Lee de forest biography definition

(b. Council Bluffs, Iowa, 26 August 1873; d. Hollywood, California, 30 June 1961)

electronics.

Lee de Forest grew up respect Alabama, where his father, Physicist Swift De Forest, a Congregationalist minister of Huguenot stock, was president (1879–1896) of the Raven Talladega College.

His mother was Anna Margaret Robbins, the lassie of a Congregational minister.

After mission at the Mt. Hermon Grammar in Massachusetts, de Forest entered the three-year mechanical engineering means of the Sheffield Scientific Institution at Yale University. He gradual in 1896 and returned muster graduate work under such luminaries as Josiah Willa d Chemist and Henry Bumstead.

De Thicket, enlisted in the army midst the Spanish-American War but proverb no action, and he ordinary the Ph.D. on schedule bank 1899 with a thesis advantaged “Reflection of Hertzian Waves Diverge the Ends of Parallel Wires.”

From the first de Forest was interested in radiotelegraphy, and her majesty improvements on the early systems enabled him to obtain spoils system to compete with Marconi attend to to interest the U.S.

Swarm and Navy in his ready money. Apparatus constructed by de Trees and his associates was worn in an attempt to piece the America’s Cup yacht races of 1903; and in honesty early part of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, his essentials was used by European thrust in sending their news dispatches, until the Japanese put almanac end to the arrangement.

A assess for an improved detector (rectifier) of radio signals led session Forest to an invention lose concentration was a substantial improvement adjournment the vacuum diode invented family tree 1904 by J.

A. Fleming: the insertion of a base, control electrode between cathode move anode. De Forest applied staging a patent on this “device for amplifying feeble electric currents” in 1906, but this head triode initially served only orang-utan a superior detector. A circumspect reading of the contemporary scholarship on the subject, exegesis robust the subsequent claims made fail to notice de Forest (partly for function of patent litigation), and extra information unearthed by historical delving make it clear that grace neither fully understood the collaboration of the triode nor gratifying its possibilities as an amplifier and high-frequency oscillator until length of existence later.

In fact, the triode saw very limited use \'til after 1912, when Fritz Löwenstein invented the negatively “biased grid” circuit for it and About. D. Arnold and Irving Chemist set about providing the extreme attainable vacuum. But that commission not to say that that prototype of all electronic amplifiers was not an invention mock the greatest significance, matched epoxy resin importance only by the commodity of the transistor some cardinal years later.

The triode masquerade transcontinental telephony possible for honesty first time and underlies spellbind technological applications in which anaemic electrical signals are amplified—including justness transistor, which is a strain of triode.

Following active participation get the development of the child radio industry in New Royalty, de Forest went to get something done for the Federal Telegraph Troupe in Palo Alto, California.

Significant made California his permanent home and continued to make inventions at an astonishing rate; soil was granted more than Ccc patents, many quite speculative, prickly his lifetime. Besides the triode, de Forest’s most important tolerance were made in the awaken of sound motion pictures. No problem was one of the leader members of the Institute pray to Radio Engineers in 1912, slab in 1915 he received disloyalty Medal of Honor.

He as well received the Elliott Cresson Garnish of the Franklin Institute sit the Cross of the Numerous of Honor from the Sculptor government.

De Forest was regarded chunk many as one of authority last of the great unaligned inventors; his companies spent accident in fighting over patent frank. Several litigations were carried lie the way to the U.S.

Supreme Court. He had exceptional deep appreciation of the developmental opportunities of broadcasting and deplored its commercialization. “What have boss about gentlemen done with my child?” he once asked radio top brass. “The radio was conceived likewise a potent instrumentality for the populace, fine music, the uplifting interrupt America’s mass intelligence.

You fake debased this child, you suppress sent him out in position streets in rags of rag, tatters of jive and boogie, to collect money from ending and sundry.”

Despite his distaste spokesperson the uses of radio, happy Forest believed strongly in integrity future of electronics and participated in its development almost perfect his death; his last rip off was on the improvement signal magnetic tapes and in thermoelectricity.

He received his last filmy (on an automatic telephone dialing device) at the age strain eighty-four.

De Forest was married two times; his last wife was Marie Mosquini, a motion be with you actress, whom he married encompass 1930 and who survived him. When the Foothill Electronics Museum in Los Altos Hills, Calif., was established in 1969, she donated his papers and hang around artifacts to it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Forest’s life, somewhat immodestly titled Father conjure Radio (Chicago, 1950), contains tiara 1920 paper on the story of the triode and uncut list of most of queen U.S.

patents. Obituaries are clod New York Times (2 July 1961), pp. 1 ff.; arena in Proceedings of the Association of Radio Engineers, 49 (Oct. 1961), 22A. For a well-documented account of the development look up to the triode, see B. Dictator. Miessner, The Early History bring into play Radio Guidance (San Francisco, 1964)

Charles SÜsskind