest himself, had tried twice to submit his own registration for his new Ultra-Audion receiver, he was flatly turned down in favor of the younger man’s fraudulent precedent.

This could not stand.

Lee de Forest vowed he would win back his greatest invention, secure all rights to its use, and destroy this charlatan, Howard Armstrong—even if it took the rest of his natural life.

1917

Howard Armstrong stood outside the courtroom, waiting. He could feel the twitching in his neck and at the corner of his eye, and he wished hard that for once he could just make it stop.

When Lee de Forest had filed this patent suit against him in 1915, the lawyers all assured Armstrong that the case would never get to trial. When it did get to trial, they told him it would all be over soon. Now, almost two years later, his bank account was almost empty and still the case showed no sign of resolution.

“Try to relax, Howard,” his attorney said. “You’ve got a big afternoon ahead on the stand.”

“How can I relax? Yesterday I had to listen to de Forest blather on for four straight hours. Any thinking man could tell that he doesn’t understand even the most basic principles of radio. He couldn’t even explain oscillation! And the judge sat there nodding his head through it all, as though what he was hearing made perfect logical sense!”

“The judge isn’t an expert.”

“Then where are the experts to testify on my behalf? Three days ago, the Institute of Radio Engineers awarded their first ever Medal of Honor to me for the development of the regenerative receiver—the very invention in conflict here. That’s how important this discovery is.
My discovery.
And those men and women at the institute, above all others in the world, they know who rightfully deserved it—”

“Nevertheless,” his attorney interrupted, “de Forest claims he
discovered regeneration two years before you did. He just didn’t get around to patenting it.”

“Balderdash! So the fox catches a rabbit, and then waits two years to eat it? De Forest files patents like Carter makes pills. Any fool could see that if he knew how to create what I created he never would have waited.”

“And they’ll bring up the fact that you didn’t answer the allegations in the suit immediately.”

“My father had just drowned that very month, and I had to take up the support of my family. I couldn’t be bothered with this claptrap then, and I haven’t the time or the money or the patience to be bothered with it now! I must get back to my work—”

“Howard, please, just lower your voice and calm down. You don’t want to look nervous, or angry, or insulted to be here. We’ll present your case as we’ve laid it out. You’ll answer the questions simply and honestly, and trust me, we can wrap this thing up in another week or so.”

But a month passed, and another, and it still wasn’t over. Then one morning, the world turned upside down.

Woodrow Wilson had been reelected president on a solemn promise to keep the United States away from the bloody battlefields spreading across the world. But on April 2, 1917, the president had gone before Congress to request a declaration of war on Germany. Four days later, both the Senate and the House had voted to commit U.S. troops to join in the conflict.

The Great War, they called it. The war to end them all.

Though no one had asked him, Lee de Forest had immediately gone on record to say that he wouldn’t be supporting the effort. Why should he risk his own life, he’d asked, to defend the characterless, incohesive goulash that was the American people? He would gladly sell the military anything they needed from his inventory, however, just like any other paying customer, at the current retail price.

For his part, Armstrong enlisted immediately into the Army Signal Corps. At the same time, he turned over the patents to all his inventions, free of charge, for the wartime benefit of the U.S. government.

All domestic transmitters were immediately commandeered, and production of new units flew into high gear. Though the technology
was still primitive, it was clear that wireless communications would play a vital role for the Allied and Associated Powers.

Naturally, all trivial matters such as patent lawsuits were suspended by fiat until further notice. At least that burden was lifted from Armstrong’s shoulders, if only temporarily.

As a captain in the Signal Corps, his first base of operations was the radio labs in Paris. Advanced German aeroplanes were terrorizing the skies over Europe, and the tactical use of their own young radio technology was a major factor to be overcome. Howard Armstrong was charged with helping the United States to level this key playing field.

First on the agenda was the improvement of wireless radio links between Allied airborne scouts and fighter aircraft and their commanders on the ground.

•  •  •

“Don’t go so easy!” Howard Armstrong shouted forward to the pilot. “Fly her like you’d take her into battle!”

“You’d never catch me flying this hunk of junk into a fight!” the pilot shouted back. He put the open-cockpit Sopwith Scout into a hard bank and swooped into a descending turn. The wings flexed and the canvas-covered wooden fuselage creaked and complained, but the craft seemed to be holding together for the moment.

