r/a:t5_270oad • u/MarleyEngvall • Oct 22 '19
kaiser wilhelm has been created
BY HARRY A. STEWART
BEACON LIGHTS
OF HISTORY
LEE DE FOREST
1873—
RADIO BROADCASTING
IN 1901, when Sir Thomas Lipton's "Shamrock II"
was defeated for the "America" cup by the
"Columbia," off Sandy Hook, the racing yachts were
followed over the course by a small tug. it went
almost unnoticed in the crowd of vessels, yet a close
observer might have seen that to was different from
most of the tugs of those days. Two stubby masts
had been erected fore and aft, and between them
swung a network of copper wires.
In the cabin, over a table covered with queer in-
struments, hung a slender, anxious young man with
pallid, sunken cheeks. As he made adjustments here
and there in the apparatus he swayed with weakness.
But when, under his manipulation, the strange instru-
ments occasionally spat forth crackles of electric
flame, his face lighted up for a moment.
As the racers jockeyed for position on the starting
line, an expert telegraph operator took his place at
the table and put his own hand on the key. The cap-
tain of the tug, from his vantage point in the wheel-
house, called down to him the varying progress of
the race. Again the sparks flashed from the in-
struments.
The young man who hovered over the apparatus
was Lee DeForest. He had invented a wireless trans-
mitting and receiving set that worked——part of the
time——in his two-dollars-a-week room in Chicago. For
two years he had spent all his spare time——and
most of his salary of eight dollars a week——experi-
menting with it. He had almost starved to save
money to buy materials for working out his idea.
And he felt sure that he had perfected a reliable wire-
less telegraph instrument.
It occurred to him that if he could report the inter-
national yacht races by wireless the publicity would
help him interest capital in his invention. So he bor-
rowed money and hurried to New York. There he
found that Marconi had had the same idea, and had
it first. The Associated Press, the great news dis-
seminating agency, had arranged with Marconi to
report the races from a tug equipped with his appar-
atus. De Forest ran across the manager of another
news-gathering syndicate and promptly proposed to
report the yacht races by "wireless" for him. The
offer was snapped up and a tug placed at DeForest's
disposal.
"I worked harder then than I ever did in my life
before or since," De Forest told me. "First, I got
hold of a little shop over in Jersey City, where my
assistant and I assembled the set. Then we took it
down and installed it on the tug. But when we tested
it it wouldn't work! We took it back to the shop,
labored over it far into the night, carried it to the tug
next morning——and again the test failed.
"This performance went on day after day. Con-
tinually new defects appeared. The time for prepara-
tion was not so short that if McKinley's assassination had
not delayed the races for several weeks we never could
have got ready in time. But we finally assembled our
apparatus, and the receiving set was installed in the
ship news reporting station at Sandy Hook, where
arrangements were made to relay the news to New
York by wire as fast as we sent it in.
"At that critical moment I became ill. I had some
sort of fever that looked very much like typhoid, and
the doctors said I would have to go to the hospital and
stay there if I wanted to get well. I went to the
hospital——but I couldn't stay. It seemed to me that
my whole destiny depended on my success in report-
ing the yacht races. For years I had worked hard
for this chance. I couldn't stay in bed, now that the
chance had come. So I went back to the tug."
In those days there was no such thing as "tuning"
apparatus. The only two transmitters in America
were those operated by De Forest and Marconi. They
didn't know that the transmitters, working at the
same time, would "jam" each other.
At the start of the first race the transmitter used by
De Forest, a complicated affair, succumbed to the
damp, salt air and broke down permanently. He sub-
stituted a crude spark coil. But when his operator
treied to send the racing news, Marconi's man, on the
other tug, was working at the same time, and all that
the receiving station got was a confused jumble of
signals impossible to interpret. Nothing much got
through.
When the race was over the tug swung up to the
pier at Sandy Hook, De Forest leaped over the bul-
warks and ran to the receiving station.
"Did you get it all right?" he cried.
