Development in the Digital Age

Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film Program Transcript

MIKE ADAMS: I'm Mike Adams. I know this has been up here a long time. This is what I'm going to try to cover today.

I wrote the book and it's a giant, really thick book. It'll keep you occupied for weeks and weeks. And what I want to talk about today, and I've titled this "The Local Lee" because something that Lee de Forest did that was the most significant thing of his entire career that made everything happened, he did it in Palo Alto at one of the first Silicon Valley start-ups. And that is that he made his audion tube into an amplifier of audio and thus radio broadcasting for audiences and also sound films.

So I want to emphasize the local Lee de Forest. Because I wrote this book and because I teach students how to do research and how to think about subjects like this, I want to also do something for you that my students are always encouraged to do too, and that's the kind of use multimedia. In other words, I wrote a book, which is Springer Science.

They dated it 2012 but it came out last December. But I also have had the leedeforest.org website and I've had that since, gee, since the '80s when I was on the Parent Foundation and we had the de Forest papers. This was in Foothill College, mind you, in the late '80s. I took out the leedeforest.org website and I've been doing it every

And it's the main website. If you type in Lee de Forest into your browser, you will get that, which will give you a link to the Facebook page. I also created a Facebook page for de Forest and I did that because I have a lot of little movies sound movies.

One of de Forest's claim to fame-- he did these little movies. I also have some visuals and I put those on the Facebook. So it's something you can't get in just a book.

So what I've tried to do is give people kind of the multimedia. I call it the way the author's work. When I'm-- wrong one. Ah, there we go.

When I'm working with research, which is something I really like to do, the main question that you always have to ask is, how do you know what you know, right? I mean, it's very important, and this is what separates an educated approach from one that's, well, somebody told me that and I believe it. But the question is, how do you know what you know?

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

And so there are three archives that I went to for primary information on Lee de Forest when I was writing this book. The largest collection is in San Jose. And I'll tell you-- the most fascinating thing about the San Jose collection, which is in History San Jose, are de Forest school books from his time at Yale University from the late 1890s. de Forest was BA and PhD Yale and we actually have his books. So you can see what he was thinking sitting there in class.

You can see what he was learning. He was learning about Hearst and Maxwell and all the famous theoreticians and inventors of the day through his professors at Yale. And then we have some later things here from the teens where he's experimenting and doing drawings. But there's a lot of stuff, including diaries.

So there's plenty of de Forest stuff. The Case Museum gives perspective to the de Forest story because de Forest worked with Theodore Case, an inventor that worked with de Forest on the film project during the decade of the 1920s. And, as you know de Forest collected and saved everything possible.

But it's all favorable to de Forest, as we all. We're the gatekeepers of our own story, right? But if you go to the Case Museum, you get actual letters that are nowhere else that de Forest and Case exchanged about sound on film and it gives you a fascinating glimpse into a story which I tell in about four chapters of this book.

There is also technology that is nowhere else-- the adapter for playing back sound films on a silent projector, de Forest final films. And you can see this little wire around [INAUDIBLE]. If you look right there, it's de Forest in script letters.

Like, he actually-- somebody who made this by hand, right? So, interesting stuff-- there are also photographs as well. And then the third collection which most people don't know about is at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, the so-called Seaver Center on Western History.

There, not only was I able to get a perspective on other film inventors and a history of film, but also there is a photo film scrapbook, something that should've been in the San Jose collection. it used the same format, the same scrapbook format, filled with pictures and letters and things like that. It is at the Seaver Center, also some photographs and other things.

So this is how, when someone asks the question, well, how do you know what you know, well, I know from looking in these three archives. I know from examining all the patents and I also know from examining what some people call the first draft of history-- that is, the newspaper stories that were written between the beginning of the 20th century and the 1950s when de Forest was finishing out his life. A quick biography about de Forest-- he was born in Iowa, raised in Alabama.

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

He received his Ph.D. from the Yale University Sheffield scientific school. This was in 1899. Here's what he wrote in his diary when he graduated from Yale. He said, my specialty, then, shall be the condenser.

So his doctoral work was on Heinrich Hertz, reflections of waves on parallel wires or something. We have it in San Jose. We have his actual work from his doctoral thesis.

Here's what I found to be the most important thing from the collection from Yale. And this was from an 1897 notebook where he was sitting in class. He drew this diagram and you can see it's a microphone and a battery, an inductance-- a transformer, right?

And the secondary of the transformer modules an arc lamp in series with a DC source. And he says, talking arc, like speaking flame. It gives a fine reproduction of any sound at the microphone and vice versa. And this I call his talisman. This, when I saw this, I said, oh my gosh.

This is what de Forest did every time he invented. He went to the flame, right? His flame detector, which didn't work, but it inspired his vacuum tube audion, his arc transmitter. The early radio transmitter was an arc, right?

His flame microphone, which he invented-- dangerous thing, you know, flames, right? Gas flames-- flame microphone in the 1920s. His sound on film process, his very first way of writing with light on film, was an arc and his flat panel television, which used a bunch of flames.

This he talked about in the 1950s but never really went any farther. But there's a lot of detail on that which I will obviously not go into. But it is in the book.

de Forest was fortunate that he had three good decades as an inventor. Most of us, you look at-- at artists, at creative people, at scientists. You know, we might have 10 good years when we're really cranking out the hits. And then all of a sudden, we're just OK, right?

I mean, all of us have that. Maybe as a writer, maybe I have just a few good years in there where things were going just right. de Forest had three good decades.

