Digital electronics brings to mind Silicon Valley, but the historic trail leads squarely to Council Bluffs.

   Bluffs-born inventor Lee DeForest set out to improve the speed of telegraphy— the original form of digital communication.  In the process he developed what some have termed “the invention that changed the world,” earning him the title “The father of radio and television.”   One of his over three hundred patented inventions was used to provide the sound for “Steam Boat Willie,” Walt Disney’s first sound picture.

   Lee DeForest was born August 26, 1873 at 523 Fourth Street, the son of Anna and the Rev. Henry DeForest, who was then pastor of the First Congregational Church.  Henry moved the family to Alabama when Lee was five to become president of the American Missionary Association’s Talladega College.  Henry DeForest was decades ahead of his time with his beliefs that education should be equally open to all, both men and women without regard to race.  This was not a popular notion in Talladega, Alabama at that time, resulting in Lee growing up with few friends in the white community.

   Lee DeForest earned a doctoral degree in physics from Yale in 1899 and began working on ways to improve wireless communications.  His most significant invention was the triode vacuum tube, which he called the Audion.  The essential component of an amplifier, this tube allowed radio waves to travel further when transmitting and to detect weak signals when receiving.  Radio waves were initially believed to be light-of-sight, thus becoming unusable after a short distance due to the earth’s curvature.  It was later discovered that they do go over the horizon hugging the ground, but quickly weaken into static.  DeForest’s tube was the broadcasting and communication game changer by amplifying these signals, and became the standard of all broadcasting and receiving for decades.

   DeForest built wireless stations for a variety of customers, including the U.S. Navy for use in ship-to-shore communications.  As the tube’s importance became well known to the electronics industry, Bell Telephone Laboratories offered to buy the rights, which he accepted.

   At this point the value in radio was seen in two way communications, not entertainment geared toward the public.  DeForest himself was one of the first to envision the latter.  Some hobbyist radio amateurs were building radio sets and though the potential audience was small in 1915 DeForest began to broadcast entertainment to them from a transmitter he built in New York City.  Though he was not the first to do this, others just signed on when they felt like it.  Some radio historians hold DeForest’s station was the first to have a regular schedule and newscasts, all five years before commercial radio as we know it came on the scene, and a decade before Council Bluffs first radio station, KOIL.  When the latter signed on DeForest was Switzerland and couldn’t attend the inaugural broadcast in person, but he sent a cable to be aired, reading in part, “It is with the keenest delight and greatest pleasure that I learned a modern broadcasting station was to be opened in Council Bluffs, the city of my birth.”

   After selling rights to the vacuum tube, DeForest’s next project was discovering a way to synchronize sound with pictures for the film industry.  Called Phonofilm, the process recorded sound directly onto film as parallel lines.  This optical system photographically recorded sound waveforms.  Though over 200 short films were made with the process, there were competing systems being developed at the same time, and in part due to business setbacks, the DeForest system was never picked up by the major studios.  Though Phonofilm wasn’t used by name to produce the sound on Disney’s “Steamboat Willie,” its technology was.  DeForest had a falling out with Pat Powers, an investor with Phonofilm.  Powers hired away DeForest’s technician who used the Phonofilm process for Power’s new company, Cinephone.

   Unfortunately, Lee DeForest proved to be as poor with business as he was great with inventions, once observing that during his lifetime he had made then lost four fortunes.  Though he remained creative and revered by those in the electronics world, his attempts to create his own companies and profit from his own inventions typically led to failures from legal challenges and his falling victim to those pirating his ideas.  Lee DeForest died in 1961 at the age of 87, a well-respected but not wealthy innovator of the electronic age.  The Lee DeForest Building at Iowa Western Community College and Lee DeForest Elementary School in Council Bluffs were named in his honor.  The former DeForest School later became St. Albert Primary School and today is home to Heartland Family Service Therapeutic School.  

(Photos courtesy of the Historical Society of Pottawattamie County and Library of Congress.  Story by Richard Warner).