Lee de Forest The Man Who Gave Volume to the World

Lee de Forest broadcasting Columbia phonograph record in 1916.

Lee de Forest came howling out of Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1873 — a preacher’s kid born into cornfields and sermons. The man was supposed to save souls, not invent chaos. But Iowa does strange things to dreamers. Too much sky, too much silence. You start thinking the air is alive, that maybe you could send a message through it. De Forest tried.

He didn’t stay long in Iowa — he was a “short timer” there — but the flat land, the quiet nights, and the sense that sound could cross a county line haunted him. When he got to Yale, he shorted out the campus power system during an experiment and nearly got expelled for tinkering with the lighting. That was his style: break it, then figure out how to put it back together.

In 1906 he built a little glass bulb called the Audion — three wires, a filament, a grid — a crude amplifier. Feed it a whisper of current, and it would roar. At first, folks scoffed. A New York paper snarked that de Forest was “wasting his time on mystical dreams of speaking tubes.” A skeptical editorial in the Scientific American suggested he “might as well claim to hold lightning in his pocket.” But that bulb cracked open the world anyway. Radios, telephones, movies — they all trace back to that flicker of electricity in his lab.

He should’ve been rich. Instead, he lived like a man hunted by his own inventions. Lawsuits, broken partnerships, the odd arrest. De Forest was sued for fraud and theft, touched off battles with Marconi’s people, and burned through backers. “I discovered the invisible empire of the air,” he once said. “And it nearly destroyed me.” He wasn’t exaggerating.

Lee de Forest holding Audions, which made
the transmission of sound possible.

By 1910, he was up on a rooftop in Manhattan, broadcasting opera singers across the dark sky. Nobody was listening — the receivers didn’t exist — but that didn’t stop him. Later, he chased the dream of talking pictures, inventing a system called Phonofilm. Hollywood dismissed him. Then studios built their own versions and made money off his idea. He raged at it quietly in letters and speeches about art gone cheap.

Still, he tinkered. He married, divorced, sued, built. He once sent a scathing missive to broadcasters: “What have you done with my child? You have dressed him in rags of jazz and tatters of boogie-woogie!” He moaned that radio had become a carnival instead of an instrument. At times he sounded like a bitter prophet.

When he died in 1961, he was broke, bitter, and surrounded by static. He believed he’d given humanity a voice. What he really gave them was volume. Every radio, every TV, every screaming guitar solo, every signal bouncing across continents — that’s him.

He was a prairie prophet who looked at the silent sky and decided it was too damn quiet. So he filled it with noise. And the world listened. Just not to him.