His first decade, he immediately upon college graduation improved upon Marconi's wireless. And he was popular in wireless and sold wireless equipment for one very good reason I talk about in the book. Whenever they referred to him, they always said our equipment is from the American de Forest. So there was this thing about, well, Marconi, he's not American.

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

You know, he's from the UK, and so we had to give our business to de Forest. And of course many people did, even though he got in trouble for stock fraud. Abraham White you've all heard of. The entire story is in the book.

Between 1907 and 1920, he worked on the three element vacuum tube, broadcasting music, also using arc and vacuum tube transmitters. And then his final good decade, the decade of the 20s, he tends to call it his lost decade because he did not succeed. He did develop a system and patent it for writing a soundtrack optically on motion picture film. It did work but it ended up in court like a lot of inventor things and did not work.

One of the main things I want to emphasize about de Forest is he took the science of the 19th century because he was a scholar. He knew about all the literature. He knew about what other scientists were doing.

He had all the patents as all inventors did back then, tried to figure out a way of doing things just different enough to get a patent and maybe make a profit. But he turned that 19th century science-- the theory and experiments of many-- into an art form, several art forms, in the 20th century, the electronic media of radio, film, and then television. And my publisher titled the book.

You know, I was going to call it Lee de Forest and the Invention of Sound on film or something, something linear and kind of stodgy. But Springer came up with the cover, which is really very good, based on a photograph I gave them of the de Forest star in Hollywood. And they came up with the title.

When I first heard it, I thought, oh, well, hm. Is that a little over the top? People will say, no, he wasn't the king. No, it wasn't the king of television.

But I like it. So-- it's catchy. It's catchy.

And so it stayed that way. But he did do this and he did this mostly-- again, I emphasize his most important contribution was the amplification that he managed to discover with a vacuum tube because this allowed audiences-- you know, in 1920, hams with earphones? That was radio.

Well, amplification was going to change that and put it into loudspeakers and families were going to enjoy radio. Same thing with film-- the silent film was OK and some of the earlier experiments in silent film used earphones, actually. But de Forest, really, we can say gave voice to the radio and to the motion picture if anything else.

I want to talk a little bit about how the inventor invents and I want to use the example of the vacuum tube. I don't know how often I've gone to conferences and people have said, oh yeah, de Forest vacuum tube, he stole it from Fleming. Well, it's not that clear cut and let me explain why.

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

And this is again based on what I know, my research. First of all, let's go back to Edison in 1880, who actually invented the light bulb. And he noticed that as the bulbs burn, week after week, there would be a black carbon deposit from the filament on the inside of the ball, which of course would make the light get dimmer and dimmer. And this was not good, right?

So Edison looked at this and he said, well, you know, I think electrons go from, in his case, from the filament to a plate. He put a plate inside the bulb to draw off the electrons. He didn't really know why, but it did. And thus, the bulb would not necessarily carbon up.

But he used a plate. He used it as a measurement of current flow. It was a beginning early theory of thermionic emission. Well, he put it aside. He patented.

He call it the Edison effect. He put it aside. Well, here's Ambrose Fleming.

Fleming worked for Edison Fleming was in the UK, running Edison in the UK. And then he went to work for Marconi at the beginning of the century. And so Fleming's interest-- because he had to work for a living. He had to do what Marconi said and Marconi was in the business of Morse code two way communication, nothing else.

He didn't want radio or audio or music. He wanted code. And so Fleming got a patent for a diode vacuum tube, a rectifier. But using it as a detector of wireless signals, he got this in 1905. Now, Fleming's tube, and you can see the little red square there, when it detects the presence of a dot or a dash, it makes a meter called a galvanometer move from one part to the other.

I've not really seen one. I know we have a galvanometer up here somewhere, but this is what Fleming's thing did because Fleming worked for Marconi. And this was a detector of Morse code-- the on or off of the dots and dashes. Well, Fleming could not go much farther.

He might have. We can always say, well, maybe Edison would have invented the vacuum tube, maybe Fleming would have if he hadn't had to work for a guy that only cared about Morse code. Well, de Forest came along and I have a letter in the book quoting Forrest. He writes to his attorney and says, get me that Flemming patent, because de Forest wanted to look at it carefully.

Well, what he did a year later, and he also did this for wireless telegraph because he had not yet started the process of working on voice transmission and radio telephone. What de Forest did was take the same Flemming tube and he added headphones and a second battery or a b battery from the plate. There's the battery, the headphones, back to the cathode or the filament.

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

And this allowed the dots and dashes to be heard in earphones. What's the significance of that? The significance of that is that as soon as voice transmission was available, you'd be able to hear it.

You couldn't hear it with Fleming's device. So what de Forest really did was very significant. It's very small.

And if you read any patent, it always says, I have found a new and useful or a new and different use for something. And so he, by adding the b battery and the earphone and then eventually adding the third element which we know as the grid to make the three element tube was able to make something that went past, well beyond Edison, and went beyond Fleming. I mean, they all had a purpose.

But as you'll see in my book and as you probably know because you're electronics oriented people that every inventor, Steve Jobs included, looks at what came before and says, how can I improve this and make it a consumer experience or how can I sell more of these? How can I do a patent that will bypass the courts, you know, and won't get sued for it? So every inventor does that. So I talk about that in the book.

de Forest was significant in radio. He was an early radio broadcaster. The newspaper record-- this article in the Times was March 1907.

It talks about de Forest broadcasting music to the times tower. And this is a 1907 phonograph. You see again every device that was invented always used the previous device as a model.

