This is an I-Heart podcast.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

So I'm a little bit on an inventor kick again at the moment. So, uh, yeah, get ready for more in the coming weeks.

Today's inventor is somebody I stumbled across and I kind of marveled at having never heard of him because he worked in a field that I have studied many of the other people.

Little did I know that I was walking into a hotbed of science legal drama, and then I got

excited. But then I got bummed because I also was way too deep into this one to switch gears

when I discovered the very, very bummer part of this story.

So we are going to give a trigger warning as we approach that very bummer part. And as usual,

it's not something we're going to linger on or spend a lot of time on, but there is a death

by suicide in this episode. So, Edwin Howard Armstrong is not exactly a well-known inventor, but his work in radio literally changed communications around the globe.

I think we could also say we might not have our jobs if he didn't do what he did.

Yeah.

Because we work for a company that does a lot of radio.

His most famous invention, which was FM radio, became a source of constant frustration

for him, though, after he had developed it.

So we're going to talk about various inventions.

We will give some basic layman's explanations, but in terms of breaking them down in terms

of how they work at the nitty-gritty level.

If you want that, you've got to go somewhere else for it.

I'm sorry.

...