Esther Marion MacInnis
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Esther Marion Armstrong was the widow of pioneering radio FM inventor
Edwin Howard Armstrong Edwin Howard Armstrong (December 18, 1890 – February 1, 1954) was an American electrical engineer and inventor, who developed FM (frequency modulation) radio and the superheterodyne receiver system. He held 42 patents and received numerous aw ...
. She is notable for continuing — and winning — her husband's patent lawsuits against some of America's largest electronics manufacturers after his suicide. In 13 years of litigation, she was victorious in every battle over her husband's patents, winning financial settlements that restored her vast wealth. In her final years she established awards and took other steps to honor her husband's accomplishments. When Marion met Edwin Armstrong she was the secretary of
David Sarnoff David Sarnoff (February 27, 1891 – December 12, 1971) was an American businessman and pioneer of American radio and television. Throughout most of his career, he led the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in various capacities from shortly afte ...
, then an executive at RCA. Armstrong was then both an inventor and Professor of
Electrical Engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...
at
Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...
. He had sold his patents for the
autodyne The autodyne circuit was an improvement to radio signal amplification using the De Forest Audion vacuum tube amplifier. By allowing the tube to oscillate at a frequency slightly different from the desired signal, the sensitivity over other recei ...
(regenerative circuit) and
frequency modulation Frequency modulation (FM) is the encoding of information in a carrier wave by varying the instantaneous frequency of the wave. The technology is used in telecommunications, radio broadcasting, signal processing, and Run-length limited#FM: .280. ...
to Westinghouse, which then owned RCA, making him a millionaire, and owner of a large block of RCA stock. Marion was described as "tall and strikingly handsome". Armstrong built Marion what was described as "the world's first portable radio". He bought her a
Hispano-Suiza Hispano-Suiza () is a Spanish automotive–engineering company. It was founded in 1904 by Marc Birkigt and Damian Mateu as an automobile manufacturer and eventually had several factories in Spain and France that produced luxury cars, aircraft en ...
sports car as a wedding gift, when they wed in 1923. By 1933, Edwin Armstrong had filed key patents for techniques he developed that were to eventually make
FM radio FM broadcasting is a method of radio broadcasting using frequency modulation (FM). Invented in 1933 by American engineer Edwin Armstrong, wide-band FM is used worldwide to provide high fidelity sound over broadcast radio. FM broadcasting is cap ...
successful. His professional relationship with Marion's former boss, Sarnoff, fractured when Sarnoff who was by then the President of RCA, concluded the development of FM radio was not in the best interests of RCA, which operated an extensive network of commercial AM radio stations. RCA and over a dozen other electronics firms including
Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent p ...
ended up filing competing patents for FM radio. These protracted patent fights brought Armstrong to the brink of financial ruin. According to ''"They made America"'' Armstrong was oblivious to the toll his struggle was taking on Marion. Marion spent months in a mental hospital after she threw herself into the
East River The East River is a saltwater tidal estuary in New York City. The waterway, which is actually not a river despite its name, connects Upper New York Bay on its south end to Long Island Sound on its north end. It separates the borough of Queens ...
. Finally, on November 1, 1953, Edwin told Marion that he had used up almost all his financial resources. In better times funds for their retirement was put in her name, and he asked her to release a portion of those funds, so he could continue the legal battles. She declined, and suggested he consider accepting a settlement. Enraged, Edwin picked up a fireplace poker, and swung at her. Marion left the apartment, and never saw him again. After just under three months of separation, on January 31, 1954, Armstrong wrote Marion an apology and threw himself from his high-rise apartment. Marion inherited her husband's patents, and, by 1967, she was uniformly successful in lawsuits she had filed against patent violators, including Motorola, RCA and Zenith, which had been manufacturing and selling FM devices without compensating the estate of Marion's late husband, FM radio inventor Edwin Howard Armstrong. In her winning legal battles, Marion was advised by Dana Raymond of Cravath, Swaine & Moore of New York City. According to Jim Wesley's book '' Radio Memories'', after she had begun to win the patent fights, she established awards to honor Armstrong's memory as a radio innovator. Marion established the Armstrong Memorial Research Foundation. Marion died on , in
New Hampshire New Hampshire is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Gulf of Maine to the east, and the Canadian province of Quebec t ...
, where she had lived for many years on her private estate, known as Shadowlawn, located at 80 Sea Road in Rye Beach, New Hampshire. Among Marion Armstrong's living relatives are Steven McGrath of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, former energy advisor to Maine's Governor, and Adam Brecht, a New York City media executive, whose paternal great-grandfather, John Frank MacInnis, was the brother of Marion MacInnis Armstrong. Marion Armstrong's niece, Jeanne Hammond, who represented the family in the Ken Burns documentary, "Empire of the Air", died on May 1, 2019 in Scarborough, Maine. Ms. Hammond worked in the radio laboratory of her uncle, Edwin Howard Armstrong, on the campus of Columbia University, for several years after her graduation from Wellesley College in 1943.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Armstrong, Esther Marion 1898 births 1979 deaths