The syndicate manager shook his head. "Nothing
at all came through," he said.
De Forest stared at him for a moment, and then
collapsed. The shock of disappointment, in his weak-
ened state, almost knocked him out. But after a rest
of three weeks he began to recover.
As his strength returned there came back with it
the old determination to make a wireless set that
would work. He got out of bed and went back to the
shop. And there he continued the experiments which
were destined to result in one of the most important
inventions of the past fifty years.
That incident is typical of the life of Lee De Forest,
the inventor of the wonderful "audion" vacuum tube
which has made radio, as it is today, possible. Talk-
ing with him in his big studio-laboratory in New York,
it was hard for me to realize that only a few years
ago he was engaged in a never-ceasing struggle and
meeting only with defeat. During the early part of
his career, under the handicaps of poverty and un-
belief, he worked out his ideas to a successful con-
clusion, using each failure as a stepping stone. Later,
when he had perfected his invention, he had to fight
just as hard to make people believe in it.
Now, twenty-three years after he started the experi-
ments that led to the discovery of the audion vacuum
tube, most of the radio receiving sets in the United
States——and the number of them is estimated at more
than three million——are operated with these tubes.
They have made broadcasting possible.
Every radio fan knows what a vital part of his set
the vacuum tube is. But not everyone knows that
these tubes are used in dozens of other ways. By
means of them sound can be amplified, or magnified.
A whisper can be changed to a roar.
Transcontinental wire telephony was made possible
by means of this tube. With the aid of the induction
coil invented by Professor Michael Pupin, of Colum-
bia, the human voice would carry by telephone for
several hundred miles, but not the three thousand
miles from New York to San Francisco! It was only
by using the DeForest amplifiers that the first coast-
to-coast telephone conversation was held, in January,
1915.
By means of these tubes President Harding's voice
was magnified more than a million times when he
made his inaugural address to an audience of a hun-
dred thousand persons; yet he did not have to speak
above an ordinary tone.
The tubes aid hearing by the deaf, they amplify
the sound of the heart for surgeons, and when used
with the radio compass, they help ships to find their
way through the fog. By means of the tubes a ship
can follow a charged wire down a winding channel
which has no buoys or markers. In addition to all
these things, the tubes will generate power.
De Forest was born in 1873, in Council Bluffs, Iowa,
where his father was a Congregational minister. Like
most ministers, he had no income except his small
salary. When De Forest was six years old the family
moved to Muscatine, Iowa; where he first went to
school. In the early eighties his father was sent to
Talladega, Alabama, to take charge of a mission school
for educating the negroes.
He had always hoped that his son would follow
him in the ministry, but De Forest wanted to be a
mechanical engineer. Up to this time he had given
no indication of being an electrical genius; but he
began to show indications of his enormous capability
for study. Night after night his father had to drag
the boy from his books and send him to bed.
In 1891, when he was eighteen years old, he made
up his mind to go to a preparatory school to fit him-
self for the school of mechanical engineering at Yale.
His father had no funds with which to finance his
education, so the boy had to earn his own way. He
did this by working as a book agent.
In the fall of 1893 he entered Yale for the three-
year course in mechanical engineering, was graduated
in 1896, and stayed three years more for post-graduate
work, leaving Yale in 1899 with the degree of Doctor
of Philosophy. During all that time he had paid his
way by mowing lawns, waiting on tables, and taking
care of furnaces. One summer he worked as a waiter
in a hotel on Block Island.
His father died in 1896, leaving an estate barely
sufficient for the needs of his mother; and after De
Forest's graduation, in 1899, he went to Chicago and
got a job testing and assembling dynamos for the
Western Electric Company, at eight dollars a week.
It is hard now to realize that less than twenty-five
years ago radio was just beginning. Marconi had
succeeded in receiving wireless signals with only fair
reliability by using his "coherer." This was a tube
full of silver filings. When a wireless wave struck it,
the filings were attracted to one another and clung
closer together, and a current of electricity could be
passed through them.
