[BC] Lee de Forest

[RichardBJohnson at comcast.net]

Well MIT doesn't usually credit people for things they did not do.

http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/deforest.html

As a youngster, I read about his "super-regenerator" circuit and made a 6-meter receiver using it. As he claimed, it was so sensitive that it could detect any signal as long as it was above the noise. Of course, it had a failure, It was broad as a barn door so if there were more than two hams near the same frequency they would interfere with each other.

This, I "fixed" with a pre-selector stage and the pre-selector had "tickler-coil" regeneration to form a "Q" multiplier. Deliberate regeneration was also invented by Deforest as was the term "tickler coil," all disclosed in his papers available at the Boston Public Library.

Cheers,
Richard B. Johnson
Book: http://www.AbominableFirebug.com/

----- Original Message -----
From: "Glen Kippel" <glen.kippel at gmail.com>

 
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.