So de Forest, for a radio telephone, used the telephone transmitter, a carbon microphone. This is how they did it. There is a phonograph and it looks like attached to the back of the phonograph is some sort of carbon microphone acoustic coupler to send record music.

And then there is an arc. He used an arc transmitter. The interesting thing about this is, and it was quoted in this March 8th '07, article, he said Dr. de Forest began experimenting with his present apparatus last December. Well, what does that mean? Who else was experimenting with a radio telephone?

STUDENT: Fessenden.

MIKE ADAMS: Fessenden-- the famous Fessenden 1906 Christmas Eve broadcast. The problem with Fessenden-- and this is where de Forest kind of overwhelms every inventor because he always courted the press. Fessenden hated the press.

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

He was a crotchety guy, if you can believe that. And Fessenden-- and again, here's how do we know what we know. To answer that question again, how do we know that Fessenden did the Christmas Eve broadcast of 1906?

Well, Fessenden said so but not until 1930 in his autobiography and so some recent scientists-- there was a big article by Mr. O'Neil in Radio World, a couple of other articles-- AWA Journal article a few years ago saying that I've searched everywhere and I cannot find-- this is what the author said, the researchers-- cannot find any information in the press about the Fessenden Christmas Eve broadcast. All we know is what Fessenden told us.

Now, it probably happened because he had the device and he was doing it earlier in the month apparently. But just the idea that here's something that was 100 years old and if you don't leave a record, well, there you go.

MALE SPEAKER: I'd like to welcome the next [INAUDIBLE] from Marshfield.

MIKE ADAMS: Yeah, I don't know.

MALE SPEAKER: Well, he did that at Grant Rock.

MIKE ADAMS: Right.

MALE SPEAKER: Which was part of the town.

MIKE ADAMS: But he did something else earlier, which I do have in the book. I have a Fessenden-- some Fessenden stuff in the book and I have the Fessenden researcher Bill Rose up in Canada, who is kind of point and counterpoint with some of the other researchers. There's a lot of detail in the book. It's ridiculously big.

de Forest also used a radiotelephone using an arc while he was using his audion as a receiver. Later on by 1916, '17, he was using his vacuum tube oscillion as a transmitter of radio. So he was early in radio.

Well, let's look at the local Lee because 1912 in Palo Alto was really important for de Forest because he developed his tube to amplify and to oscillate. You remember three things-- detector, amplify, and transmit or oscillate.

Federal Telegraph was the first Silicon Valley start-up. Some Stanford professors financed Cyril Elwell. First, he tried to look at the McCarty patents in San Francisco, Spark Gap, and said, this is too crude. We can't use it.

He ended up buying the Polson patents for high power, really high power, international code using Polson arc. We even have those at Parent Foundation-- giant, big arcs. But this was founded and funded by Stanford professors.

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

And Elwell, like de Forest-- de Forest forest was out of money as always around that time. And Elwell said, come here. We'll give you a lab.

We'll give you assistants. You can do whatever you want, which is really kind of the way Silicon Valley is today. You know, if someone's a superstar, they give them space and hopefully there was an agreement he would get something out of it.

But this is what happened for de Forest. Now, sadly, as soon as de Forest got there, he was arrested for probably the second or third time. And this was written in his-- he wrote this in his diary March 29, 1912. And he was arrested based on stock fraud for exaggerating the value of the audion.

And I have all the court transcripts in the book. The prosecutor said, well, it's not even a good light bulb, right? Because it didn't have enough light. So anyway, in the trial, which I talk about in the book, a couple of de Forest's business partners were put in jail.

de Forest was exonerated as he always was. He was accused but he was never convicted. But anyway, what he said, just to give you an idea of partly the arrogance and partly de Forest the scientists, let me just read this.

Since Wednesday, I have worried about what my arrest will cause my dear ones and about its outcome to me. Being guiltless, I fear not the outcome, only the heavy and renewed expense and the sense of the rank injustice of it all. I will probably fight it out here, then go back east for a long time.

But here is my work, my income, especially during the coming summers when static problems must be solved. So, you know, here's de Forest rambling in his diary about now they're screwing me again, arresting me. It's not right. But, you know, what I really have to do is be a scientist.

So it's interesting. Throughout his diary, there are some racist comments, anti- Semetic comments, warm comments toward his family. There's a lot. And when you read hundreds of pages of this stuff, you probably can't read it now.

But after a while, you begin to click in and you realize-- it takes a while, but I transcribed all of these into type and I used them throughout. Anyway, it wasn't even a good light bulb, right? While de Forest was in New York getting married to his second or third-- to his third wife, before he came back to Palo Alto during the trial time, he had while in Palo Alto demonstrated his audion to AT&T.

They needed desperately a way to do transcontinental phone calls-- that is, from San Francisco to New York back then. And the ordinary telephone repeaters would not do it. They thought, well, this audion is probably ideal.

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

de Forest demonstrated it, crude as it was, filled with gas instead of vacuum as it was, and they didn't do anything. AT&T found out de Forest was hungry. And so they let him sweat for about a year. Then, they brought in some attorney who said I represented somebody.

I can't tell you I represent. I'm authorized to give you I think it was $50,000 for the rights for long distance telephony. And he was hungry, so he took it. Found out later it was a scam by AT&T. So, you know, de Forest may have been a little on the dishonest side, but so was AT&T in that case.

