The inventor Edwin Howard Armstrong gave a demonstration of FM radio to an audience of engineers and everyday listeners 80 years ago today.

Anyone who has listened to an AM broadcast for more than a few hours has encountered its drawbacks: crackles, hisses, static-y noises, pops. Armstrong, building on 15 years of research into high frequency signals, had devices that could send and receive high frequency signals. Armstrong played a jazz record through AM equipment and then through FM. A reporter who was there wrote, “If the audience of 500 engineers had shut their eyes they would have believed the jazz band was in the same room. There were no extraneous sounds.” It worked, yet the FM radio era lay decades off in the future.
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Dr. Bob Smith, a surgeon in Akron, Ohio, had his last drink on this date in 1935. His alcoholism had bedeviled him for decades. The organization that he and a stockbroker named Bill Wilson founded, Alcoholics Anonymous, considers this to be its founding moment.

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The final episode of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s television series Twin Peaks aired on ABC 25 years ago today. It was the 22nd episode of the show’s second season and its 29th episode overall. The wrong Agent Cooper appeared to have exited the Black Lodge. (Next year, Showtime will run a new series of 18 episodes, all written by Lynch and Frost and directed by David Lynch.) The show’s credits (below the jump):
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