~ "...No Static At All..." ~

Today is the day that listeners first heard FM radio, when the American inventor Edwin Howard Armstrong gave a demonstration in Alpine, New Jersey, in 1935. FM stands for "frequency modulation," because Armstrong's idea was to create sound by varying the frequency of a radio wave instead of varying its amplitude, which is what happens in AM radio. FM was much clearer than AM; it had much less static. For Armstrong's demonstration, listeners got to hear classical music and the sound of water being poured.