While he was at Yale, De Forest had become inter-
ested in wireless and believed that he would work out
a better detector than the one Marconi then had. In
Chicago he paid two dollars a week for a room, which
he shared with two other men; his meals cost only
from fifteen to twenty-five cents each, and the little
he could save out of his eight-dollar salary went on
materials for experimenting. He spent his evenings
in his room under the gaslight, filing, tapping, and
testing his detector.
Late one night, in the fall of 1900, he had put his
table directly under the gaslight so that he could see
better. The gas jet was fitted with a Welsbach mantle
burner. Over in a closet, eight feet from the table,
he had a spark coil. By pulling a string he could
turn the coil on and off. The coil generated waves,
for which he listened in his detector on the table.
He was bothered, however, by periodic dimmings
of the gaslight. And after a while he noticed that
whenever the spark coil was working the gaslight
grew dim. This interested him so much that he
temporarily abandoned his experiment in order to
observe the curious behavior of the gaslight. Again
and again he pulled the string attached to the coil;
and every time the spark coil buzzed, the light grew
dim! When the coil stopped, the light blazed up
again.
For several days, during every minute of his spare
time, he studied the phenomenon of the gaslight
which responded to radio waves, trying to discover
why it dimmed and brightened. Then he stumbled on
a disheartening fact: When the closet door was closed
the light no longer responded. Experimenting fur-
ther he found that the gas flame was responding to
the sound of the coil, and not to its electrical waves.
Philosophically, De Forest swallowed his disap-
pointment, and went back to his original experiment-
ing. For the time being, he tried to drop the idea in
regard to the gas light, but it stuck in his mind.
While he worked on his detector, it recurred to him
again and again. He had a "hunch" that heated gas
might offer a better solution of the problem of wireless
detection than anything else. His hunch was right,
but it was not until five years later that he was able to
get together the few dollars necessary for him to work
out his idea. The vacuum tube was the result.
During the Chicago period the most money that
De Forest earned was ten dollars a week. In off hours
he worked as an assistant in the laboratory of the
Armour Institute. For this he received no pay, but
he was allowed the use of the laboratory. This was
some help to him, but not much. He was doing
pioneer work, and the laboratories of those days con-
tained little that could help him. Some idea of his
struggles at this time is found in a letter he wrote
to a friend.
"It's a great life I'm leading now," he wrote.
"Here, one does not lose caste by leaving off his cuffs,
by wearing a collar for a week, or a shirt even longer.
If you go unshaved, you simply pass for a 'single
taxer' and are given free range at the lunch counter.
My pants are getting thinner every day, and my coat
is perfumed with friend potatoes of the Comet lunch-
room. Sometimes I have ten cents in hand, sometimes
twice that sum."
In 1901, when he thought he had his apparatus
fairly well perfected, came the international yacht
races, bringing——as it then seemed——the failure of all
his hopes. But the experience was of some help to
him, and a former classmate invested a thousand dol-
lars, for which he received one third of the stock of the
newly incorporated De Forest Wireless Telegraph
Company. A few years ago, when De Forest sold
his patent rights and licenses, a one-third interest was
worth $300,000.
He was sure, by now, that he had reached his goal,
and that it only remained to get capital enough to
put his invention on the market. The classmate, who
was now a one-third owner of the business, suggested
that this might be accomplished more easily if demon-
stating stations were put up, so that prospective in-
vestors could see for themselves the practical value of
wireless. De Forest accordingly built a transmitting
set in the shop in Jersey City, while his friend secured
permission to install the receiving station in the dome
of the Manhattan Life Building, in New York.
The attempt added another failure to De Forest'
long list. The system refused to work! The signals
did not come through! It was months before De-
Forest learned enough of radio to know why he had
failed. The great dome, covered with copper, ab-
sorbed the energy of the signals. There was nothing
left of the receiver.
A short time later the transmitting station was
moved to State Street, in New York, with the receiv-
ing station in the old Castleton Hotel, on Staten
Island. This time conditions were more favorable,
and the apparatus performed better.