You know, they actually tried to do that. So anyway, AT&T does this. They demonstrate this in 1915 at the Pacific Panama International Exhibition in San Francisco known as the PPIE.

de Forest also does an exhibit at the PPIE. His is really his transmitters and receivers and the radios he's now making using his audion. De Forest drops in at the AT&T booth and they have a brochure called "The Story of a Great Achievement-- Telephone Communication From Coast to Coast." They talk about Alexander Graham Bell.

They talk about the capitalists at AT&T. What they don't mention at all is the name de Forest when they just bought the patent from him at a price he thought was not fair. So de Forest, being the kind of promotion guy he is, went to the local printer.

And overnight, he came back with a copy. We have both of these in History San Jose. He called it, of course, the same thing-- "Story of a Great Achievement" and it's de Forest instead of Alexander Graham Bell. And he talks about it in a scientific way because again, whatever else you think of de Forest, he was a real physicist, a real scientist. Anyway, his version, we have them both at History San Jose-- interesting kind of thing here.

OK, one final thing about the local Lee-- as you probably know and you will know more about this in another book we're going to have here at CHRS, John Schneider's History of Bay Area Radio, which we'll be selling to you when it comes out-- March, April, May, or thereabouts. He set up a broadcast station using an amateur experimental call 6XC in the California theater. I read in his diary.

In January, 1920, California theater radiophone is in pretty good shape. Antenna on humble tower is not ideal, but the music has been heard 1,200 miles out to sea. So he was using, as you can see, his oscillion tubes in this device. Now, the significant thing about this, even though this never became a licensed station was that this was the beginning of the year where KDKA would be licensed toward the end of the year in November and be that first commercially licensed station.

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

But many people-- well, not many, but a number of people were already broadcasting. I think Charles Harold had a 6XE or something like that call for his experiments. So there were people doing this sort of thing.

Obviously, the audience was almost all entirely amateurs. OK part two of how the inventor invents-- de Forest's claim to fame was that he put a variable density soundtrack beside the film so it would always remain in synchronization. And basically, what we're seeing is the actor speaks into a microphone.

It's amplified and the light vibrates in time with the voice. It is focused through a tiny slit through optics onto a slit. And then it exposes the film along with the picture.

It's a very crude version of it. I'm telling you there's more. Obviously, the book does it in great detail.

But it allows sound to be on the film for the very first time. And so de Forest was not necessarily first doing sound movies, but I'll admit it. I'll tell you why he probably did it right. This also brings up the de Forest way which he did with everything he did he.

From an idea, he would get a patent. He would put it into practice. He would promote it and he would try to profit from it. But of course, he never did because he wasn't very good at that sort of thing.

So what de Forest did, like all scientists, he said, well, if I'm going to invent something, I have to identify what the problems are. In other words, this is like the literature search that any scientist or writer does. You try to find out what else has worked and not worked, read about it, and then you synthesize all that information and maybe you come up with some kind of a solution. Well, the solution to sound on film was obvious.

Prior to de Forest getting into it in the late teens, the carbon telephone microphone was the only microphone existing. It evolved out of the telephone and because there weren't radio stations on the air then, you really didn't need anything better, although there would be. But right then, it was a carbon microphone.

And they're not very sensitive. And so if you're recording an actor speaking, the actor would have to be really close to the microphone. Otherwise, exponentially, it would be really soft as you got farther and farther away. So it was no good.

The quality wasn't too good. It was OK for the telephone. It was fine for the radiotelephone in the early experiments. The other problem-- headphones for listening.

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

Any early sound on film experiment before de Forest used the very insensitive selenium cell which only could be heard with earphones. And that, of course, was because the audion had not been made to amplify. And that's why de Forest really-- that was a big thing.

He rode that audion because it did so much for the media that we know today. So all the pre-de Forest sound films either used the phonograph or a selenium cell. Edison and Dixon experimented in 1894 recording the sound along with the picture.

The picture was on the film, early Edison film. Edison was one of the first film makers, you know. And the sound was on a cylinder.

Now, synchronization would have been a problem because even though you could have a horn speaker which would allow an audience to hear sound on film, Edison tried several times putting the speaker behind the screen and running some sort of a belt, mechanical belt, between the screen and the projection booth. And obviously, it was labor intensive.

It never worked. Eugene [INAUDIBLE] did in 1912 about the time Edison tried his last phonograph experiment. [INAUDIBLE] to put sound on film, but again, the selenium cell. And so it was theoretically.

You'd hear it on an earphone, but it would not work. It would not change Hollywood filmmaking. And de Forest always said, he wrote in his diary many times, the limitation of the phonograph, three to five minutes on a side, never would be good for sound on film. He even tried a wire recorder. He tried a Polson [INAUDIBLE] gramophone, whatever that thing is. It's in the book.

MALE SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE ADAMS: [INAUDIBLE], yeah, he tried one of those in 1913 in an experiment in New York at RKO to try to synchronize because he wanted a longer playing time for music as well as for film. So de Forest gets this idea. He writes it down in October 1918 on the back of a piece of paper while on a cruise on a ship.

He writes down what actually is the entire sound on film. It has not been improved upon. I mean, it's technical increments, of course. But what he basically says here, he says three minutes, three methods for photographing sound film, sound on film, if we're talking motion pictures.

A, use the speaking flame, which he began using some sort of gas. You know, imagine a nitrate film back there. I'm sure he had some big surprises in the lab. But anyway, he used a speaking flame.

