Our Growing Collections

KENNETH A. LOHF

Gifts

Armstrong Foundation gift. The officers and directors of the
Armstrong Memorial Research Foundation have presented the
professional files of L'.dwin Howard Armstrong (E.E., 1913;
Sc.D., 1929), inventor in the field of radio and Professor of Elec¬
trical Engineering at Columbia from 1934 until his death in 1954.
Included among the approximately two hundred thousand pieces
are his correspondence, research notes and diagrams, lectures, ar¬
ticles and legal papers. Of Dr. Armstrong's many inventions and
researches documented in the collection the most important are:
the regenerative or feedback circuit (1912), the first amplified
radio reception; the superheterodyne circuit (1918), the basis of
modern radio and radar; superregeneration (1922), a simple high-
power receiver now used in emergency mobile service; and fre¬
quency modulation, EM (1933), static-free radio reception of
high fidelity. A considerable porrion of the collection concerns
Armstrong's lawsuits, primarily with RCA, over infringement
of his patents. The correspondence, with friends and colleagues
working in rhe field, include letters from Lee De Forest, Enrico
Fermi, Herbert C. Hoover, Guglielmo A-Iarconi, William S. Paley,
Michael I. Pupin, David Sarnoff, Leopold Stokowski and Arthur
Hays Sulzberger.

BijrzMM gift. Professor Jacques Barzun (A.B., 1927; Ph.D., 1932)
has donared a group of musical and literary works, including a
series of scores for string quartettes by Bernard van Dieren and an
American first edition of H. G. Wells's story for children. The
Adventures of Tommy, 1935, illustrated with the author's colored
drawings.