Seldom has a single invention unlocked so many doors as did Lee de Forest's audion, the forerunner of the modern vacuum tube. The audion made possible radio broadcasting, effective long distance telephoning, modern high-fidelity sound reproduction systems, television, radar, and high speed computers. So essential is the audion that de Forest, long known as the "Father of the Radio," might also well be called "Godfather of Electronic Age."
The road to triumph as an inventor was a rocky one for Lee de Forest. He had to struggle constantly to find the means to live while he studied, experimented, and invented. Twice he lost fortunes won by his inventions because of the financial chicanery of business associates. Only after a federal grand jury had found him and his patent lawyer, Captain Samuel E. Derby, not guilty of using the mails to defraud in promoting the audion did fortune turn a steadily smiling face on the indomitable inventor. But whether fortune frowned or smiled, from boyhood until his death at 87, Lee de Forest was always actively inventing.
Advancing the Electronic Age is the story of not only Lee de Forest, but all of the men who worked with him, in cooperation and in competition. Such rivals as Sir John Ambrose Fleming, inventor of a diode tube; R.A. Fessenden, who beat de Forest in the race to one kind of detector; and Edward H. Armstrong, who claimed to have discovered the feedback principle before de Forest-these men never gave up in their belief that they had beaten him.
Early wireless telegraphers and amateur operators gave de Forest unremitting and invaluable help. In his eyes they could never be given enough credit for working alongside him in jungle heat and Arctic cold, on land, afloat, and in the air, on the installation of testing of telephony, and radio broadcasting.
Most of all Lee de Forest was proud that he could bring great music to the world. His fascination as a four-year-old with and early Edison phonograph foreshadowed his lifelong obsession with the electronic reproduction of music. Because of Lee de Forest's inventions, everyone in the world today-even those isolated in remote regions- can have front row center seats for the performance of the great music of the world.
—from the book
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