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

Second, very short fine filament incandescent-- well, we know from the science of the time that a flame was much faster and there was a lag with the incandescent filament. And so this is why it was not satisfactory. The third method, a glow tube light filled with gas-- he says hydrogen, nitrogen, it's oxygen, and so on and so forth.

This was what eventually would end up to be the light that would write the actual sound on the film. But here is where de Forest shines. Unlike [INAUDIBLE] and all these people before, de Forest pops in a triode. Hey, there we go.

So from whatever the microphone is here, we go through out of the plate and through some sort of inductance here to the light, which he says fine slit, moving film, focused, and variable density soundtrack. Now, this is really more theory that a working model because he tried for several years to make it good enough that he could show an audience. But it worked.

But of course-- and de Forest always admitted this-- he read about Ernst Rumer in the 19th century who developed the photograph phone using an arc to write the sound on film. Again, Rumor's playback was the selenium cell in earphones. So it wasn't practical, but it showed that it could be done.

And also, there was Bell, Alexander Graham Bell and his brother Chester Bell and somebody else. It's in the book. They did the photograph phone sending signaling by lights, so using the selenium cell. So anyway, it was not-- de Forest didn't just wake up and say, I'm going to do this.

But he took various bits and pieces from stuff he knew and created this piece of paper which led to, less than a year later, filing in 1919 this patent for sound on film which, again, says everything. It probably would not have worked satisfactorily, but he basically says everything to reproduce talking moving pictures from a single roll of film. He says, I have found a certain new and useful invention for means of recording and reproducing sound.

So this is-- he had two motives. He wanted to do sound on film, but he thought film would be a good way to have full-length and I could listen to them play back in my home. I wouldn't have to keep turning over the stupid 78s from side to side.

Anyway, we know that the 1918 drawing was accurate because this fully formed patent, which he filed less than a year later, confirms that he put it to patent what he was really doing. Again, writing and reproducing sound using light, he was covered by the press and coast to coast and around the world. On August 23, 1920, here's what he says.

He succeeded. He says, on this day, I made a photographic voice record on film with talking flame which actually spoke to me the words which I had forgotten were there-- one, two, three, four, five, six. August the 23rd-- this was 1920.

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

So he believed he had that scientific breakthrough after all this experimenting. I mean, his diary, as you'll see-- and I've used a lot of it in the book-- shows the painful process of invention. You just don't say, here it is, but it takes a long time to do it. And basically, we're writing and playing back.

The actor speaks into the microphone, which is amplified, which makes the light flicker analogous to the audio, and it's exposed onto film. It's one of many processes, this being a variable density. Really, the RCA photo phone variable area ended up taking over what was used in the 1930s after a few tries with this. de Forest was very-- he was very good at putting on a white laboratory coat and sort of set dressing his laboratory and inviting the press to come in.

He got some great interviews and I've used bits and pieces of them in the book. But the press loved him because he was always out there and willing to talk to the man and women of the press. And again, having publicity is one thing that de Forest thought would get him not only reputation, but also would allow him to maybe attract people to buy his worthless stock.

But he was very good at promoting. He wrote a series of articles and presentations in the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, now SMPTE, in the 1920s of all of the articles on sound and film in the 1920s. There were six of them between 1920 and 19, say, 27. de Forest wrote like four of the six or five of the six.

So he was there. He was in front of scientific organizations. He wrote an article in Scientific American about this, the National Education Association about using sound film and education. He was always thinking.

I mean, he was a manic, you know? He was definitely an interesting guy. The de Forest way, he started the phonofilm company in 1923 and sold stock.

It was not successful. He had a phonofilm UK operation and they headed that. Running it for de Forest was Cyril Elwell, de Forest's old boss back at Federal. So de Forest kind of paid him back and took care of him.

de Forest, while some scientists loathed de Forest and many people, technical people do, there was one group-- and you may be all be a part of this. There was one group that loved de Forest to the end and those were the ham radio operators. They called themselves the de Forest pioneers and they had annual meetings.

And, you know, this was a big deal-- the ham wireless pioneers, de Forest wireless pioneers. OK, but de Forest did not do with sound on film process by himself even though he understood how it had to work. He heard about a man, Theodore Case, who lived in Auburn, New York, who fortunately for de Forest

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

was a fellow Yale alum. Case was a smart guy, got his b.a. From Yale, and went to Harvard Law for a few years.

From a rich family but dropped out because he wanted to be an inventor. And what he invented that was significant was he invented a photocell called [INAUDIBLE] cell during World War I which allowed communication between ships but not on the visible wavelength. They used light that was above or below what you could see.

And this photocell actually obviously started the selenium cell, right? But the photocell actually amplified the light and allowed this kind of signaling. And so this is what Case was doing.

This is his laboratory as it was last summer or a year and a half ago. Case owned about half of Auburn, New York, the fancy mansions and everything. But they preserved it all.

They gave it as a museum and it's being run as the Case Museum. And it has some interesting things in it, including the other side of the story between de Forest and Case. Anyway, that's his lab as he walked away from it before 1930.

What Case did was he supplied the photocell, which he called the thalafide cell. And they've got boxes of them there at the Case Museum. And also the light that converts sound into light to record the light on the film-- he called his AEO light, standing for Alkaline Earth Oxide. So again, gas filled tubes with filaments and amplified.

This is how it started in 1920. de Forest writes to Case, saying I understand you are producing a very sensitive photocell. So de Forest was checking vendors. Case actually wrote back and says, yes, we'll make sure you get one, but we want to order some condensers and resistors and things like that, some coils.

