“Rainbow in the Sky”: FM Radio, Technical Superiority, and Regulatory Decision-Making

Abstract

‘‘Rainbow in the Sky”: FM Radio, Technical Superiority, and Regulatory Decision-Making HUGH RICHARD SLOTTEN The Commission FM evangelists of yesterday, as to­ day’s leaders of the radio industry, seemingly have lost their zeal to bring to the people this utopia of broadcasting and listening potential . . . FM chan­ nels in the sky go begging, and this new and superior radio service continues to be just a rainbow in the sky. [Commissioner Robert F. Jones (Federal Com­ munications Commission), January 17, 1950.’] When frequency modulation (FM) radio was first developed, dur­ ing the 1930s, its promoters—especially its inventor, Edwin H. Arm­ strong—were convinced that the new system’s inherent technical superioritywould guarantee its success in competition with the estab­ lished amplitude modulation (AM) system. W. R. G. Baker, an im­ portant leader of the radio engineering community, argued that FM was “so much better technically than the present regular broadcast system that it can’t fail of acceptance.” Many radio engineers viewed the invention ofFM as part of the “march ofscience which will obso­ lete the system now in use.” Historical examples, including the tri­ umph ofalternating current over direct current electricity, were pre­ sented to drive home this point. In 1940, four years after the first public demonstration of his new invention, Armstrong confidently Dr. Slotten is visiting assistant professor in the Department of History at George Mason University. He wishes to thank the late Hugh Aitken, Bill Aspray, Loren But­ ler, Susan Douglas, Colleen Dunlavy, Robert McChesney, Robert Post, John Servos, John Staudenmaier, and the Technology and Culture referees for their comments on earlier versions of this article. The research for this project was supported by a post­ doctoral fellowship from the IEEE-Rutgers Center for the History of Electrical Engi­ neering and grants from the Dibner Foundation and the National Science Founda­ tion (SBR-9511607). ’Robert F. Jones, “Channels in the Sky’’ (speech before the New York Chapter of the American Marketing Association), January 17, 1950, folder marked “FCC Correspondence, 1950,” box 456, Edwin H. Armstrong Papers, Columbia University Archives, New York City (hereafter cited as Armstrong Papers).© 1996 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/96/3704-0007S01.00 686 FMRadio, Technical Superiority, and Regulatory Decision-Making 687 predicted that FM would supplant the old AM system within five years.2 But nearly four decades passed before FM successfully challenged AM radio’s supremacy in the United States. Not until after 1979 did FM’s share of the radio listening audience exceed AM’s. Historical studies that have examined the failure of FM broadcasting to live up to initial expectations generally repeat the story told by Arm­ strong and the FM pioneers, who argued that his invention was sup­ pressed by the dominant commercial interests, especially the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and its subsidiary, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). FM supporters charged that instead ofworking for the public interest, these companies were mainly com­ mitted to protecting their economic investment in the “inferior” system of network AM radio and in the development of the nascent television industry. Certainly the most serious charge was that the government agency responsible for regulating the broadcast indus­ try, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), was actively supporting big business’s efforts to suppress FM. Armstrong’s sup­ porters portrayed him as “an individual warrior struggling against organized evil.” The only recent book on Armstrong and FM is subti­ tled “One Man vs. Big Business and Bureaucracy.” Along similar lines, Armstrong’s biographer contends that the “vast concentration of economic power” in the broadcast industry “rolled over FM and crushed it to a shape less threatening to the monopolistic pattern of operations.”3 Armstrong’s suicide in 1954, at the end of the fifth 2Statement of W. R. G. Baker in “Broadcasters Pledge Action on Post-War Alloca­ tion Plans,” Broadcasting 25 (August 9, 1943): 10. C. M. Jansky, “FM—Educational Radio’s Second Chance—Will Educators Grasp It,” n.d., pp. 8-9, folder marked “Jansky and Bailey,” box 124, Armstrong Papers. Armstrong prediction in Edwin H. Armstrong, “Evolution ofFrequency Modulation,” ElectricalEngineering59 (1940): 4. FM commercial operations were suspended during World War...