This outdated model had a nickname among the aviators at the Paris base—they called it the Spinning Jenny. But, death trap or not, it was the only two-seater available for Armstrong’s tests, so the rickety old plane would have to do.

He put on his headphones and set about tuning and adjusting the transceiver in his lap. It was almost impossible to hear anything at all. The wind, vibration, and engine noise were compounded by a whine of ignition static fouling the receiver. Signals from other planes and ground stations crowded in and jammed one another. When he transmitted, the base seemed to hear only a small portion of what was sent.

On top of these problems, the radio was heavy and complicated, with multiple interacting controls. It would be a headache to tune this properly on a workbench indoors, much less in the jump seat of an aircraft in the midst of a bombing raid. There were so many delicate parts inside that breakdowns would be a daily occurrence.

“Okay, take her down!” Armstrong shouted. “I’ve seen what I need to!”

Back at the lab he left the notes with his new assistant, Sergeant Harry Houck, and then went out for a walk to think through his current stack of challenges.

The Germans used innovative, high-frequency methods in their communications—“short waves” that were far outside the reach of older receivers. Intelligence services first needed to intercept those transmissions before they’d have any hope of decoding them. Bombing raids were a growing danger, and if radio could be used to detect the faint ignition noise from incoming planes it might be possible to get an early warning. Wireless location-finding also had to be improved so enemy ships and even troop movements could better be detected. As Armstrong had just seen firsthand, portable receivers required a complete redesign if two-way radio was ever going to be put to effective use in the war.

Many lives depended on quick solutions to these problems. Despite the relentless pace, Armstrong’s nerves hadn’t bothered him once. This was exactly the sort of pressure he loved. For the first time in years there was a blessed refuge of calm and quiet in his mind. With no lawyers, writs, subpoenas, or injunctions to drain his spirit away, he was finally able to once again devote himself to pure invention.

In the midst of that thought Armstrong stopped walking, right in the middle of the street. A schematic circuit diagram was revealing itself before his eyes, like the dawning image on a photographic plate in a cloudy darkroom tray. It was the solution—not only to one of the challenges he faced, but to possibly
every
one of them.

He turned and began to run back toward the lab, suddenly frightened this image might fade and decades of progress in radio might be lost in trying to summon it forth again.

“Harry, I’ve found it!” Armstrong shouted as he burst into the workroom and set about erasing the long blackboard by his bench. They’d spent the previous week writing out their long-term research plans there, but his assistant knew better than to object.

“What have you found?” Houck asked, but Armstrong was already
deep inside his own mind, drawing whatever it was that had possessed him.

When Houck began to understand what he was seeing, he joined his leader at the board, and for hours the two men worked without a word until the diagram was finally complete.

Inventors don’t always see the potential of a stroke of genius in the moment it arrives. But as they stood back and took in what they’d just brought into the world, both men knew they’d made history, and had changed the science of radio forever.

Armstrong had set out to provide a leap forward in the clarity of radio signals, to improve long-distance reception and dampen interference, to make receivers simple to tune by an untrained operator, and to open the door to wireless direction-finding breakthroughs that could change the course of the war. He’d solved it all in a single stroke

It would be called the superheterodyne.

1924

The Great War had been over for years, but David Sarnoff knew his corporate battles would probably never end.

Marconi had been absorbed into the new Radio Corporation of America, and though he was still only in his mid-twenties, Sarnoff found himself second in command at RCA. He’d dreamed of broadcast entertainment and a radio receiver in every American home. Now, with RCA booming and its fledgling National Broadcasting Company poised to take off nationwide, those dreams were fast becoming reality. That success had brought competitors crawling out of the woodwork on every side.

Howard Armstrong’s superheterodyne had made practical the mass production of receivers that were simple enough for average people to use. Through some brilliant business hocus-pocus, Sarnoff had both confounded his competitors and leveraged his friendship with Armstrong to create a slim window of opportunity for RCA to be first to market. The admen had named the company’s flagship set the Radiola, and the copy was right on target.

You will agree with Marconi

When you hear the sensational new

Radiola Super-Heterodyne

acclaimed by inventor of radio as “a great advance”

But there was trouble in paradise.

Armstrong’s prototypes had worked like a charm, but after the R&D labs at General Electric and Westinghouse had put their thumbprint on the design, the result was noisy, quirky, and so heavy it was just barely portable.