“A Few of My Favorite Things”—A Half-Century of Broadcasting and Telecommunications

Over the years I’ve found that good biographies can be an enjoyable way to gain a better understanding of changes in both the telecommunications and broadcasting fields. Indeed, some can make for great reading (see Smith, below). Despite real progress on this front, however, we still lack well-researched biographies of many key technical figures (radio inventor Edwin Armstrong springs to mind—and his papers are at Columbia University, ready for use) and even more so, business leaders (or their firms), in part as lawyers too often exercise continuing control over key papers. Definitive (meaning archive-based to me) biographies are beginning to allow a more measured view of such well-known inventors such as Morse, Edison, and Bell. Other modern biographies serve to “rescue” their subjects from being forgotten (those on the important engineers Preece and Alexanderson noted here are on point). Still others fill a decades-long gap where no research-based study existed (especially the case here with Marconi, but also Farnsworth and Zworykin).