With over 300 patents and 25 companies to his credit, Lee De Forest was known to be one of the fathers of “electronic age” mainly because of his invention of the Audion. As an American inventor and businessman, De Forest experienced many failures both in his personal life and business career.
Image Source: Magnet Lab Website
Early Life and Education
Lee De Forest was the son of Anna Margaret and Henry Swift De Forest. He was born on August 26, 1873 in Council Bluffs, Iowa. De Forest was married four times during his entire life. He remained in Hollywood pursuing his phonofilm business until his death in June 30, 1961.
De Forest started his education at Talladega College in Alabama on 1879. In 1891, he attended Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts. In 1893, he enrolled at the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University in Connecticut. It was in 1896 when De Forest completed his bachelor’s degree in engineering at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1899 with a doctoral thesis on the reflection of Hertzian (radio) waves. De Forest’s first job was at Western Electric in Chicago.
Inventions and Businesses
De Forest’s first invention was the responder, a radio wave detector. He invented it while he was employed at American Wireless Telegraph Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. For this invention, he used liquid electrolyte inside a tube instead of metal filings which was used in the existing radio wave detector (known as the coherer) during that time. In 1901, De Forest founded his first company, the American De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company. De Forest fell into competition with Guglielmo Marconi’s wireless telegraphy company. De Forest’s first business didn’t last long when two years after its foundation, it was ordered to cease production of the responder due to a patent infringement case. He totally abandoned his first company in 1907.
In the same year, De Forest patented the Audion, a three-electrode vacuum tube (also called as a triode) capable of detecting, rectifying and amplifying radio waves. This was an improvement on the previous invention of John Ambrose Fleming, a two-electrode vacuum diode (known as Fleming valve). In 1910, De Forest was credited with the “birth of public radio broadcasting”. Around 1912, he made an improvement on the triode by producing a cascaded amplifier circuit. He further improved it by devising a regenerative or feedback circuit. However, the patent was not credited to his name. An inventor by the name of E. Howard Armstrong had invented and patented it first before him.
In 1919, De Forest developed and patented the phonofilm process which uses electrical-optical method for making motion pictures with sound. After several experiments and demonstrations to the press, De Forest finally established his De Forest Phonofilm Company in November of 1922.
Awards and Recognitions
Lee De Forest was one of the pioneers of radio broadcasting. He received the IRE Medal of Honor in 1922 for his three electrode amplifier and contributions to radio. Other honors he received were the Elliot Cresson Medal in 1923 and Edison Medal in 1946. In 1957, he was introduced in a television show as “the father of radio and the grandfather of television”.
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