So they started out ordering things from each other. But their relationship, as it evolved through the 1920s, was almost all science. Yes, Case was upset at de Forest for not paying his bills on time, but they mostly talked about science, you know.

Here's something from the amplifier going through the primary, the output of the plate into the primary, the secondary to the light to write on film. de Forest writes a letter and I just underlined Professor Pupin. Professor Pupin was in here Monday.

The famous inventor Mihajlo Pupin was de Forest's lab. I mean, he would just drop those names like, oh yeah, Armstrong was here. Well, it wouldn't be Armstrong, but anyhow, this was the kind of thing that happened probably two or

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

three times a week between 1920 and 1925 or so. They exchanged letters, some rancorous.

Some were friendly. But they always went back to science. They always ended up dialoguing for a long time about science. The noise is due to the graininess of the emulsion and I am taking the matter up with Doctor [INAUDIBLE] of the Eastman Kodak Company to see if we can produce an emulsion which contains only very fine [INAUDIBLE].

These guys were chemistry. They were physics. They were optics, electricity.

I mean, it must have been very exciting back then because we know way too much today. They were just discovering these things-- how to write sound on film. Anyway there were plenty of correspondence and letters going back and forth.

What Case really dislike more than anything else was that de Forest was getting all the credit for the work, right? Case wanted some credit. He wanted-- here's de Forest, his picture on everything, all the phonofilm advertising. Case was a small town guy, right, at Auburn New York.

And the reason-- here's the reason. de Forest was exhibiting phonofilms at of the Ridley theater in New York and he asked-- the question was asked, can we get Case's name up on the marquee or actually even on the title of the film? And here is what Hugo [INAUDIBLE], the managing director said, and this explains everything. You surely understand that all of our publicity has been exclusively de Forest, which we consider a valuable asset on account of the great popularity of the radio.

So here it was. de Forest was famous for two things in his life-- radio and briefly for sound film. But this is what they were doing. They were using de Forest's name on the marquee, a de Forest system, because he was famous for radio.

I want to show you the first of two phonofilms. This one does have de Forest Case patents on it. This is President Coolidge talking about the deficit in 1924, more or less.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

---country needs every ounce of its energy to restore itself. The costs of government are all assessed upon the people. This means that the farmer is doomed to provide a certain amount of money out of the sale of his produce no matter how low the price to pay his taxes.

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

The manufacturer, the professional man-- the cleric must do the same from their income. The wage earner, often at a higher rate when compared with this earning, makes his contribution perhaps not directly--

MIKE ADAMS: He's talking about basic economics 101.

--- the advanced cost of everything he buys.

MIKE ADAMS: OK, so I'm going to stop it, of course--

[END PLAYBACK]

MIKE ADAMS: --because it's not important, but I want to do another one because Case-- meanwhile, Case was developing a sound on film system which he thought was a new and useful improvement upon de Forest just in very small ways. And he began making some films too, including this one, which is the talking duck, "Gus [INAUDIBLE] and the Talking Duck."

MALE SPEAKER: I've seen this.

MIKE ADAMS: It's very funny.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

Again, these were not films. These were recordings of existing media like, for example, Vaudeville acts, musical groups, bands, comedians. Everything was just a fixed camera on the presidium of the theater, right, a microphone somewhere a close as possible.

[INAUDIBLE] disgusting, actually. Goosing the duck to make him--

-Quack! He's [INAUDIBLE] breaking my heart.

MIKE ADAMS: Poor duck.

-[INAUDIBLE]

MIKE ADAMS: OK, so anyway, let me just say that--

[END PLAYBACK]

MIKE ADAMS: --if go to the de Forest Facebook page, if you just type in the Google window Lee de Forest, de Forest king of radio, TV, or something, you'll get the Facebook page. I have about maybe 10 of his phonofilms on there right now in fairly big screen. So take a look at them.

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

OK, well, as I say, Case, being a smart guy-- you know, Harvard Law, right, and Yale-- he thought he had a system that was good. He patented it but not until 1925. de Forest had already made the patents, but Case tried to make his just different enough. But when he sold it to William Fox to create Movietone, de Forest immediately sued.

This thing was in court for three years maybe. What really ended up in the end was that neither party won. It was settled out of court.

Fox Films gave de Forest a fairly decent sum. They all walked away. By then, there were processes and sound movies being made every day.

See, Hollywood didn't care. They could spend all the money in the world to solve these problems. And in the Case Museum, there are these big displays for court, these exhibits, these old, dusty books. And what de Forest had done was cut out pictures from the Ernst Rumor book from the turn of the century.

And both de Forest and Case said, well, no one can really own this. [INAUDIBLE] well, you can't really own this. It goes back to Bell's photophone and Rumer's photographone. You can't own this.

And de Forest or Case was saying the same thing. Well, you can't own it either. So it became kind of a-- it didn't happen. So anyway, it was a good idea but did not happen.

Warner Brothers, "Jazz Singer" in 1927, de Forest writes in his diary, last night, the flashing posters of vitaphone gave me first the shock like a blow. Why and how have I wasted the past two years?

Well, the reason-- invitaphone was a phonograph, a synchronized 16 inch 33 and 1/3 phonograph. But because electrical recording had happened by 1925, the photograph quality was quite high, higher than the sound on film processes. And again, the studios don't care because they did their mastering on these things and went from disk to disk to disk and mixed disks [INAUDIBLE]. I mean, it must have been terribly noisy.

But they knew what they were doing. But the real key-- why do movies work? Well, Al Jolson-- had a big star. Same reason movies work today-- a big star.

