When was Lee de Forest born?
256764#1
Lee de Forest was born in 1873 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the son of Anna Margaret (née Robbins) and Henry Swift DeForest. He was a direct descendant of Jessé de Forest, the leader of a group of Walloon Huguenots who fled Europe in the 17th Century due to religious persecution.
Lee de Forest
256764#0
Lee de Forest (August 26, 1873 – June 30, 1961) was an American inventor, self-described "Father of Radio", and a pioneer in the development of sound-on-film recording used for motion pictures. He had over 180 patents, but also a tumultuous career—he boasted that he made, then lost, four fortunes. He was also involved in several major patent lawsuits, spent a substantial part of his income on legal bills, and was even tried (and acquitted) for mail fraud. His most famous invention, in 1906, was the three-element "Audion" (triode) vacuum tube, the first practical amplification device. Although De Forest had only a limited understanding of how it worked, it was the foundation of the field of electronics, making possible radio broadcasting, long distance telephone lines, and talking motion pictures, among countless other applications.
Lee de Forest
256764#2
De Forest's father was a Congregational Church minister who hoped his son would also become a pastor. In 1879 the elder de Forest became president of the American Missionary Association's Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama, a school "open to all of either sex, without regard to sect, race, or color", and which educated primarily African-Americans. Many of the local white citizens resented the school and its mission, and Lee spent most of his youth in Talladega isolated from the white community, with several close friends among the black children of the town.
Lee de Forest
11377415#1
Roy De Forest was born in North Platte, Nebraska to migrant farm workers during the Great Depression. De Forest's family lost their farm in Nebraska due to the harsh economic conditions during the Great Depression and were forced to move to Yakima, Washington. In Yakima, the De Forests bought a new farm, where they harvested pears and plums. De Forest described the socioeconomic status of his family as "not well off." Farm life had an important impact on De Forest's art. In his early art, De Forest experimented with landscape, which was inspired by the open land of his farm. Later in his career, De Forest began painting animals and other fantasy creatures in his art, which was inspired by growing up around farm animals.
Roy De Forest
256764#52
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". He suffered a severe heart attack in 1958, after which he remained mostly bedridden. He died in Hollywood on June 30, 1961, aged 87, and was interred in San Fernando Mission Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. De Forest died relatively poor, with just $1,250 in his bank account.
Lee de Forest
256764#18
On July 18, 1907, de Forest made the first ship-to-shore transmissions by radiotelephone — race reports for the Annual Inter-Lakes Yachting Association (I-LYA) Regatta held on Lake Erie — which were sent from the steam yacht "Thelma" to his assistant, Frank E. Butler, located in the Fox's Dock Pavilion on South Bass Island. De Forest also interested the U.S. Navy in his radiotelephone, which placed a rush order to have 26 arc sets installed for its Great White Fleet around-the-world voyage that began in late 1907. However, at the conclusion of the circumnavigation the sets were declared to be too unreliable to meet the Navy's needs and removed.
Lee de Forest
256764#56
Although raised in a strongly religious Protestant household, de Forest later became an agnostic. In his autobiography, he wrote that in the summer of 1894 there was an important shift in his beliefs: "Through that Freshman vacation at Yale I became more of a philosopher than I have ever since. And thus, one by one, were my childhood's firm religious beliefs altered or reluctantly discarded."
Lee de Forest
18114919#9
Lee De Forest produced a program broadcasting opera phonograph records from the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 1908. This was just an experimental stunt for other nearby hobbyists and not considered a public broadcast as the public had no access to receivers at the time. At one point, when testing the radiotelephone for the Navy, Lee de Forest played patriotic phonograph music as the ships entered the harbor.
Birth of public radio broadcasting
38339036#2
De Forest was born in Randers, Denmark, to a Danish mother, Marianna Birgitte Gudnitz and Swedish father, Ingvar de Forest (1938–2010). Following her parents' divorce when she was young, she grew up with her mother in Mariager, Denmark, and in Stockholm, Sweden. She had previously claimed that she was a great granddaughter of British king Edward VII. Danmarks Radio used the story of her claim to royal ancestry in its promotion of the Dansk Melodi Grand Prix, although the claim has been discredited by researchers.
Emmelie de Forest
256764#34
U.S. patent law included a provision for challenging grants if another inventor could prove prior discovery. With an eye to increasing the value of the patent portfolio that would be sold to Western Electric in 1917, beginning in 1915 de Forest filed a series of patent applications that largely copied Armstrong's claims, in the hopes of having the priority of the competing applications upheld by an interference hearing at the patent office. Based on a notebook entry recorded at the time, de Forest asserted that, while working on the cascade amplifier, he had stumbled on August 6, 1912 across the feedback principle, which was then used in the spring of 1913 to operate a low-powered transmitter for heterodyne reception of Federal Telegraph arc transmissions. However, there was also strong evidence that de Forest was unaware of the full significance of this discovery, as shown by his lack of follow-up and continuing misunderstanding of the physics involved. In particular, it appeared that he was unaware of the potential for further development until he became familiar with Armstrong's research. De Forest was not alone in the interference determination — the patent office identified four competing claimants for its hearings, consisting of Armstrong, de Forest, General Electric's Langmuir, and a German, Alexander Meissner, whose application would be seized by the Office of Alien Property Custodian during World War I.
Lee de Forest