THE LEE DE FOREST SITE HAS BEEN REDESIGNED -
CLICK HERE FOR A NEW LOOK AND MORE COMPLETE INFORMATION

Thank you, Mike Adams, Webmaster

Lee de Forest was one of the first to broadcast voice and music to an audience

Lee de Forest was a fan of the opera, and he claimed in his writings that he before anyone else believed that the radiotelephone would be an excellent way to send musical entertainment into homes. In 1907 he formed the De Forest Radio Telephone Company. Newspaper stories show that in 1910 he used his radiotelephone to send the voices of opera singers to members of the press stationed at receiving sets. And when testing the radiotelephone for the Navy, he played patriotic phonograph music as the ships entered the harbor.

In a de Forest company advertisement issued in 1907, he wrote: "It will soon be possible to distribute grand opera music from transmitters placed on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House by a Radio Telephone station on the roof to almost any dwelling in Greater New York and vicinity. . . The same applies to large cities. Church music, lectures, etc., can be spread abroad by the Radio Telephone."

Many have believed that the early de Forest radiotelephone transmitters were based on his famous audion tube. This is not true. Until 1916 De Forest, like Charles Herrold and practically every early broadcaster of voice and music used some version of the Poulsen DC arc for voice transmission. Read a more complete version

To transmit the de Forest "broadcasts" in 1916, the tube replaced the arc
Later, de Forest was asked to talk about his early Oscillion transmitters. As detailed in the accompanying story, he was the first to broadcast election returns to an audience. While many believe that KDKA in 1920 was the first, it was from High Bridge New York in 1916 that de Forest broadcast for a rather large audience the Hughes-Wilson Election returns from the newsroom of the New York American. He used a tube to transmit for the first time, his final use of the Audion in radio broadcasting. In 1920, de Forest set up a radio station in San Francisco, again using another version of this transmitter.See the photos and read the story.
Disillusioned With Radio
	In his final years de Forest was disillusioned at what radio programming had become. Believing himself to be the "Father of Radio" he asked reporters in the early 1950s, "Why should anyone want to buy a radio . . . nine tenths of what one can hear is the continual drivel of second-rate jazz, sickening crooning by degenerate sax players, interrupted by blatant sales talks?" Yes, Lee, why should anyone indeed?