|
|
Lee DeForest (1873-1961)  Lee DeForest was born August 26, 1873, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the only child of Rev. Henry Swift DeForest, a Congregational minister, and Anna Margaret Robbins, and was given the name of his paternal grandfather. Rev. DeForest accepted an appointment to the presidency of Talladega College in Alabama shortly after his son's birth, and Lee spent much of his youth in that locale. Talladega was established to educate African-Americans, and of course that activity was not well regarded in that southern community; while there was some difficulty in finding Caucasian friends, Lee had African-American friends early on.
Rev. DeForest coveted the thought that his son might also enter the ministry, and he was sent to the Northfield Mount Hermon preparatory school for boys in Mount Hermon MA. After graduation, however, Lee enrolled at the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, receiving a Bachelor's degree in 1896 and the PhD degree in 1899. His career as an inventor was already underway, and it paid some of his educational expenses. (His baccalaureate degree was threatened at one point when he tapped into Yale's nascent power system and inadvertently caused it to shut down. Notwithstanding such capers, his educational background got him his first engineering job, with Western Electric in Chicago.)
By 1901 he had started the first of many business enterprises-- almost none of which were successful for any length of time-- American DeForest Wireless Telegraph Co. (later United Wireless Telegraph Company). A similar company, State Street Wireless, was started in 1902, but, by 1906, DeForest needed a permanent job, and became a faculty member at Armour Institute (now Illinois Institute of Technology). Shortly after arriving at Armour, he introduced his most significant invention, which he named the Audion. British researcher Prof. John Ambrose Fleming had applied the Edison effect-- the flow of electrons from a heated filament to a second electrode in an evacuated bulb-- as a detector of radio signals, and patented that in 1904. DeForest added a third electrode, a "grid" between the filament and "plate" (which was literally a metal plate, in Fleming's "valve"), and patented the resulting three-electrode device, or triode, in 1908. (Fleming, meanwhile, had done the same, and a very long international legal battle resulted; DeForest's U. S. patent was finally upheld by the Supreme Court.)
In fact, DeForest's original Audion failed to achieve amplification, and DeForest did not fully understand its operation; Edwin H. Armstrong, who would later be DeForest's opponent in at least two lawsuits, explained the Audion's operation and improved it to allow amplification.
In 1910, DeForest left Chicago for San Francisco, where he worked for the Federal Telegraph Company, which was beginning the development of a worldwide communications network. In 1913, he was hit by another lawsuit, this one filed by the US Attorney General on grounds of fraud. Although acquitted, he was once again nearly bankrupt, and he had to sell the Audion rights to AT & T for $50,000.
About this time he again tried to organize his own companies; two more were founded in 1913, neither of which had a long existence.
In 1916, DeForest became a radio pioneer, broadcasting radio commercials for his own products, and, in November of that year, election returns for the contest between Woodrow Wilson and Charles Evans Hughes.1 DeForest went on to sponsor broadcasts of music, featuring opera star Enrico Caruso and many other events, but he received little financial backing. Later, he began to investigate the movie industry as a platform for inventions, and in 1919 filed for a patent on his Phonofilm process, which recorded sound in the form of lines on the edge of the movie film. He founded a company to merchandise the process, but there were no takers. He demonstrated the system by showing a number of short films, primarily depicting vaudville acts, at the Rivoli Theatre in New York-- since the Rivoli was independent, it did not require authorization from the powerful movie chains, as would have been the case in most theaters-- but again no takers. By the time the Phonofilm company filed bankruptcy in 1926, the major studios were using a system synchronizing sound from phonograph disks. Eventually, a system using DeForest's principles was re-adopted, and in 1959-60 he received an Academy Award, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, commemorating his contribution.
Personal
DeForest's abrasive personality cost him business partners and life partners. (One Chicago-area electrical engineer today recalls a spat he saw as a boy, with DeForest arguing with an irate customer who was picketing the DeForest-Sanabria Television salesroom in Chicago-- another of DeForest's many unsuccessful business ventures.) His marital life was little better; he married four times:
-Lucille Sheardown in February 1906 and divorced the same year.
-Nora Stanton Blatch (1883–?) in February 1907. They had a daughter, Harriet; in 1911 they divorced.
-Mary Mayo (1892–?) in December 1912. In 1919 they had a daughter Deena (Eleanor) DeForest, but divorced in 1920.
-Marie Mosquini, a silent film actress, (1899–1983) in October 1930.
In contrast to his abrasiveness, DeForest did have a sense of humor: During the 1950's, when he was campaigning for programming improvements in television and radio, he wrote an open letter to the Federal Communications Commission, which began as follows: "This is DeForest's prime evil..." , a remarkable pun on the opening lines of Longfellow's narrative poem "Evangeline".
Awards
Despite the controversies which followed Lee DeForest most of his life-- and it must be admitted that he courted controversy-- he was recognized in numerous ways during his lifetime:
1906 Technical Excellence and Creativity Award – TECnology Hall of Fame of the Audio Engineers Society
1922 IRE Medal of Honor -- in "recognition for his invention of the three-electrode amplifier and his other contributions to radio". (IRE, the Institute of Radio Engineers, founded in 1912, was a predecessor organization-- as was the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, founded 28 years earlier-- of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE. Lee DeForest was a charter member of IRE.)
1923 Franklin Institute Cressan Award
1946 Edison Medal of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers -- 'For the profound technical and social consequences of the grid-controlled vacuum tube which he had introduced'. An important engineering award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers is now named the Lee De Forest Medal.
1951 Vice president, National Association for Better Radio and Television
1952 Eta Kappa Nu Eminent Member Award
1955 Gold Medal (formerly the John H. Potts Award) of the Audio Engineering Society (AES)
1956 Star – Hollywood Walk of Fame for contributions to motion picture sound recording
1957 De Forest was the guest celebrity on the May 22, 1957 episode of the television show This Is Your Life, where he was introduced as the "Father Of Radio and the Grandfather of Television".
Patents and Publications
DeForest was awarded more than 300 patents for various activities; the list below identifies those awarded during the 1902-1920 period, including some of his most important contributions to electronics:
|
|