- Excerpt

 

Much Ado About Almost Nothing:
Man's Encounter with The Electron

by Hans Camenzind

INTRODUCTION

Those interested in the history of invention, will enjoy this excerpt from the new book, Much Ado About Almost Nothing, a history of electricity by microchip designer Hans Camenzind.

Camenzind moves like a charged particle through the history of electronic invention, sketching dozens of inventors, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, professors and others.

All the luminaries are here -- Franklin, Faraday, Morse, Bell, Tesla, Edison, Marconi -- but Camenzind shines most when profiling lesser lights who made big contributions.

The excerpt below is about one such character: Lee de Forest. Was he the "Father of Radio," as he proclaimed, or a fraud? He helped develop the vacuum tube and rode it to three fortunes before settling down with a Hollywood starlet to a life of relative obscurity.

You can find video clips of the author talking about other technology pioneers at the History of Electronics web site.

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Lee de Forest: "Father of Radio" or Fraud?

by Hans Camenzind

Lee de Forest was born in 1873 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the son of a Congregational minister. When he was six years old, his father accepted the presidency of Talladega College and the family, including an older sister and younger brother, moved to Alabama. Talladega College had been founded by missionaries as a school for Negroes and the de Forest family found itself ostracized. Often the white town boys hurled rocks at the de Forest children, and they retaliated in kind.

As a boy Lee had an ungovernable temper that annoyed his strict and severe father and resulted in frequent spankings, during which Lee stubbornly refused to cry. He grew up with few friends and often withdrew, lying on the floor and sketching inventions.

Although his father pressured him to become a minister, Lee was determined to be an inventor. He found a scholarship at Yale (which had been set up by a distant relative for "anyone named de Forest"). His Yale classmates found him cocky, brash and loud. He was voted the "homeliest" and "nerviest" and on the question who was the brightest he only received one vote (his own) but 16 for "thinks he is."

De Forest, with his bushy eyebrows, sunken eyes, prominent cheekbones and peculiarly shaped head, did not like his own appearance. He was graceless and awkward in his contacts with people, always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Being desperately poor, he needed to supplement his small allowance with menial jobs. During his undergraduate days he constantly thought up schemes to make money -- an airship, an improved pipe, a chainless bicycle, a crease perpetuator -- none of which were successful. He promoted souvenir programs for regattas and proms, with the result that his mother had to bail him out of his debts. When he entered a $50,000 contest for the design of an underground trolley cable and heard nothing, he decided he had been robbed and sent a threatening letter to the contest administrators.

Despite an undistinguished undergraduate record, de Forest managed to enter graduate school. In the second year of his postgraduate work he heard a lecture on the work of Hertz, which made him decide to choose wireless as his career. He went to New York for an interview with Tesla, but was turned down.

De Forest received his Ph.D. in 1899 and found a job at Western Electric in Chicago, working for $8 per week in the generator department. Two months later he was promoted to the telephone laboratory. His work there was mediocre, he spent much of the company's time on his own wireless projects.

In May 1900 he quit Western Electric and went to work for a Dr. Johnson, who was in the process of starting up the American Wireless Telegraph Company in Milwaukee. Again de Forest worked on his own device and, when he refused to let the company use it, the association came to an abrupt and premature end.

Returning to Chicago he went into partnership with Edwin Smythe, a colleague from Western Electric. Smythe contributed $5 of his $30 weekly salary. De Forest earned another $5 per week from part-time teaching and editing of technical journals. The two of them got permission to use a laboratory of the Armour Institute when no class was in session.

What de Forest was working on was not revolutionary. Many people were trying to improve on the coherer and several had come up with more sensitive detectors. De Forest had found an article on a French detector in which a pasty mixture replaced the metal filings; he experimented with the mixture and filed a patent application on essentially the same device. The device never found a practical use.

Nevertheless de Forest felt ready for the big time. Professor Clarence Freeman of the Armour Institute had a design for a new transmitter and was taken in as a partner. De Forest went to New York to set up a wireless link for the reporting of the America's Cup races. He found that Marconi had already signed up Associated Press, so he made a deal with Publisher's Press, which was to pay him $800 if the equipment worked. A former mayor of New York advanced $1000 and became a partner, too.

Everything went wrong in New York. Freeman's transmitter did not work; de Forest hastily replaced it with an ordinary spark coil. Then Marconi and de Forest found they were interfering with each other, neither of them using any kind of tuning in their receivers. They agreed to transmit alternately for 5 minutes, but then a third transmitter appeared, operated by the American Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company, and wiped out all radio communication during the races.

De Forest was broke. He begged Smythe for some money, pounded Wall Street to raise capital and, finding none, was ready to ask the Marconi Company for a job. But then he found Henry B. Snyder, an over-the-counter stockbroker, who knew how to go about raising money. Snyder got in contact with a certain Abraham White -- and de Forest was in business again.

