Lee de Forest

His father took the presidency of Talladega College in Alabama in 1879, a school run by the American Missionary Association and attended mainly by the children of the formerly enslaved, and the white town closed around the family. Lee grew up with Black playmates and few others, and with a Congregational minister for a father who expected a pastor. He got out through Mount Hermon and then Yale's Sheffield Scientific School on a 300-dollar scholarship reserved for de Forest relatives, already certain he would be a famous and rich inventor, entering prize competitions that never paid. His experiments kept blowing fuses. After he blacked out a building during a lecture by Professor Charles Hastings, Sheffield expelled him.

The Audion came out of a wrong idea. De Forest believed the heated gas inside the bulb did the work, and in late 1906 he put a third electrode, a bent wire grid, between the filament and the plate. He filed on January 29, 1907, and patent 879,532 issued on February 18, 1908. The grid turned a detector into an amplifier, and the amplifier made long-distance telephone service, broadcasting, television and the first electronic computers possible. He did not know that. In 1908 he was still writing that he had arrived as yet at no completely satisfactory theory. He sold the telephone rights to AT&T through an intermediary in July 1913 for 50,000 dollars, the radio rights in 1914 for 90,000, and the remainder in 1917 for 250,000.

In March 1912 the government arrested him and four officers of his company for using the mails to defraud. Three were convicted and de Forest was acquitted. The lasting damage came from Edwin Armstrong, who in 1913 documented how a triode could amplify and oscillate and won the regeneration patent in October 1914. From 1915 de Forest filed applications copying Armstrong's claims, resting on a notebook entry dated August 6, 1912. A district court ruled in 1921 that his own failure to understand or follow up made the claim implausible. Another court gave him priority in 1924 and the Supreme Court let it stand in 1928 and 1934. Most engineers kept crediting Armstrong. When Armstrong tried to hand back his Medal of Honor, the institute refused to take it.

He spent his last decades objecting to what was done with the thing. In 1940 he asked the National Association of Broadcasters what they had done with my child, the radio broadcast, dressed in rags of ragtime, tatters of jive and boogie-woogie. He was as wrong about the future as he had been about his own tube. The transistor would never replace the Audion, he wrote in 1952. In 1957 he said no man would reach the moon and return, regardless of all future advances. He died in Hollywood on June 30, 1961, with 1,250 dollars in the bank and an honorary Oscar four months old, and in 1970 a crater on the moon took his name.

Lee de Forest's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The two-element Audion invention
  Filed October 25, 1906 and granted the following January 1906
• Grid Audion, U.S. Patent 879,532 patent
  The third electrode that turned detection into amplification 1908
• Metropolitan Opera broadcasts other
  Tosca on January 12, 1910 and Enrico Caruso the next day 1910
• De Forest Phonofilm invention
  Sound printed on the film itself, in variable density 1923
• De Forest Phonofilm Company company
  Founded November 1922 and bankrupt by September 1926 1922
• Father of Radio book
  The autobiography. It sold poorly. 1950

• 1879 aged ~6 His father takes over Talladega College in Alabama The white town resented the school, and the family lived apart from it.
• 1899 aged ~26 Takes a Yale doctorate on the reflection of Hertzian waves Sheffield had already expelled him for blacking out a lecture hall.
• January 29, 1907 aged 33 Files the patent application for the grid Audion
• February 1909 aged 35 Puts his mother-in-law on the air arguing for women's suffrage Harriot Stanton Blatch, in what may have been the first public speech by radio.
• January 13, 1910 aged 36 Broadcasts Enrico Caruso from the Metropolitan Opera The tests showed the idea was not yet technically feasible.
• March 1912 aged 38 Arrested with four company officers for mail fraud Three were convicted. He was acquitted in late 1913.
• April 15, 1923 aged 49 Premieres 18 Phonofilm shorts at the Rivoli Theater in New York
• 1934 aged ~61 The Supreme Court leaves his regeneration priority standing Armstrong tried to return his Medal of Honor. The institute would not take it back.
• June 30, 1961 aged 87 Dies in Hollywood with 1,250 dollars in the bank A severe heart attack in 1958 had left him mostly bedridden.

• Edwin Howard Armstrong 1890–1954
  Invented the regenerative and superheterodyne circuits and frequency modulation radio. rival
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815–1902
  Principal theorist and organizer of the nineteenth-century women’s rights and suffrage movements. married her granddaughter
• Alexander Graham Bell 1847–1922
  Inventor of the telephone and founder of AT&T, transforming global communication. sold his patents to the Bell system
• Philo Farnsworth 1906–1971
  Demonstrated the first fully electronic television system using his image dissector tube. built the medium he said could not pay
• Orson Welles 1915–1985
  Director, actor, and broadcaster whose innovations in film, radio, and theater reshaped American visual and dramatic storytelling. worked in the medium he made possible