A formally educated scientist whose inventions in some way have affected nearly every human life, Lee de Forest was one of the most important of the early inventors of radio and electronic technology. He is most known for his pioneering work with the vacuum tube-first as a detector of radio waves, then as an amplifier for long-distance telephone calls, and finally as the major technology of the radio transmitter, one still in use today. Although de Forest was responsible for some of the more significant radio technical accomplishments of the early 20th century, his career was one of continuing controversy: he was accused of stealing inventions from Reginald Fessenden and Edwin Howard Armstrong, he was accused but not convicted of business fraud, and his continual exaggeration of the facts surrounding his life and career caused him to become estranged from the radio engineering establishment. Even though he wrote an autobiography proclaiming himself "the Father of Radio," he never received the respect he actively sought his entire life.

Origins and Early Work

  Lee de Forest was born in the Midwest but grew up in the Old South. Shortly after his birth in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1873, his father accepted a position as the president of Talledega College, a small, historically black school in Alabama. But although de Forest grew up in a rural environment, his education was formal, upper class, and thorough. He attended a private boys' school in Massachusetts, preparatory to his entrance into Yale University's Sheffield Scientific School, where he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with an 1899 dissertation entitled "The Reflection of Hertzian Waves at the End of Parallel Wires." After graduation, he worked briefly for several Chicago companies, Western Electric among them.

     But young de Forest wanted to start his own wireless business. In the beginning, he followed the work of Marconi, attempting to develop better communication between ships and shore stations. After several attempts to demonstrate that his version of spark transmitter and coherer receiver technology was superior to that of Marconi and others, de Forest finally received the notice of a Wall Street promoter named Abraham White. In 1902 de Forest joined White in forming the De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company. Among their early customers were the War Department and the U.S. Navy. Under the guidance of White, a public offering of stock was made, public demonstrations were held, and radio equipment was sold. But characteristic of de Forest's entire career, the hyper-bole surrounding the company was greater than its actual value, and although de Forest continued to invent, he was apparently unaware that White may have been engaging in less than ethical business practices.

     Apparently, de Forest tired of telegraph-based wireless. A person of culture and lover of the opera, de Forest believed early on that the radiotelephone, or talking wireless, was going to be a way to send highbrow musical entertainment into homes. It was one thing to have to earn a living selling communications equipment to the navy, but his real passion was voice and music by wireless. In 1907 he formed the De Forest Radio Telephone Company-merely one of what would become a steady stream of companies with various backers. For the transmitting part of his radiotelephone, de Forest used a version of a Poulsen direct current arc, and the historical record shows that de Forest did attempt on several occasions to use this device to send the voices of opera singers to members of the press stationed at receiving sets. Even when testing the radiotelephone for the navy, he usually played some sort of phonograph music as the ships entered the harbor. De Forest was a showman, and he was one of the early pioneers in what would become radio broadcasting to an audience.

Audion and Later Inventions

     Lee de Forest is best known for his improvements to the basic invention behind all radio and television, the vacuum tube. Earlier, Thomas Edison's electric lamp had been modified by the Englishman Ambrose Fleming, who added a second element, called a plate, and named the new invention the Fleming Valve. By 1906 de Forest had modified Fleming's valve by adding a grid to control and amplify signals; he called his device the Audion. As became apparent over the next few years, the inventor did not fully understand his own creation. Little did he realize then that the simple Audion was going to bring him fame, fortune, heartbreak, and high legal bills for most of his life.

     One of de Forest's first major brushes with the legal system did not concern the Audion but happened as a result of fraud in his radiotelephone company, and in 1913 he and business partners James Smith and Elmer Burlingame went to trial for misleading stock offerings. Smith and Burlingame were found by a jury to be guilty, but de Forest was declared innocent. Shortly thereafter, he began a decades-long court battle with Edwin Armstrong over the invention of the regenerative circuit based on the Audion tube. Regeneration is like feedback: a small signal from the output of a vacuum tube is fed back into the input, thus making weak signals very strong. Both de For­ est and Armstrong claimed discovery of this principle; the litigation lasted from 1914 to 19 34, and although the courts would finally side with de Forest, the technical community did not. It was a hollow victory, which nearly destroyed both claimants.

     Personally, de Forest suffered a series of failed marriages. The first of these, in 1906, was to a Lucille Sheardown, a marriage that ended in divorce the same year. The second, in 1907, was to Nora Blatch, who bore him a child, but Nora, a liberated woman with an engineering background, soon realized that she did not want to live under the shadow of de Forest. By 1911 the marriage had ended in divorce. By 1912 de Forest had remarried, this time singer Mary Mayo. Several children resulted, but by 1926, while in Europe, de Forest had married his fourth wife, the actress Marie Mosquini. Even though he had failed to divorce Mary Mayo, de Forest managed with legal help to marry Mosquini and remained married to her, apparently happily, for the rest of his life.

     The Audion would continue to dominate de Forest's life. Moving to California in 1910, he worked for the Federal Telegraph Company at Palo Alto. While there, de Forest finally made his Aud ion tube perform as an amplifier and sold partial rights to American Telephone and Telegraph (ATT) as an amplifier for transcontinental wired phone calls. For this innovation he received $50,000, whereupon he returned to New York and started the Radio, Telegraph and Telephone Company. By the beginning of 1916, he had finally perfected his Audion for its most important task, that of an oscillator for the radiotelephone transmitter. By late 1916 de Forest had begun a series of experimental broadcasts from the Columbia Phonograph Laboratories on 38th Street, using his Audion as a transmitter of radio for one of the very first times. According to de Forest in a newspaper article published in late 1916, "The radio telephone equipment consists of two large Oscillion tubes, used as generators of the high frequency current" ("Air Will Be Full of Music Tonight," New York Sun, 6 November 1916).

Early Broadcasts

     A few months later, de Forest moved his tube transmitter to High Bridge, New York, where one of the most publicized pre­ World War I broadcasting events took place. Just as Pitts­ burgh's KDKA would attempt to broadcast an election exactly four years later, in 1920, de Forest used the most public of events, the Hughes-Wilson presidential election of November 1916, for his broadcast. The New York American installed a private wire, and bulletins were sent out every hour. The listener reports in the press were positive: "Seven thousand wireless telephone operators within a radius of 200 miles of New York City received election returns from the New York American. They heard not only election returns, but music as well." Because it happened in New York, was heard by a large audience, and received so much press attention, it was one of the single most important pre-World War I events in radio broadcasting. Beginning with his arc telephone experiments for the navy and his transmissions of opera music, and ending with his radio station at High Bridge in 1916, the evidence strongly suggests that Lee de Forest, more than any other individual, saw a potential for voice transmission beyond just a wireless replacement for two-way communication.

     Lee de Forest's accomplishments in radio technology were both huge and unrewarded. His vacuum tube innovations between 1906 and 1916, although clouded by court battles, were nevertheless significant and long-lasting. In his later years he lived in Hollywood and worked on a variety of non-radio technical devices such as guidance systems for bombs. Most notable was his Phonofilm process, a way to make the movies talk by adding a synchronized optical soundtrack to the film. For that invention, he received an Oscar in 1959 from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He continued to promote his legacy as the "Father of Radio," but his most important non-technical contributions to radio, his publicized pre-1920 broadcasts, were far in the past. He became increasingly paranoid, believing that his failure to achieve recognition was because of his "enemies." Following a long illness, he died in Los Angeles in 1961.