Abraham White was a colorful figure, with flaming red hair and moustache, blue eyes, patent leather shoes, gold chain, silk hat and a flower in his buttonhole. Little is known about his background, except that he came from Texas and had changed his name from Schwartz (Black in German) to White. Needless to say, White had made his money speculating.

When de Forest met White he was wearing his only pair of trousers, the lining in his suit jacket was gone, his shoes needed soles, he was hungry and owed money for room and board. White peeled off a $100 bill and told de Forest to get some new clothes.

The American De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company was now formed, with White as president and de Forest as vice president and scientific director. De Forest built two demonstration stations, one on Staten Island, and the other in a striking, glassed-in penthouse laboratory on the roof of 17 State Street, to which White brought prospective investors. After the demonstration the guests were treated to a sumptuous lunch, during which a surprised de Forest heard White explain how the company would build wireless stations all along the Eastern Seaboard, the Gulf of Mexico, and across the continent, compete with the telegraph and telephone, and have subsidiary companies all over the world. At that time de Forest had achieved a maximum distance of 11 km (7 miles).

Investments came rolling in. At the St. Louis Exposition in 1904 the company erected a 100-meter (300-foot) tower and de Forest lived in a three-story brick house, with carriage and coachman, cook and butler. He now wore a derby and smoked fat cigars; on paper de Forest was worth nearly $1 million.

It was mostly a stock selling scheme. By 1905 more than 90 antenna towers had been constructed, few of which were ever put to use. What little real business the company had was in trouble. A contract for five Navy stations was completed late and wireless links for meat packers between Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City were so full of static that the meat packers returned to using the telegraph.

The bottom began to fall out of the scheme in November 1905, when a court injunction was obtained against the detector de Forest was using. A warrant was issued for his arrest. He decided to flee to Canada until White could arrange for a $5000 bail bond.

At this point White decided he no longer needed de Forest. Indeed, de Forest had come up with few inventions of value. White offered de Forest $1000 for all of his stock and threatened to revoke the bail bond if de Forest did not accept. De Forest accepted. White then reorganized the American De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company into the United Wireless Telegraph Company, which went on for a few more years bilking gullible investors.

But, although de Forest was in deep trouble during 1905 and 1906, these were his most interesting and crucial years. Back in Chicago he had noticed that a gaslight in the room flickered whenever the spark transmitter was turned on. It turned out to be merely due to the crackling sound made by the spark, but the scene never left de Forest's mind. Early in 1905 he applied for several patents for radio-frequency detectors, each of them employing either a Bunsen burner or an enclosed electric heating element. The patents claimed that radio frequency, applied to two electrodes near these burners or heaters affected the conduction of the gas between them. There is no evidence that any of the devices ever actually worked.

De Forest was in desperate need for a patentable detector. He investigated John Ambrose Fleming's valve, which Marconi was using. De Forest later consistently claimed that he had not heard of Fleming's work. He did not understand how Fleming's valve worked, but began to concentrate more and more on a filament encapsulated with an additional electrode in a glass bulb. Trying (and patenting) everything that came to his mind, he decided to enclose a second anode and then varied the positions of the two anodes with respect to the filament. He found the device worked best as a detector when one of the "wings" was made of meandering wire and located between the filament and the other anode. He patented this as a "Device for Amplifying Feeble Electrical Currents," though there was actually no amplification. As a detector de Forest's "Audion" was about on par with Fleming's valve and inferior to the crystal detector.

De Forest gave a long and hazy paper on the "Audion" to a meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in New York. The Audion was partially evacuated; he explained its effect as being due to the remaining air, which underwent "changes when subjected to Hertzian waves."

What had de Forest invented here? His device later became the most important electronic component -- the vacuum tube -- and its appearance marked the beginning of electronics. But we must not be blinded by what happened later. De Forest did not understand how his Audion worked and up to this point had not achieved any amplification.

The most important property of a vacuum tube is amplification: with a tiny amount of power you can control a much larger one. It is akin to a water valve with which one person can turn on a very large turbine. And the vacuum tube (or valve) can do this gradually, in fine increments.

A device such as the vacuum tube was badly needed and nothing illustrates this better than the quest to transmit voice (or music) over radio. If you have a vacuum tube you can amplify the feeble signal from a microphone until it is strong enough to control the power going into the transmitter. Thus the transmitter power increases and decreases in rhythm with the voice (called amplitude modulation, or AM). Reginald Fessenden tried to do this in 1900, before the vacuum tube existed. He built a massive, water-cooled microphone that directly modulated the amplitude of the transmitter. It didn't work very well.

During the same time Robert von Lieben in Vienna developed and patented a tube which used a complete vacuum and produced amplification. But he received very little publicity and died of cancer at age 35.

