Free FM by Richard Neer

don’t think he’ll have a problem. Are you free Saturday morning?”
    That was like asking me if I wanted to make love to Julie Christie. I couldn’t believe that my little good deed of giving a friend a ride would pan out as a job offer at a real radio station. But my adrenaline rush was tempered by the realization that I’d have to tell Robert that I’d gotten the job and he hadn’t.
    As I thanked Ted, I saw Jackson in the reception area perched on the seedy loveseat, looking nonplussed. Was this worth endangering our friendship? Would he think I deliberately engineered this to steal his job?
    To his everlasting credit, he was gracious and kind. He congratulated me from the heart. It was apparent that he felt real joy at my good fortune more than disappointment at his own rejection. The short car ride back to the dorm was filled with his suggestions for the show, all of which were well meaning but 180 degrees away from what WLIR wanted.
    As we got out of the car, he sniffed haughtily, “I’m not sure the world is ready for me and my flair yet. But they will be, Dick Neer. They will be.”
    God, I hated being called that name and Jackson knew it, deliberately tweaking me to affirm our friendship. I had no doubts that someday, in some way, Robert’s talents would be appreciated, although at the time my mind was swimming with the whirl of events that had overcome me in the last few hours. I was going to be on a
real
radio station, even if it was only FM.

FM: No Static at All
    AM radio ruled the airwaves for the first six decades of the twentieth century, based on the timeworn business principle of arriving
first,
not necessarily with the
best.
Commercial AM broadcasts began in earnest in the twenties and became solidly entrenched in the public consciousness as the Great Depression neared. Edwin Howard Armstrong was an inventor who pioneered the use of radio transmissions in the First World War and held many of the early patents for AM (amplitude modulation).
    But Armstrong was not content with the static and spotty reception that plagued radio in those days. He set about at his own expense to find a better way to transmit words and music in higher fidelity. By 1933, after laboring long hours in a basement laboratory, he came up with frequency modulation, or FM. Upon demonstrating the clear superiority of FM, he expected David Sarnoff’s RCA to exercise the right of first refusal on his work he’d given them and begin laying the groundwork for the conversion from AM to FM.
    Sarnoff was a longtime friend; in fact, the “General,” as he was called, introduced Armstrong to the woman who would later become his wife. But Sarnoff was under the misconception that the inventor had been working on a way to improve AM reception. The General had no intention of junking the massive investment that RCA had in AM transmitters and receivers. He also wanted his company to concentrate its technical resources on television, which he correctly saw as the more powerful of the new media.
    What followed was thirty years of legal wrangling, which perplexed and frustrated Armstrong and everyone else who had witnessed demonstrations of FM’s clarity and frequency response. At first, the battle was joined over spectrum allocation, or where FM should be located on the dial. Originally, it was granted space at 42–50 MHz and roughly a half-million receivers designed to capture those signals were sold to audio enthusiasts. But RCA fought FM every step of the way, even when the FCC declared that television sound would be FM and dedicated channel 1 to the band. After the Second World War, and after extensive lobbying by RCA using misleading technical data, Washington abruptly switched the frequencies to 88–108 MHz, the area it occupies today. Massive damage was done to FM’s cause. Overnight, transmitters and receivers were obsolete, and consumers were reluctant to plunge ahead, fearing that more changes would stick them with more