7 Lee De Forest 7he was widely honoured as the “father of radio” and the
“grandfather of television.” He was supported strongly but
unsuccessfully for the Nobel Prize for Physics.
Life
De Forest was the son of a Congregational minister. His
father moved the family to Alabama and there assumed
the presidency of the nearly bankrupt Talladega College
for Negroes. Ostracized by citizens of the white community
who resented his father’s efforts to educate blacks, Lee
made his friends from among the black children of the
town and, together with his brother and sister, spent a
happy although sternly disciplined childhood in this rural
community.
As a child, he was fascinated with machinery and was
often excited when hearing of the many technological
advances during the late 19th century. By age 13 he was an
enthusiastic inventor of mechanical gadgets, such as a
miniature blast furnace and locomotive and a working
silver-plating apparatus.
His father had planned for him a career in the clergy,
but Lee insisted on science and, in 1893, enrolled at the
Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, one of the few
institutions in the United States then offering a first-class
scientific education. Frugal and hardworking, he supple-
mented his scholarship and the slim allowance provided
by his parents by working at menial jobs during his college
years, and, despite a not-too-distinguished undergraduate
career, he went on to earn the Ph.D. in physics in 1899.
By this time he had become interested in electricity,
particularly the study of electromagnetic-wave propagation,
then being pioneered chiefly by the German Heinrich
Rudolf Hertz and the Italian Guglielmo Marconi. De