Lee de forest

Lee de Forest’s entire life was devoted to the invention of media technology primarily based on sound. He supplied the missing voice to radio and film. Following a solid Yale education in Physics and Electricity, he spent the decade between 1900 and 1910 improving the wireless telegraph, but he quickly tired of its limitations of sending coded messages. In 1906 he filed his first patent for the vacuum tube he called the Audion, describing it as a detector of sound. By 1907 he had invented an arc-based radiotelephone transmitter and Audion receiver, and he was writing about the possibility of sending music into homes by wireless. Between 1910 and 1920 he improved his Audion as a detector, an amplifier, and later a transmitter of radio. He started several radio stations. He was an early if not the first broadcaster of entertainment-based audio, primarily opera music. Between 1920 to 1930 he invented, patented and improved upon a system of recording a sound track on a strip of film, thus allowing accurate synchronization with the picture. Lee de Forest invented the Talking Motion Picture.

Lee De Forest, (born Aug. 26, 1873, Council Bluffs, Iowa, U.S.—died June 30, 1961, Hollywood, Calif.), U.S. inventor. He had invented many gadgets by age 13, including a working silverplating apparatus. After earning a Ph.D. from Yale University, he founded the De Forest Wireless Telegraph Co. (1902) and the De Forest Radio Telephone Co. (1907). In 1907 he patented the Related Article Summaries

Lee De Forest was born in 1873 and grew up in Alabama. He became interested in machinery as a young child but repeatedly clashed wills with his father, who wanted him to study for the ministry. Desperate to convince his father to send him to the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, he forged his father’s name on a letter to Before going to Yale in 1893, De Forest traveled to the Chicago World’s Fair. When he ran out of money soon after arriving, he worked as a strikebreaker for the grounds crew, pushing the wheelchairs of disabled or exhausted tourists. He had little sympathy for either the workers on strike or his customers, whom he overcharged in order to make enough money to prolong his stay. De Forest eventually arrived at Yale and remained there until he received a doctorate in physics for his work on De Forest’s first job was at Western Electric in Chicago. He worked his way up to the experimental laboratory and developed a few modestly successful inventions, which spurred him to move to New York and start the De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company in 1902. Though this company did not last long, in 1907 De Forest patented the De Forest was a pioneer broadcaster in addition to an inventor and engineer. He set up a radio station in the Bronx in 1916. However, his reliance on During the 1920s De Forest began to work on a system for producing motion pictures with sound. The operating quality of his optical recording system was poor and failed to interest the film industry....

Inventor. He was born in Iowa but raised in Alabama where his father was President of Talladega College (an African-American school). His family faced difficulty there as some white residents resented his father educating African-Americans. He went to college at Yale where he gained a reputation as an ingenuous inventor. In fact, he paid for some of his tuition by marketing some of his inventions. He was suspended when he tapped into the school’s electrical system while working on an invention and caused a campus wide blackout. However, he was allowed to complete his schooling and eventually earned a PhD. The focus of his interests was wireless telegraphy. In 1906, his experiments led to the invention of the Audion tube. This vacuum tube was a device that allowed a voice to be amplified. A year later he filed a patent for an improved tube, called a triode or the De Forest Valve. He was also one of America’s pioneer radio station owners. In 1916, he broadcast the first radio advertising (for his products), was the first to report presidential election results via radio and led the first radio broadcast of music. He is credited with inventing talking movies. His inventions led him to be dragged through several legal battles concerning patent conflicts and investor concerns. He won in the courts, but the cases took their toll in his professional life as many of his colleagues lost their trust in him. However, in 1959 he was awarded an Academy Award for “his pioneering inventi...

Lee De Forest occupies an interesting space in the history of inventions past. While his work was pivotal to things like the De Forest was the defendant in several patent infringement lawsuits, had 4 failed marriages, several failed companies, and was barely able to make any money from his almost 300 patents. In the end, his major accomplishment was that he invented the Audion vacuum tube, a crucial component to That said, in order to understand the accomplishments of De Forest's early life Lee De Forest was born on August 26, 1873, in the U.S. state of Iowa to a congregational minister. Being a pastor's kid would lead him through an interesting childhood. His father moved his family to Alabama to become the president of Talladega College. Notably, De Forest's family was white, yet Talladega College was exclusively for African American students. Lee's father felt that it was his duty to champion education for all races, but this viewpoint led to Lee and his family being ostracized by much of the culture in the day. This ultimately meant, though, that Lee made his friends among the black communities in the area, which shaped much of his upbringing. Lee, like many future engineers and inventors, was fascinated with machinery at a very early age. By the early age of thirteen, he had already begun inventing new mechanical gadgets like a miniature blast furnace. He even had invented a working mechanical train-like device. Drawing back to Lee being a pastor's kid in the late 180...

