Issue #45: General Electric and the Wild West of Early Radio

He literally got a high from discovery--and obviously was addicted to the endorphin rush... which went away with the 'mop up' of application.

Frankly one can get 'high' from the entire process

 

As Milton bore down on us my XYL anxiously asked tongue-n-cheek "Can't the USAF just nuke it?"

In the past there has been lots of USG research into storm modification. Check out Project Stormfury etc that has direct ties to Langmuir et al.

 

Thanks for the link suggestion -- interesting reading. I wish there was some easy solution, and hope that you and your family didn't suffer any major loss in Milton. Dave, W7DGJ

 

Langmuir also described shallow water circulation on the ocean and lakes in 1938. So called 'wind streaks", Langmuir cycle, Langmuir streaks caused by strong steady wind blowing across the water develops lines of circulation!

 

RE: The Langmuir cousins and artitioning of work.

As I have said many times:

INVENTOR INVENT; TEAMS EXECUTE

 

To be precise:

Armstrong made a practical regenerative receiver. DeForest discovered regeneration, but didn't understand it and didn't do anything practical with it. Armstrong made it work, and patented it.

FM was known in theory long before Armstrong started working on it. What he developed was a practical form of VHF FM, which eliminated "static" and greatly increased fidelity and sound quality. This required developing both transmitters and receivers for wide-band VHF FM, and optimizing them for practical use.

Armstrong also developed multiplex FM for stereo broadcasting. His system, still in use today, is 100% compatible with monoaural FM receivers.

And much more. For example, the transmitter used by 1BCG in Greenwich, CT for the 1921 Transatlantic Tests was designed by Armstrong. Here's the monument, near the 1BCG transmitter site:



Note the names at the bottom.

73 de Jim, N2EY

 

Hello Dave. Excellent aricle. I recall first encountering Langmuir's name in my freshman-year "Electrical Engineering 101" textbook, which was written in the late 1960s. (An introductory chapter included a short section about the emissions of vacuum tube filaments. That was the only detailed mention of vacuum tubes in the whole book.) A few years before that, when I was in high school, I would go to the city's public library and check out a huge 2-volume "book" of data sheets (each volume was a 3-ring-binder that was 3 inches thick) on General Electric transmitting tubes, covering everything from "brand new in 1931" types up through magnetrons for large radar systems. It was truly an amazing variety of markets that GE's vacuum tube division served.

Your mention of the arrival times of the two "regenerative receiver" patent applications at the US Patent Office reminds me of another sad tale: "Back in the day" my former employer supplied some large inverters to Ford Motor Company's R&D so they could do research on developing a hybrid vehicle. I was not involved in supporting that project, but later I heard that the Ford patent application was held up in their legal division for final clean-up, and, as so often occurs in history, arrived a very short time after the Toyota patent application. (I also heard that the two company's concepts were very similar to each other.) Alas, another "engineers and lawyers" situation where reality borrowed the script from a Dilbert cartoon. As an engineer I can blame the lawyers, but I'm sure the lawyers were saying "If those engineers had worked just a little bit faster, we would have had more time to do our work properly!" :-(

 

Hi Don - thanks for the input here (and the comment on the Langmuir article). The story you tell about the auto industry is probably repeated hundreds of times across many areas of business. I wonder . . . the two companies were working on very similar solutions, do you think that there could have been some industrial espionage involved? Or was it, as it was in the Langmuir and Armstrong labs, just a case of bright people working on a path that resolved itself in what was the best solution. Dave W7DGJ

 

Kurt Vonnegut and his brother Bernard worked at GE, and Bernard was an acquaintance of Langmuir. Langmuir's work on cloud seeding inspired Kurt to create the character of Felix Hoenniker in his novel Cat's Cradle. Hoenniker discovery a new phase of water called Ice 9 which melts at 115 F. This is a major plot point. If you haven't read the novel I highly recommend it, as well as some of his other books, most famously Slaughterhouse Five.

73, Dan KW4TI

 

Thanks Dan! I had no idea that even Kurt worked at GE! Thanks - Dave W7DGJ

 

Two pictures from a 1953 scientific yearbook published in Sweden, showing key persons in the GE research effort about "weather modification".


In clockwise direction from top left, Dr. Langmuir,
Dr Vonnegut and Mr. Schaefer.


Dr. Vonnegut in action generating silver iodine crystals.

 

Thanks Karl-Arne! 73, Dave