Lee de Forest: The Audion Tube, a Mail Fraud Trial and Losing Phonofilm

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Lee de Forest grew up in Talladega, Alabama, where his minister father ran Talladega College for African Americans and the local white community shunned the family. His only childhood friends were Black children from the town, and the isolation fed a lifelong hunger for wealth and recognition. At Yale on a $300 scholarship, his dorm experiments kept blowing the building's fuses, and knocking out power during a physics lecture got him expelled from the scientific school. At the 1901 International Yacht Races he tried to beat Guglielmo Marconi at wireless reporting, threw his broken transmitter overboard, and watched every competing signal jam into static.

With promoter Abraham White he ran a company built on stock hype, but in 1906 he created the grid Audion, a vacuum tube with a wire grid that could amplify a weak signal for the first time, even though he wrongly believed it needed residual gas to work. A 1912 mail fraud trial ended in acquittal but left him broke, and he sold telephone rights to AT&T. He won a long patent war with Edwin Howard Armstrong over the regenerative circuit at the Supreme Court twice while engineers sided with Armstrong. He died in 1961 at 87 with $1,250 in the bank.

He titled his own autobiography Father of Radio and held over 300 patents.
His company parked a wireless auto with an unmuffled spark transmitter on Wall Street to attract investors.
AT&T pumped the gas out of the Audion and used it for the first transcontinental phone calls in 1915.
He debuted Phonofilm sound on film in 1923, but Theodore Case took improved technology to Fox as Movietone.
He accused broadcasters of dressing his child in rags of ragtime and tatters of jive and boogie woogie.

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