Lee de Forest amplified the electronic age and lost four fortunes doing it
Lee de Forest's three-element Audion tube of 1908 was the first practical electronic amplifier, opening the way to radio broadcasting, long-distance phone lines and talking pictures. He held over 300 patents, bragged that he had made and lost four fortunes, and once stood trial for mail fraud before being acquitted.
De Forest was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1873, a descendant of a Walloon Huguenot leader who had fled persecution in Europe. His father, a Congregational minister who hoped Lee would follow him into the pulpit, became president of Talladega College in Alabama in 1879, a school open to all regardless of race that mainly taught African Americans. Resented by many white locals, the family lived apart from them, and Lee's close childhood friends were Black children of the town.
A family scholarship of $300 a year took him to Yale's Sheffield Scientific School in 1893. Sure he was destined to be a rich and famous inventor, he peddled puzzles and gadgets to companies and entered essay contests, mostly without luck. His graduate experiments kept blowing the building's fuses, and after he plunged an important lecture by Professor Charles Hastings into darkness he was thrown out of Sheffield. He enlisted as a bugler in the Spanish–American War without ever leaving Connecticut, then finished a doctorate in 1899 on radio waves along parallel wires, supervised by Willard Gibbs.
Wireless telegraphy was his target, and Guglielmo Marconi his rival. Marconi's receivers used a coherer, which had to be tapped after every dot and dash. After failing to get jobs with Nikola Tesla or Marconi, de Forest built his own receiver while at Western Electric in Chicago, and by 1900 he could send signals about 7 kilometres. In 1901 he tried to beat Marconi at reporting yacht race results; his transmitter failed, and in a rage he hurled it overboard.
A flamboyant promoter, Abraham White, then launched American De Forest Wireless, whose stunts included a car on Wall Street blasting a noisy spark transmitter to lure investors. It built five powerful Navy radio stations, including ones in Panama and Key West, before de Forest fell out with management and went independent. He later styled himself the Father of Radio, won the 1922 IEEE Medal of Honor, and died on June 30, 1961.
Source: Lee de Forest
