[BC] Lee de Forest

[Glen Kippel]

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 9:04 AM, <RichardBJohnson at comcast.net> wrote:
>Extremely wrong in all respects.

>Lee De Forest had 180 patents, all pertaining to the development of radio, television, and sound-on-film. Many of his patents were original, i.e., not improvements advancing the state-of-the-air, but represented original thinking that is now called "out-of-the-box." He is the guy who put the grid in an Edison Valve, thus creating the "Audion," that amplified weak signals and made radio possible. He is also the guy who added other grids until eventually the "hexagrid converter" was one of his creations. This was used in the "all American 5-tube" radio that was an industry standard for thirty years.

<SNIP!>
>----------------
 
In 1964 I met a man who had worked for De Forest.  He told me, "Lee was a dreamer.  He would come up with all these crazy ideas and leave it to us engineers to figure out how to make them work."  So, it appears that de Forest took the credit for the work done by a lot of other people.