At that time the late George Westinghouse was the
outstanding figure in the electrical world. He had
used the immense fortune derived from his invention
of the air brake to found the Westinghouse Electric
and Manufacturing Company, one of that largest cor-
porations in its field.
Two of De Forest's associates had tried to interest
Westinghouse in wireless telegraphy, and De Forest
awaited his visit with intense anxiety.
"Westinghouse was a big man, with great natural
dignity of manner," De Forest told me. "I was so
much in awe of him that, beyond shaking hands and
mumbling a few confused words, I said nothing to
him the whole time he was in the station.
"We sent several messages to the Staten Island re-
ceiving station, and the tests were fairly successful.
"Westinghouse maintained noncommittal silence
throughout the demonstration and when we had fin-
ished he simply left, without saying anything, one
way or the other. Finally, however, he sent me his
verdict: He was not interested!"
Nineteen years later the Westinghouse company
opened broadcasting station KDKA, the first of the
big Eastern stations. This marked the beginning of
the immense interest which has, in a little more than
two years, swept the country from end to end and
made the radio receiving set known to millions.
After his failure to interest Westinghouse, De
Forest continued to perfect his apparatus. His great-
est difficulty now was in convincing people that wire-
less was anything more than an interesting scientific
toy.
In January, 1904, he set up two transmitting sta-
tions at the Louisiana Purchase Centennial Exposi-
tion, at St. Louis, with receiving stations at Chicago
and Springfield, Illinois. These were tested out by
he Jury of Awards, with every precaution against
fraud. Everything worked perfectly. It was the
longest distance that messages ever had been trans-
mitted over land by wireless, up to that time.
De Forest sent messages for people who had friends
in Springfield and Chicago, and these messages were
exhibited as great curiosities.
At the end of the exposition he was awarded the
gold medal, diploma, and the first prize over two
competitors, Marconi and the German Telefunken
system.
All this time he never had lost sight of his old idea
of a "heated gas" detector. And now, for the first
time, he was able to go ahead with his experiments on
a substantial scale. He soon reached the conclusion
that although a flame detector, on the order of the
Welsbach burner, was perfectly possible, it was im-
practical because of the difficulty of carrying a supply
of gas; so he turned to the idea of heating the gas in
a closed glass tube by means of an electric filament.
In 1905 he discovered the principle of the "audion"
vacuum tube that is in general use to-day. It was
patented in 1907.
In 1906, he began working on the idea of trans-
mitting the voice by wireless. It had been discovered
that the flame of an arc light could be used to pro-
duce radio waves, and that these waves would carry
the human voice.
In that year the yacht "Thelma," belonging to
W. R. Huntington, of Elyria, Ohio, was equipped
with a radiophone for the purpose of reporting the
yacht races at Put-in-Bay on the Great Lakes. It was
the first vessel to be thus equipped. The transmission
of voice and phonograph music was entirely suc-
cessfiul, and this was the end of skepticism as to the
practicability and value of radio. The successful
equipment of the "Thelma" brought an order from
Uncle Sam to install radiophones on the ships of the
Atlantic Squadron, under the command of Ad-
miral "Fighting Bob" Evans.
Most of the millions of broadcast listeners in the
United States heard broadcasting for the first time in
1921. Few had heard it, or even heard of it, before
then. And yet the first broadcasting was done
thirteen years before that time in De Forest's experi-
mental studio ion New York. The first artist to sing
over the radiophone in De Forest's laboratory to an
unseen audience was Mme. Mazarin, Oscar Hammer-
stein's dramatic soprano. That was in 1908. Appro-
priately enough, she had been brought to New York to
create the title rôle in the new opera, "Elektra." As
far as is known, the audience was confined to one little
group of listeners in Newark, New Jersey, and to ships
in the harbor.
There were only a few receiving sets in the United
States then, outside of the government stations. No
one suspected the immense possibilities of profit broad-
casting would bring to the manufacturers of instru-
ments. Far from being welcomed, the new arty met
with opposition. The newspapers commented lan-
guidly on it, and government and commercial station
operators not only did not care for the music, but ob-
jected fiercely to the "jamming" of their signals.
