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The man who invented
radio
November/December 2008
by Judith Ann Schiff
Judith Ann Schiff is
chief research archivist at the Yale University Library.
In 1924, Lee De
Forest (1873-1961) returned to his alma mater to speak about his new invention,
"talking movies." De Forest, who had graduated from Yale's Sheffield Scientific
School in 1896 and received his Yale doctorate in 1899, recalled a lecture he
had attended as a student that was given by Alexander Wurts (Sheffield 1883).
Wurts's description of his invention of the lightning arrester (an early form
of surge protector) had inspired De Forest to enter the field of experimental
research. He told his audience that he had vowed, if he became successful, to
return to Yale to lecture on his own work. He hoped, he said, to "plant the
seed of inventive ambition in a student of today."
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In graduate school, De Forest's mentor was Josiah Willard Gibbs.
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At Yale, Lee worked
as a waiter, caretaker, and research assistant to pay for his room and board.
During his senior year, his father, Henry Swift De Forest, Class of 1857,
'66BDiv, died suddenly. His mother moved to New Haven so that Lee and his
brother Charles, Class of 1901, could afford to attend Yale.
The De Forest men
had also benefited from a scholarship. The money came from the David de Forest
Scholarship Fund, established by a distant relative, which gave first
preference to descendants of his bearing the exact family name. So while at
Yale the brothers, as a courtesy, spelled their name with the lowercase "d."
In graduate school,
De Forest's mentor was Josiah Willard Gibbs '58, '63PhD, the world-famous
theoretical physicist and mathematician. In De Forest's autobiography, Father
of Radio, he praised Gibbs's "colossal
mind" and wrote, "Thanks to the deep inspiration I was deriving from Gibbs, I
well knew that the leaders in electrical development would be those who pursued
the higher theory of waves and oscillations and the transmission by these
means of intelligence and power."
De Forest's
dissertation on the reflection of Hertzian waves at the ends of parallel wires
was published in the American Journal of Science in 1899. He worked on developing the wireless
telegraph, and in 1906 invented the Audion, a three-electrode vacuum tube. In a
1990 New York Times article,
"Out of De Forest and Onto the Air Came Music," Hans Fantel called De Forest's
invention, the standard radio tube, "the first effective device for electrical
amplification."
At first the world
was not impressed. De Forest worked for the U.S. Navy, building wireless
telegraph devices, while he planned spectacular schemes for publicizing the
possibilities of radio broadcasting. In 1908, for the French War Office, he
successfully demonstrated his system of wireless telephony from the Eiffel
Tower. Then, on January 13, 1910, using a fishing pole as an antenna, he
broadcast the first "Live from the Met" performance, featuring Enrico Caruso in Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci. Of course, no one yet had a radio, so public receivers
were set up in New York City, Jersey City, and Bridgeport, Connecticut.
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De Forest broadcast the first U.S. presidential election report in 1916.
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Radio broadcasting
developed slowly. The first major use of the Audion was by AT&T; the
company acquired rights in 1913 to inaugurate coast-to-coast long-distance
service using the Audion as an amplifier. In November 1916, De Forest broadcast
the first U.S. presidential election report. During World War I, he developed
radio, telephone, and telegraph devices for field and airplane communications
for America and the Allies. (De Forest received more than 180 patents, but he
spent a considerable amount of time and money in court defending his claims to
his inventions, including the Audion.)
After the war, in
1919, he patented a sound-on-film process. Most attempts at making "talking" pictures
involved playing recordings of dialogue, music, and other sounds that matched
the action on screen. (The first popular "talkie," Al Jolson's 1927 The Jazz
Singer, worked essentially that
way.) But the De Forest Phonofilm process embedded the sound track into the
film. More than 200 short movies were created with it, including, in 1924, a
six-minute speech by New York governor Alfred E. Smith for his presidential nomination
campaign -- the first application of a sound movie to politics.
De Forest's
Phonofilm technology was soon eclipsed by rivals. Still, in 1959, the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded him an honorary Oscar for "his
Pioneer Invention which brought Sound to the Motion Picture."
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The TV show This is Your Life honored De Forest in 1957.
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In 1931 De Forest
turned his attention to television, then in its infancy. His first invention in
this area was the "tele-film," a method of television for full-screen theater
projection. When De Forest demonstrated it at the MGM studio theater, Louis B.
Mayer said, "So what?" This proved prophetic, for the Great Depression would
take its toll, and the project folded. Even so, when he was honored on the
classic TV show This is Your Life in 1957, De Forest was introduced as the "Father of Radio and the Grandfather
of Television."
At his 30th college
reunion in 1926, Yale awarded De Forest an honorary Doctor of Science degree.
The citation read in part: "Dr. De Forest is one of the foremost magicians in
the romantic domain of modern science; he has helped to make the present age
preeminently the age of miracles."
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