FW: Lee De Forest

John Gehñ sends this bio of the American inventor Lee De Forest (1873-1961), who was a pioneering and prolific force in the fields of wireless telegraphy, radio, wire telephone, sound-on-film, picture transmission, and television. The most widely known of his more than 300 patented inventions was the triode, or Audion tube for amplifying radio signals. Until the development of the transistor in 1947, the De Forest triode remained the key component of all radio, telephone, radar, television, and computer systems. Along with Marconi and a distinguished list of other claimants, De Forest was frequently called the father of radio (and he so referred to himself, not unjustifiably, in the title of his 1950 autobiography). De Forest was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the son of a Congregational minister, but was brought up in Alabama, where his father had become president of the Talladega College for Negroes. Ostracized by the white community, De Forest grew to maturity none the worse for having only black youngsters for his companions. In 1893, he entered the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, finishing with a Ph.D. in physics six years later. His doctoral dissertation dealt with the propagation of electromagnetic waves, which made it possibly the first United States thesis on what would later become known as radio. He went to work for the Western Electric Company in Chicago, where he began designing devices for wireless telegraphy. In 1902 he received sufficient funding to found the De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company. Unfortunately, by 1906 his company became insolvent (due to fraud by his business partners), but in 1907 he obtained the patent for his Audion tube, the triode device that he had developed by adding a third element to the electronic diode patented by the Englishman Sir John Ambrose Fleming in 1905. Using his radio tube, De Forest was able to broadcast experimentally both speech and music in the New York City area. De Forest again ventured into business, starting up the De Forest Radio Telephone Company, which became another failed operation. However, this time his poor choice of partners led to an indictment of De Forest for fraudulent use of the mails to promote a worthless device. De Forest was acquitted and then made the fateful decision to sell his rights to the Audion -- only to watch his "worthless" invention become the basis for the subsequent success of AT&T. De Forest later designed a movie-sound system and contributed to the development of the phonograph, telephone, television, radar, and diathermy. Over time, however, De Forest acknowledging his poor business acumen would sell many of his patents at prices much less than their true worth. Despite an understandable degree of bitterness at the financial exploitation of his inventions, De Forest continued as an active freelance inventor well into old age, and was granted his last patent in 1957 at age 84. He did enjoy a noticeable degree of support from the communications community, but they were unsuccessful in their efforts to earn him the Nobel Prize for Physics. See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671134809/newsscancom/ref=nos im for a biography of De Forest