The Boy Genius and the Mogul: The Untold Story of Television

A journalist whose articles have appeared in numerous national publications, including theiNew York Times/iandiSmithsonian/imagazinie/i,bDANIEL STASHOWER/bis also the author of five mystery novels andiTeller of Tales/i, the Edgar Award-winning biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Stashower lives with his wife and son in Bethesda, Maryland.OnebrbrThe Death of Radiobrbr"Oh, 'what price glory!' "br--Lee de Forest, on the Armstrong tragedybrbrBy the spring of 1923, the Radio Corporation of America had put the finishing touches on a magnificent broadcasting tower on the roof of the Aeolian Hall, twenty-one stories above West 42nd Street in New York City. At the very top of the tower, above a cross-arm that stretched thirty-six feet across, stood a globe fashioned from strips of iron. It measured perhaps five feet in diameter, and the strips of iron were widely spaced in the manner of a hollow, loosely wound ball of yarn. The tower, along with a second broadcasting mast nearby, was intended as a statement of RCA's dominance of the radio industry, throwing a long shadow across Fifth Avenue.brbrOn May 15 of that year, a tall, somewhat lanky man named Edwin Howard Armstrong could be seen climbing the tower's 115-foot access ladder. Armstrong wore a dark suit, a pair of glossy leather shoes, a silk tie, and a gray fedora pulled low against a stiff crosswind. Earlier, he had swung upside down by his legs from the tower's cross-arm. Now, scrambling to the top of the open sphere, he braced one foot under a strip of iron and kicked the other into the air, waving gleefully at a photographer on the roof below.brbrArmstrong had every reason to feel on top of the world. His innovative circuit designs had transformed the radio industry, and made him a wealthy man at the age of thirty-two. His high-wire posturing--an impulse he indulged whenever an opportunity presented itself--was simply a giddy expression of his status at the pinnac