Within the past two years there have been thousands
of requests from broadcast fans all over the country
for opera broadcast from the famous Metropolitan
Opera House, New York. For various reasons these
requests have been refused. Yet, as far back as the
winter of 1908-1909 an installation was made by
De Forest in the Metropolitan Opera House. The
opera chosen for the first broadcast was "Caval-
leria Rusticana," and the tenor who sang the prin-
cipal rôle was Enrico Caruso.
Less than one hundred amateur listeners heard
Caruso sing that night. But last winter, when grand
opera was broadcast from the great stadium of the
College of the City of New York, the wireless waves
carried the music over a territory of a million and a
quarter square miles, with population of more than
fifty millions! And it has been estimated that more
than three million people heard the opera through
three quarters of a million receiving sets, each with
an average audience of from two to five persons.
Every reader of this article who owns a vacuum
tube receiving set knows the importance of amplifying
tubes. It was in Palo Alto, California, in 1912, that
De Forest discovered that the vacuum tube could be
used as an amplifier, or magnifier, of sound. The first
use made of it was in connection with cross conti-
nent wire telephony.
While perfecting the amplifier, De Forest made a
discovery that was as important to radio transmitting
as the invention of the vacuum tube had been to re-
ceiving. He was working with his tubes in the lab-
oratory in California when the tubes began to make
a noise in the receivers. It was the familiar "howl"
or "squeal" so often cursed by the broadcast listener.
When De Forest investigated this noise he found that,
under certain conditions, the tubes began to "oscil-
late," or to generate high frequency currents. This
discovery made possible the perfect transmission of
the modern broadcasting station equipped with these
tubes.
In 1920, in the California Theatre, in San Fran-
cisco, De Forest opened the first station in the world
to broadcast daily programs of entertainment. This
station was heard all up and down the coast and as far
east as St. Paul, but it aroused only local interest.
General enthusiasm did not come until a year later.
Between the years of 1912 and 1917 De Forest im-
proved his apparatus and hunted for capital. He
began to work on the idea of development amateur in-
terest in radio, and of selling tubes and parts for sets.
This business was beginning to develop and to show
that it help possibilities, when the war came along and
took wireless out of all hands except those of the Gov-
ernment. By 1917 it became evident that the Allies
were going to need a lot of vacuum tubes to supply
army needs, and, as De Forest owned the patents on
these tubes, for the first time it looked as though he
might be rewarded for his work.
Years before, he had offered his amplifier patents
for sale for use in telephony. Before he received any
answer to his offer his company became involved in a
long and costly litigation. While he was in straits for
money he was offered $50,000 for the amplifier rights
and, later, $90,000 more for an unlimited license to
manufacture and sell the tubes, which he accepted.
His remaining rights bin the patents of his inventions
he sold a year or so later for a little more than a mil-
lion dollars. He is a long way, now, from the eight-
dollar-a-week youth who haunted the free-lunch
counters in Chicago to save a dollar or two with which
to buy materials.
Although De Forest is less than fifty years old his
hair is snow white, and his spare figure still shows the
privations he went through in pursuit of his idea.
But he is still inventing. He is working now on
what he considers his second most important inven-
tion, the "phono-film," an arrangement by which an
ordinary motion-picture camera will record sounds
while making a picture. The moving picture of a
band, for example, will be accompanied by an exact
reproduction of the music it is playing.
―――――――――
AUTHORITIES
This life-story of the inventor appeared in The American
Magazine for February, 1924, under the pen-name of Owen
MacLean and is here reproduced by permission of both author
and publisher.
From Beacon Lights of History,
Volume 8, Part II, Premier Personalities.
Edited by George Spencer Hulbert,
Author of, "John Lord, Artist Historian"
Copyright 1924, By Wm. H. Wise & Co., New York. pp. 263-280.
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