Background
Lee De Forest was born on August 26, 1873 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, United States, the son of Henry Swift (a minister) and Anna (Robbins) De Forest.
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1942
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1950
Lee De Forest was born on August 26, 1873 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, United States, the son of Henry Swift (a minister) and Anna (Robbins) De Forest.
De Forest's father, president of Talladega College in Alabama, had hoped that his son would also become a minister, but early in life Lee had shown an intense interest in inventing. As preparation for what his father hoped would be a religious career, de Forest was enrolled at Mount Hermon school in Massachusetts. The school’s emphasis on hard work (students did most of the chores in order to defray the expenses) left de Forest little time for inventing, and he was unhappy there. Nevertheless, after graduation he was able to convince his parents to allow him to attend the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale University. Eventually, he graduated from Yale University in 1896, obtaining his Ph. D. degree there three years later.
De Forest's first position was in the experimental telephone laboratory of the Western Electric Company in Chicago, and in 1900 he began active work in wireless telegraphy for the Armour Institute of Technology there. In 1902 he founded the American De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company, Jersey City, New Jersey, which did a thriving business in providing wireless telegraphy apparatus for ocean vessels and the United States government; it was succeeded in 1906 by the United Wireless Telegraph Company.
De Forest was chief research engineer for the Federal Telegraph Company in San Francisco from 1911 to 1912. In the latter year he sold the rights to the Audion amplifier as a telephone repeater to the American Telegraph and Telephone Company, thus making possible transcontinental telephony.
In 1915 De Forest transmitted a voice from Arlington, Virginia, to a receiving station atop the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and in 1916 he inaugurated news broadcasts by radio.
De Forest next turned to the development of talking motion pictures. By 1923 he had perfected a method for sound-on-film pictures, called the phonofilm, which he demonstrated for the first time at the Rivoli Theatre in New York. Later he had a part in the development of television and high-speed facsimile transmission.
In 1934 he founded the Lee De Forest Laboratories for research and the manufacture of radiotherapy apparatus.
His autobiography, Father of Radio, appeared in 1950.
De Forest was widely honoured as the “father of radio” and the “grandfather of television.” He had over 180 patents during his career.
His invention of the oscillating Audion coupled with the Audion tube, perfected and brought to completion the art of transmitting sound over the air.
He installed the first high-power radio stations for the United States Navy at five of its largest bases in this country. He also developed the horizontal receiving antenna, the loop antenna, the direction antenna, and the duplex method of sending and receiving.
He was instrumental in perfecting method for sound-on-film pictures. His other inventions include "noiseless recording" positive prints and "glow light" recording of sound films.
He was awarded the 1923 Franklin Institute Elliott Cresson Medal for "inventions embodied in the Audion".
He received the 1946 American Institute of Electrical Engineers Edison Medal, "for the profound technical and social consequences of the grid-controlled vacuum tube which he had introduced".
De Forest won honorary Academy Award Oscar presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1960, in recognition of "his pioneering inventions which brought sound to the motion picture".
He was honored February 8, 1960 with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Although raised in a strongly religious Protestant household, de Forest later became an agnostic.
De Forest was a conservative Republican and fervent anti-communist and anti-fascist.
De Forest married Lucile Sheardown in 1907, they divorced in 1907. Then he married Nora Stanton Blatch, a civil engineer, they divorced in 1911. After that he married Mary Mayo, a singer on December, 1912, they divorced in 1929. Finally, he married Marie Mosquini, an actress, in 1930. He had a child from the second marriage - Harriot Stanton de Forest, he had children from the third marriage - two daughters and one son.