The audience in the theater does not care whether the sound is on the film or on the phonograph record. They just don't care because basically, it's what's on the screen. And "The Jazz Singer" was a transition picture. If you've seen it, there were a couple of scenes where Al Jolson sings to his mother or sings to an audience and this is synchronized.

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

But most of it was subtitles. So anyway, transition-- OK, let's wrap this up. The de Forest legacy-- de Forest began telling his story as early as 1924. He told his story over and over and over again.

There was a serialised, in radio news, maybe five or six or seven issues, seven or eight parts of the de Forest story. In 1930, he met Georgette [INAUDIBLE], who did "Conqueror of Space" or something like that because he called his triode space telegraphy, right? And she wrote a book.

Both of these said, with the cooperation and permission of de Forest. So this was the authorized-- these were authorized. Father of Radio, de Forest autobiography in 1950-- again, what de Forest wants you to believe. You know, there were some-- I mean, I've read them all and they all have their purposes.

We have this bust downstairs. de Forest was the kind of guy who-- he wanted to be loved. I mean, I think more than money, he wanted to be adored by everyone and he was popular. I mean, people did know about him.

Even though he believes-- he believed for years that he was screwed out of the sound on film process, he did receive an Oscar for it in 1959-- to Lee de Forest for bringing sound to the motion pictures. So he was, in a sense, vindicated by the Hollywood community and also in the very first group in 1961 of the Hollywood Walk of Fame stars at Hollywood and Vine. Right there in the shadow of Capitol Records is the de Forest signed star for motion pictures-- a famous guy.

If you're into movies, just coincidentally-- I'll be done. Just coincidentally, there are two current films nominated for Oscars-- "Hugo" is early silent film history, excellent film, as is "The Artist," a very cute film which is about the transition. And I do the parallel history of film in the de Forest book. So, see those movies and that's-- any questions? I'm done, Thank you.

MALE SPEAKER: Did de Forest ever meet Scott Harold?

MIKE ADAMS: No, de Forest apparently never met Harold in person, but they exchanged one letter. Harold basically said I was broadcasting to your booth in 1915 at the PPIE from San Jose and would you say I was the first broadcaster? Because he was trying to cement his legacy, de Forest. de Forest was not the first broadcast. He started a radio station which was significant and-- student radio station, college radio, like I do.

MALE SPEAKER: How did all these primary sources end up in San Jose, California?

MIKE ADAMS: Well, of the three different archives, the reason the primary sources are in San Jose can be traced back to Federal Telegraph because also,

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

along with de Forest, Doug Parem worked in Federal Telegraph as a mechanician. And Parem had a whole museum in San Jose throughout the 1940s and '50s before it went to Foothill. And so de Forest-- it was de Forest's wife, who was still alive because she was much younger, his fourth wife heard about the Parem Foundation I think through [INAUDIBLE] Stein, the president of Parem at the time.

She was going to throw all this stuff out. And so apparently, she gave it to the Parem Foundation. That's a tenuous connection, but Parem, we have photographs. There's one in the book of Parem and de Forest together.

So that's probably the San Jose connection. Plus, he must have felt really good. He loved California.

Even though his final 30 years were spent in Los Angeles, he loved and talked about his days of hiking in the hills above Stanford and all of that. So he loved this area. Oh, yes, sir.

MALE SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE] something [INAUDIBLE] film.

MIKE ADAMS: Who?

MALE SPEAKER: Edison.

MALE SPEAKER: Edison.

MIKE ADAMS: Edison, Edison-- what Edison did was help us make the transition from wet plate photography into motion picture. Eastman developed a flexible film base for a 35 millimeter-- one of those, you push the button and send it in and they develop it. And so Edison heard about it.

Or actually, there's some argument there because Edison's pal Dixon who worked for him claimed he did it. But he asked Eastman Kodak to make him a longer roll of it which he used in his kinetiphone, his peep show thing that he used, kinetiscope or kinetiphone. But these were silent, little 30 second silent film loops.

So what it took to make the transition-- again, and this story I write about in the book, that's why the book is so big-- is we went from wet plate photography to flexible film base. We also developed a start and stop action to be able to pull down the film, open the shutters shine the light through, pull it down, stop it, shine the light through about 24 times a second. And of course, Edison's light bulb was not quite good enough but they used arc lights in the early projectors.

But it was dim and this is why he used the peep show format in the very beginning. And all this was happening back in the 1880s and 1890s. So I guess

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

you could say Edison was-- he's very important. Edison owned film until 1905, 1906. When the film trust came in, they had to buy his patents. You know, he was kind of a ruthless guy in some ways.

MALE SPEAKER: Was what was Western Electric's involvement in producing movies? [INAUDIBLE] the '30s and the '40s movies, you see at the end [INAUDIBLE] Electric.

MIKE ADAMS: When Western Electric started, they developed the vitaphone process because they developed electrical playback and recording of records, which changed everything from the horns and the groups yelling into the speaker. That was Western Electric. They developed the first vitaphone system.

They developed the sound on film system. They were the manufacturing arm of AT&T, of the phone company. They were like the science trust, like Xerox PARC or something like that I think. I mean, if anybody knows more-- does that sounds right?

MALE SPEAKER: And then they developed what's called the sound recorder with a variable split and a variable slit to put the sound on the film.

MALE SPEAKER: How was that different, though, than what he was talking about? The variable thing on the side of the soundtrack-- on the side of the film?

