Lee de Forest

Lee de Forest (born August 26, 1873, Council Bluffs, Iowa, U.S.—died June 30, 1961, Hollywood, California) was an American inventor of the Audion vacuum tube, which made possible live radio broadcasting and became the key component of all radio, telephone, radar, television, and computer systems before the invention of the transistor in 1947. Although de Forest was bitter over the financial exploitation of his inventions by others, he was widely honoured as the “father of radio” and the “grandfather of television.” He was supported strongly but unsuccessfully for the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Life

De Forest was the son of a Congregational minister. His father moved the family to Alabama and there assumed the presidency of the nearly bankrupt Talladega College for Negroes. Ostracized by citizens of the white community who resented his father’s efforts to educate blacks, Lee made his friends from among the black children of the town and, together with his brother and sister, spent a happy although sternly disciplined childhood in this rural community.

Britannica Quiz

A History of Everyday Technology in 68 Quiz Questions

As a child, he was fascinated with machinery and was often excited when hearing of the many technological advances during the late 19th century. By age 13 he was an enthusiastic inventor of mechanical gadgets, such as a miniature blast furnace and locomotive and a working silver-plating apparatus.

His father had planned for him a career in the clergy, but Lee insisted on science and, in 1893, enrolled at the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, one of the few institutions in the United States then offering a first-class scientific education. Frugal and hardworking, he supplemented his scholarship and the slim allowance provided by his parents by working at menial jobs during his college years, and, despite a not-too-distinguished undergraduate career, he went on to earn the Ph.D. in physics in 1899.

By this time he had become interested in electricity, particularly the study of electromagnetic-wave propagation, then being pioneered chiefly by the German Heinrich Rudolf Hertz and the Italian Guglielmo Marconi. De Forest’s doctoral dissertation on the “Reflection of Hertzian Waves from the Ends of Parallel Wires” was possibly the first doctoral thesis in the United States on the subject that was later to become known as radio.

His first job was with the Western Electric Company in Chicago, where, beginning in the dynamo department, he worked his way up to the telephone section and then to the experimental laboratory. While working after hours on his own, he developed an electrolytic detector of Hertzian waves. The device was modestly successful, as was an alternating-current transmitter that he designed. In 1902 he and his financial backers founded the De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company. In order to dramatize the potential of this new medium of communication, he began, as early as 1902, to give public demonstrations of wireless telegraphy for businessmen, the press, and the military.

Invention of the Audion tube

A poor businessman and a poorer judge of men, de Forest was defrauded twice by his own business partners. By 1906 his first company was insolvent, and he had been squeezed out of its operation. But in 1907 he patented a much more promising detector (developed in 1906), which he called the Audion; it was capable of more sensitive reception of wireless signals than were the electrolytic and Carborundum types then in use. It was a thermionic grid-triode vacuum tube—a three-element electronic “valve” similar to a two-element device patented by the Englishman Sir John Ambrose Fleming in 1905. In 1907 de Forest was able to broadcast experimentally both speech and music to the general public in the New York City area.

A second company, the De Forest Radio Telephone Company, began to collapse in 1909, again because of some of his partners. In the succeeding legal confusion, de Forest was indicted in 1912 but later acquitted of federal charges of using the mails to defraud by seeking to promote a “worthless device”—the Audion tube.

In 1910 he broadcast a live performance by Enrico Caruso at the Metropolitan Opera in order to popularize the new medium further. In 1912 de Forest conceived the idea of “cascading” a series of Audion tubes so as to amplify high-frequency radio signals far beyond what could be accomplished by merely increasing the voltage on a single tube. He fed the output from the plate of one tube through a transformer to the grid of a second, the output of the second tube’s plate to the grid of a third, and so forth, which thereby allowed for an enormous amplification of a signal that was originally very weak. This was an essential development for both radio and telephonic long-distance communication. He also discovered in 1912 that by feeding part of the output of his triode vacuum tube back into its grid, he could cause a self-regenerating oscillation in the circuit. The signal from this circuit, when fed to an antenna system, was far more powerful and effective than that of the crude transmitters then generally employed and, when properly modulated, was capable of transmitting speech and music. When appropriately modified, this single invention was capable of either transmitting, receiving, or amplifying radio signals.

Throughout de Forest’s lifetime, the originality of his more important inventions was hotly contested by both scientists and patent attorneys. In time, realizing that he could not succeed in business or manufacturing, he reluctantly sold his patents to major communications firms for commercial development. Some of the most important of these sales were made at very low prices to the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, which used the Audion as an essential amplification component for long-distance repeater circuits.

Other inventions

In 1920 de Forest began to work on a practical system for recording and reproducing sound motion pictures. He developed a sound-on-film optical recording system called Phonofilm and demonstrated it in theatres between 1923 and 1927. Although it was basically correct in principle, its operating quality was poor, and he found himself unable to interest film producers in its possibilities. Paradoxically, within a few years’ time, the motion-picture industry converted to talking pictures by using a sound-on-film process similar to de Forest’s. During the 1930s de Forest developed Audion-diathermy machines for medical applications, and during World War II he conducted military research for Bell Laboratories.