1873-1961
Radio Pioneer

Childhood and Education.

Born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Lee De Forest was raised in Alabama, where his father was president of Talladega College. He studied engineering at Yale University's Sheffield Scientific School and then continued as a graduate student in physics. His favorite teacher was J. Williard Gibbs, but Gibbs was a theoretician who could not instruct in practical matters. While in graduate school De Forest read Nikola Tesla's lectures on high-voltage, high-frequency electric current phenomena, because he intended to ask Tesla for a job. Tesla's laboratory in New York, De Forest later explained, "was a fabulous domain into which all ambitious young electric students aspired to enter and there remain." In 1896 he met Tesla at his laboratory. De Forest's principal interest was radiotelegraphy, and his 1899 doctoral thesis on "Reflection of Hertzian Waves from the Ends of Parallel Wires" was a means...