preview

Lee De Forest Essays

Decent Essays

Lee De Forest

Lee De Forest was born Aug. 26, 1873, Council Bluffs, Iowa. De Forest was the son of a Congregational minister. His father moved the family to Alabama and there assumed the presidency of the nearly bankrupt Talladega College for Negroes. Excluded by citizens of the white community who resented his father's efforts to educate blacks, Lee and his brother and sister made friends from among the black children of the town and spent a happy although sternly disciplined childhood in this rural community. (Kraeuter, 74). As a child he was fascinated with machinery and was often excited when hearing of the many technological advances during the late 19th century. He began tinkering and inventing things even in high school, often …show more content…

De Forest's doctoral dissertation on the "Reflection of Hertzian Waves from the Ends of Parallel Wires" is said to possibly be the first doctoral thesis in the United States on the subject that was later to become known as radio. (Kraeuter, 76).

His first job was with the Western Electric Company in

Chicago, where, he began working in the dynamo department, then working his way up to the telephone section and then to the experimental laboratory. While working after-hours on his own, he developed an electrolytic detector of Hertzian waves. (A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries, 1999). The device was very successful, as was an alternating-current transmitter that he designed. In 1902 he and his financial backers founded the De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company. In 1902, De Forest began giving public demonstrations of wireless telegraphy for businessmen, the press, and the military in an effort to inform and expand its succcess.

De Forest invented the Audion, or triode, device in 1906, by inserting a grid into the center of a vacuum tube. Applying voltage to the grid controlled the amount of a second current flowing across the tube. a vacuum tube device that could take a weak electrical signal and amplify it into a larger one. (A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries, 1999). In 1913, AT&T installed audions to boost voice signals as they crossed the US continent. Soon the audion was

Get Access