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physicist Michael Pupin. Most of his boyhood dreams were in the process of being realized, but one had continued to elude him throughout his college years.
    Tonight, however, he thought with a smile, that just might change.
    Between classes Howard had continued his obsessive work with the Audion, commuting to Manhattan every day by motorcycle so that he could return to a long night of experimentation in his workshop at home. That evening he could feel in the air that all his hard work and sacrifice was about to pay off.
    He stared hard at the circuit he’d just constructed—a design that had come to him in a flash of inspiration—and thought back to how he’d arrived at this point.
    Current radio signals were far too weak to be heard without headphones pressed against the ears—even at a moderate distance. Mere audio amplification wasn’t enough—that only made the faint signals fade into the background noise. The answer had to be to somehow amplify the signal itself, not just the resulting sound.
    The Audion produced only a modest improvement in the faint signals, but what if . . . what if the output of the Audion were fed right back into its input again? Electrons travel at the speed of light—he could feed the signal back a hundred times, a thousand times, even twenty thousand times, all in the blink of an eye, and the Audion would compound its tiny amplification with every single pass.
    That electronic snowball effect was the very idea that Howard was about to put to the test.
    Armstrong sat in the dim candlelight, making final adjustments. When all was ready he set the tuning capacitor all the way to the bottom of the band and turned a potentiometer that he’d labeled regeneration ever so slowly clockwise. Near the middle of the range he backed it off as a high-pitched squeal began to develop.
    So far, so good. Now, with the delicate touch of a safecracker, he twisted the metal tuner knob gently up the scale.
    Silence.
    Again, and then again, another fraction of a turn.
    Still nothing.
    He sighed heavily and, for the first time in months, felt the nervoustic flaring up at the corner of his eye. He was dog-tired from another day of hard study and a night spent on this fruitless work. Maybe it was finally time to throw in the towel, focus on finishing his degree, and save this wandering experimentation for his idle retirement years.
    In frustration, he tweaked the control hard, one last time.
    A deafening tone pounded into his ears and he tore off the headphones in surprise. He could still hear it, though, loud and distorted, from where the ’phones dangled down at the end of the cord.
    Stunned, his ears ringing, Armstrong reached out for the switch that would route the sound from the headphone jack into the tall amplifying horns he’d mounted beside his desk.
    The windows rattled from the blast of clear, strong sound that suddenly filled the room. It wasn’t just sound— it was a signal.
    He stumbled his way down the stairs to the second story, pounding on every door he passed until he burst into his eldest sister’s room.
    “I’ve done it!” Armstrong yelled. “I’ve done it!”
    “Done what?” she answered, her voice registering her sudden fright over what he might be talking about. “Howard, have you set the house on fire again?”
    “Come with me now! You have to hear this!”
    But she could already hear it, even from the floor below. As he ran up the stairs with his sister close behind, the Morse code continued booming into the attic, clear as a bell.
    “Remember this night, sis,” he said. “This is the night you’ll tell your grandchildren about: the night that radio changed forever.”
    “It’s so loud!” she shouted back, with her hands cupped over her ears. “Where’s this guy transmitting from anyway, our kitchen?”
    Armstrong held up his hand for silence, his eyes growing wide as he mentally translated the incoming dots and dashes.
    “Honolulu,” he whispered. “It’s