Free Dreamers and Deceivers by Glenn Beck Page B

Packard Bell, and many others, by intent or oversight, had profited from the work of Howard Armstrong—and she believed that it was long past time for them to pay for it. But, for Marion, as with her late husband, it was never about the money.
    In his ruling against Emerson Radio & Phonograph, Judge Edmund Palmieri found the corporation’s arguments on the up-for-grabs origins of FM to be “speculative, inconclusive, and unconvincing,” and declared that “Major Armstrong was truly a pioneer in the field in theory and in fact.” At last, FM belonged to Armstrong.
    The decision was so definitive that Emerson’s lawyers saw no hope in an appeal. Upon learning of this result, several other companies who’d banked on similar cases suddenly proposed generous out-of-court settlements. The last holdout, Motorola, lost their final appeal in October 1967. More than half a century since the legal challenges began, and thirteen years after his death, Edwin Howard Armstrong had finally won.
    •  •  •
    Long after he was gone, Armstrong was honored by the International Telecommunication Union. There, among his peers, his name is forever enshrined alongside those of André-Marie Ampère, Alexander Graham Bell, Michael Faraday, and Guglielmo Marconi.
    Edwin Howard Armstrong’s discoveries formed the basis of communications technology for many decades to come. In fact, his FMbroadcast system was later used by another pioneer who bore the Armstrong name, though the two were related only in spirit.
    In 1968, in a moment that would have delighted one of the twentieth century’s greatest unsung inventors, Neil Armstrong spoke to the world via FM radio from his station on the surface of the moon—the very place that Lee de Forest believed mankind would never visit.

3
Woodrow Wilson: A Masterful Stroke of Deception
    PROLOGUE
    Berlin, Germany
    May 17, 1933
    The somber-faced man with the Charlie Chaplin mustache and stubbornly straight black hair looked confidently upon the members of the Reichstag. He had waited for this moment ever since his release from prison years earlier. Now, as chancellor of the German republic, his power was absolute and his real mission just beginning.
    He had spent years railing against the Treaty of Versailles that had ended the Great War. But repudiating the “Treaty of Peace”—the brainchild of the French, British, and Americans under Woodrow Wilson—had only gained traction in recent years. The Great Depression had hit Germans hard and, as a result, citizens were restive, angry, and vengeful.
    These were qualities that a man like Adolf Hitler could appreciate.
    “All the problems which are causing such unrest today lie in the deficiencies of the ‘Treaty of Peace,’ which did not succeed in solving in a clear and reasonable way the questions of the most decisive importance for the future,” Herr Hitler charged. He decried the “absurd” terms of the treaty, including the harsh reparations imposed on Germany thatwould lead to the “economic extermination of a nation of sixty-five million.”
    “These terms,” he declared to his approving audience, “will become a classic example in the history of the nations of how seriously international welfare can be damaged by hasty and unconsidered action.”
    The worst part of Hitler’s latest diatribe was that it contained an element of truth. Even his fiercest opponents now recognized that the treaty’s harsh terms had played right into the Nazi Party’s hands. Ironically, those very same terms had once been opposed by one of the treaty’s prime architects: Woodrow Wilson. But, in the end, Wilson was too infirm and confused to be of any real use. At a critical moment in world history, the leader of the free world’s power was increasingly and secretly transferred to someone who was wholly out of their league when it came to international affairs.
    This, in many ways, is the story of how the Second World War really began.
    Princeton, New