MALE SPEAKER: This is-- de Forest is variable density, dark to light.

MALE SPEAKER: Like AM and FM? Is that what you're talking about [INAUDIBLE] kind of a difference?

MALE SPEAKER: Notice the--

MIKE ADAMS: They both play back on the same projector, believe it or not.

MALE SPEAKER: --to expose the motion on the film at the soundtrack area. This is variable density. And the Western Electric system was variable area.

MIKE ADAMS: Which is a goniometer magnetically moving to write the soundtrack and a mirror-- the light reflected on the mirror. I can--

MALE SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE] in the book, actually. More like that slide you showed earlier with the two examples and was a kind of a--

MALE SPEAKER: Yeah, that's sort of looks like--

MIKE ADAMS: Yeah, that was what it looked like. And everything became variable area by the 1930s. Western Electric did amplifiers.

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

They did microphones. They did loudspeakers. I mean, they were big.

MALE SPEAKER: Before RCA?

MIKE ADAMS: Well, RCA was started in 1920 as a consortium which included AT&T which must have included Western Electric because under the RCA agreements, it was Western Electric, right, that was allowed to sell transmitters for broadcasting.

MALE SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE] Western Electric was an arm of AT&T.

MIKE ADAMS: Yes, they were the inventing-- they were like the science arm [INAUDIBLE]

MALE SPEAKER: How does de Forest fit into progression to the triode and the pentode. Does he inspire later inventers in amplification?

MIKE ADAMS: Yeah, I think other people did a lot more with it. I mean, I think de Forest started out with a triode which he thought had to have gas inside to make it work. And of course, they realized it would have been a very noisy amplifier and it was.

And so other inventors-- and when the phone company bought it, they immediately started with their high priced scientists spending full time on it. de Forest just flitted from one thing to the other. He said, well, here it is. You want to buy it?

He ended up selling three or four different sets of rights to AT&T. And de Forest ended up where his only rights until early '20s was to sell the amateurs. That was the license he had.

MALE SPEAKER: How well off was he when he-- the last years of his life? Last years of his life-- how well off was he?

MIKE ADAMS: He was not that well off. I saw his house in the Hollywood Hills. It's still there.

I mean, somebody else lives in it. It was fancy for the time but not a mansion by any means. He had a--

MALE SPEAKER: He was comfortable, wasn't he?

MIKE ADAMS: He was comfortable because he did get royalties. He actually got royalties from what's now Devry University. But it was called the de Forest Radio Institute in Chicago.

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

He was-- for his name, I mean, he got stuff. He sold his tube business to RCA, I believe, in the middle 1930s, got lots of money for that. They claimed he died with just a few dollars in his pocket, but he had stuff. He had nice cars.

MALE SPEAKER: What do you think of Armstrong? Armstrong always said he didn't really understand how any of his stuff worked?

MIKE ADAMS: And I go into great detail about that in the book. He hated Armstrong in a very unreasonable way. He hated him, hated him, hated him, you know?

And they went to court many times. In the end, the judge in the middle of the 1930s said, I'm not going to take any more testimony. I'm not going to reinvent the wheel.

What happened years ago is just going to stay what happened in the '20s at the second or third trial. And so he did rule in favor of de Forest. But Armstrong and de Forest wrote letters back and forth and letters to Congress in the late '30s and early '40s.

You know, de Forest and others-- DuMont, for example-- claiming that Armstrong's FM was not really his invention, but it was something that happened around the turn of the century. So, I mean, every inventor-- no inventors were saints, right? I mean, if you could name one he probably doesn't have very many patents or inventions. They all borrowed and tried to improve upon the work of those who came before.

MALE SPEAKER: I've watched the-- I think it's the empire or the--

MIKE ADAMS: Oh sure, yeah.

MALE SPEAKER: And does he still have family, or is there family existing still?

MIKE ADAMS: He had three daughters-- two by his third wife and one by his second wife, I guess. And the one was born in 1925. She's in her 80s.

Somebody, I guess her daughter, wrote an email to me and I wanted to get in a conversation. I said, you know, where is she? I'll come and it was-- I'm trying to think of her name. It's in the book, the de Forest child. She speaks well of him but she's very private and didn't want to really talk to me.

MALE SPEAKER: So do they own any of his patents?

MIKE ADAMS: Oh no, I don't think so.

MALE SPEAKER: Anything like that?

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Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film

MIKE ADAMS: No, I think most of those expired in his lifetime. Patents didn't last very long. You know, the audion patents started to expire in the '20s.

MALE SPEAKER: What did he do during World War II?

MIKE ADAMS: World War II, he did have some patents on some radar kinds of things. He was too old for the war just like he was too old for World War I. But he did live to be an old guy.

But in World War I and II, he spoke and talked about it and he was a patriot. OK, I hope you will buy my book Lee de Forest-- King of Radio, Television,, and Film. It is an honest book.

It talks about good and bad de Forest and hopefully exposes him in a perspective that you can live with. I think that Empire of the Air was a little anti-de Forest, wouldn't you say? But I'm not really--

MALE SPEAKER: Where's it available?

MIKE ADAMS: It's available downstairs. We're actually going to be selling it anywhere. I mean, just, you know, Amazon, anyplace-- barnesandnoble.com. There are no bookstores anymore. OK, thank you. [INAUDIBLE] applause.

Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest, King of Radio, Television, and Film Content Attribution

Adams, M. (2012). Mike Adams Presents Lee de Forest King of Radio Television and Film.m4v [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5J8AwkOgQM

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