De Forest now repeated the history of his first company: he turned to James Smith, one of White's star salesmen, to raise money for the De Forest Radio Telephone Company. Smith became president, de Forest a vice president.

In 1908 de Forest married; he now received a salary of $300 a month and had seven assistants. With increasing stock sales the value of de Forest's shares shot up to $700,000. He started to build a large house outside New York.

The De Forest Radio Telephone Company sold a variety of radio equipment products. In its advertisements the Audion is either not mentioned at all or as a minor item; it simply did not work that well. The crystal detector performed better and was less expensive. Only a few hundred Audions were made per year and used only as detectors. He allowed the British patent on the Audion to lapse for non- payment of a $125 renewal fee.

To continue selling stock de Forest now tried two publicity stunts. In the first one he attempted to transmit voice between the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower in New York, the tallest building in America, and the Eiffel tower, the tallest structure in Europe. He began erecting antennas in 1909. In New York the antenna stood for a year, then a wire snapped and it fell to the ground, narrowly missing a pedestrian. After this incident he was asked to remove the antenna; no transmission between the two points had ever taken place.

In the second attempt de Forest set up an opera transmission with Caruso singing. The few people who had receivers found the music so badly distorted that the voices were hardly recognizable.

It was Smith who delivered the coup de grace to the company. He calmly informed the board of directors that the last block of 20,000 shares sold were not the company's, but his own, and then walked out, leaving behind a debt of $40,000. De Forest attempted to reorganize the company and its subsidiaries into a new shell, the North American Wireless Corporation, but the government had belatedly started a crusade against radio stock promoters and de Forest and his companies went into bankruptcy. He lost his dream-house, his wife sued for divorce, and he was forced to accept a job with the Federal Telegraph Company in San Francisco.

To make matters worse, de Forest, Smith, two other former associates and the stock underwriters were indicted in 1912 on mail fraud, alleging that the four of them had used fraudulent methods to sell stock. Smith was found guilty and drew a heavy fine and jail sentence. De Forest was cleared on three counts, but on the fourth, conspiracy, the jury disagreed. The government decided not to pursue the case any further.

Shortly after de Forest started to work at Federal Telegraph, he received a letter from a John Hays Hammond, telling him of the work of a Fritz Loewenstein in New York. Loewenstein had taken some of de Forest's Audions and had found out how to use them properly, biasing the third electrode, the grid, with a small negative voltage and thus allowing it to control the current flow between cathode and anode in a predictable way.

It was probably this letter that prompted de Forest to take a second look at his Audion. He managed to build an amplifier and reckoned that this amplifier was just what was needed for the telephone. On October 30, de Forest was able to demonstrate his amplifier before a group of AT&T engineers, with the purpose of selling the Audion. The demonstration was repeated for Dr. Harold Arnold, who had studied under Millikan and knew much about cathode rays and vacuum devices. The amplifier did not work very well, it could handle only weak signals and would distort badly with louder voices and show a blue haze inside.

Arnold immediately sensed that de Forest's explanation of how the Audion worked was wrong. He had enough experience with electrons in vacuum to know that the residual gas hindered the desired effect rather than helping it.

AT&T took its time. Not only needed a lot of work to be done to determine if the Audion could be useful for the telephone system, but de Forest had assigned his patents to his old, bankrupt company and a bewildering number of subsidiaries, which needed to be tracked down. Finally, in 1913, de Forest received $50,000 from AT&T for the use of the Audion in all fields except wireless telegraphy and telephony. De Forest used some of the money to buy back his dream house. A year later AT&T paid an additional $90,000 for a non-exclusive license for the use of the Audion in wireless telegraphy.

Arnold and his engineers at AT&T worked hard to improve the Audion and a string of minor improvement patents resulted. De Forest noticed the issuance of these patents and filed patents with identical claims for the sole purpose of interference 12. It was an incredibly underhanded action (which he blithely admits in his autobiography, immodestly entitled "Father of Radio"), but it worked. In 1917 AT&T made a final payment of $250,000 for all remaining rights, except sales to direct users, the U.S. Government, a license to Marconi, and the distribution and reception of news and music over radio.

With the payments from AT&T, de Forest was flush with cash for the first time in his life. But his troubles persisted. The Marconi Company, owner of Fleming's patents, sued for infringement in 1914. De Forest counter-sued, claiming that the Audion was not based on Fleming's valve and that he had not known of Fleming's work when he invented the Audion (a statement clearly untrue). De Forest lost in court and again on appeal.

He spent his money lavishly on his house, his laboratory, and making talking pictures. By 1936 he was bankrupt again -- and divorced three times.

After this he moved his base of operation to Hollywood and, at 57, he married a 21-year-old starlet; strangely enough it was the only marriage that lasted. The remaining two decades of his life he spent lecturing, consulting, and writing, never becoming financially successful again. He died in 1961, at age 87, his estate having dwindled to a little over $1,000.