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RADIO ACTIVATOR: Local inventor Lee de Forest developed the technology that made modern media possible. In Palo Alto, about a century ago, a man named Lee de Forest invented the three-element vacuum tube. With his typical sense of poetry, he named it “the Audion.’ Superseded by other advances in amplification, the device exists, when it does, in those high-end tube amps that electric guitarists purchase. This invention, however, gives credence to what Lee de Forest: King of Radio, Television and Film ($27.95; Copernicus Books/Springer) De Forest was a genius, but a troubling and troubled one, a model for the embittered crackpot beloved of science fiction. Says Adams, de Forest believed “that an unnamed ‘they’ were out to get him’ as early as the 1890s, even before the inventor entered Yale. He was a famous man, a highly successful inventor who made a million dollars from one of his patents. And he was much-married: the fourth time to a very pretty, if forgotten, Hollywood actress. De Forest was also cranky enough to write to the newspapers that “his’ invention, radio, had been perverted by all that cheap music the disk jockeys played, that “hubba hubba and audio jitter bug … a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere.’ Ultimately, radio had multiple fathers. Adams stresses de Forest’s neglected rep as the pioneer of sound film. The author has a local historian’s sympathy for de Forest, whose artifacts, including the honorary Oscar he won in 1960, are kept at Hi...

Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers, March 1914. It had been known since the middle of the 19th century that gas flames were This was a significant development as existing commercial wireless systems were heavily protected by grid). The Audion provided power gain; with other detectors, all of the power to operate the headphones had to come from the antenna circuit itself. Consequently, weak transmitters could be heard at greater distances. Patents and disputes [ ] De Forest and everybody else at the time greatly underestimated the potential of his grid Audion, imagining it to be limited to mostly military applications. It is significant that de Forest apparently did not see its potential as a note magnifiers had been the bane of the telephone industry for at least two decades. (Ironically, in the years of patent disputes leading up to World War I, it was only this "loophole" that allowed vacuum triodes to be manufactured at all since de Forest's grid Audion patent did not mention this application). (left) The first prototype Audion with the grid (zigzag wires) between the filament and plate. (right) Later design of an audion tube. The grid and plate are in two parts on either side of the central filament. In both these tubes the filament is burned out. De Forest was granted a patent for his early two-electrode version of the Audion on November 13, 1906 ( [ citation needed] He always referred to the vacuum triodes developed by other researchers as "Oscillaudions...

Lee De Forest was born in 1873 and grew up in Alabama. He became interested in machinery as a young child but repeatedly clashed wills with his father, who wanted him to study for the ministry. Desperate to convince his father to send him to the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, he forged his father’s name on a letter to Before going to Yale in 1893, De Forest traveled to the Chicago World’s Fair. When he ran out of money soon after arriving, he worked as a strikebreaker for the grounds crew, pushing the wheelchairs of disabled or exhausted tourists. He had little sympathy for either the workers on strike or his customers, whom he overcharged in order to make enough money to prolong his stay. De Forest eventually arrived at Yale and remained there until he received a doctorate in physics for his work on De Forest’s first job was at Western Electric in Chicago. He worked his way up to the experimental laboratory and developed a few modestly successful inventions, which spurred him to move to New York and start the De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company in 1902. Though this company did not last long, in 1907 De Forest patented the De Forest was a pioneer broadcaster in addition to an inventor and engineer. He set up a radio station in the Bronx in 1916. However, his reliance on During the 1920s De Forest began to work on a system for producing motion pictures with sound. The operating quality of his optical recording system was poor and failed to interest the film industry....

RADIO ACTIVATOR: Local inventor Lee de Forest developed the technology that made modern media possible. In Palo Alto, about a century ago, a man named Lee de Forest invented the three-element vacuum tube. With his typical sense of poetry, he named it “the Audion.’ Superseded by other advances in amplification, the device exists, when it does, in those high-end tube amps that electric guitarists purchase. This invention, however, gives credence to what Lee de Forest: King of Radio, Television and Film ($27.95; Copernicus Books/Springer) De Forest was a genius, but a troubling and troubled one, a model for the embittered crackpot beloved of science fiction. Says Adams, de Forest believed “that an unnamed ‘they’ were out to get him’ as early as the 1890s, even before the inventor entered Yale. He was a famous man, a highly successful inventor who made a million dollars from one of his patents. And he was much-married: the fourth time to a very pretty, if forgotten, Hollywood actress. De Forest was also cranky enough to write to the newspapers that “his’ invention, radio, had been perverted by all that cheap music the disk jockeys played, that “hubba hubba and audio jitter bug … a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere.’ Ultimately, radio had multiple fathers. Adams stresses de Forest’s neglected rep as the pioneer of sound film. The author has a local historian’s sympathy for de Forest, whose artifacts, including the honorary Oscar he won in 1960, are kept at Hi...