Suicide
Financially broken and mentally beaten after years of legal tussles with RCA and others, Armstrong lashed out at his wife one day with a fireplace poker, striking her on the arm. MacInnis left their apartment to stay with her sister, Marjorie Tuttle, in Granby, Connecticut.
On January 31, 1954 Armstrong removed the air conditioner from the window and jumped to his death from the thirteenth floor of his New York City apartment. His body was found fully clothed, with a hat, overcoat and gloves, the next morning by a River House employee on a third-floor balcony. The New York Times described the contents of his two-page suicide note to his wife: "he was heartbroken at being unable to see her once again, and expressing deep regret at having hurt her, the dearest thing in his life." The note concluded, "God keep you and Lord have mercy on my Soul." After his death, a friend of Armstrong estimated that 90 percent of his time was spent on litigation against RCA. Upon hearing the news, David Sarnoff supposedly remarked, "I did not kill Armstrong."
MacInnis was able to formally establish Armstrong as the inventor of FM following protracted court proceedings over five of his basic FM patents. Until her death in 1979 she participated in the Armstrong Memorial Research Foundation that she founded.
Edwin Armstrong was buried in Locust Grove Cemetery, Merrimac, Massachusetts.
Read more about this topic: Edwin Howard Armstrong
Famous quotes containing the word suicide:
“Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)
“Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn’t had an audience, and lines to speak?”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)