Sculpture by Jim Pallas

IMMIGRATION/EMIGRATION'S ROOTS & BRANCHES

One thinks of de Forest almost like Californian Luther Burbank. A hundred years ago things grew in the Valley of the Heart's Delight, the finest alluvial fruit-growing land and balmy weather in America. The railroad ran to San Francisco and, from San Jose, points east. Packing plants like Libby's located along the railroad line, reduced (or ascended) to a research park shortly after we arrived in the Valley in 1988.

Born in Iowa, Lee de Forest's father became the President of Alabama's black Talledega College, back when such administrators were always white. Lee went on to Yale, supporting himself with engineering and "gaming inventions", and was briefly suspendend for hacking into the university power plant and causing a blackout. He got his Ph.D. from Yale University's Sheffield Scientific School. His interest in wireless telegraphy and Hertzian waves led to his invention of the Audion tube in 1906, the world's first vacuum tube. Though he said he never quite understood why the phenomenon worked, the Audion amplified radio waves.

His subsequent invention, the triode (three-electrode, a grid inserted between the filament and plate of John Fleming's diode) has been called the most important electronics invention between the development of radio and the birth of the transistor. De Forest involved himself in radio, broadcasting the 1916 Presidential election results and grand opera, and enjoying the company of radio personalities. He developed the synchronized sound process for movies and predicted microwave cooking, but poo-pooed manned space flight and was convinced the transistor would never replace the audion vacuum tube.

De Forest discovered an effect, a phenonmenon, upon which the nation's electronics industry was soon to be based. As others grafted new species of fruit, he developed the audion tube and then triode. An electronics industry could take root here, an orchard of technology. With his tweed wool newboys cap jauntily turned backwards (equivalent of today's baseball cap?), he resembled an early aviator like the Wright brothers or San Francisco's daredevil Lincoln Beachey. In the 1930s Moffet Naval Air Station helped bring military contracts to local electronics firms...while southern navy men demanded racially-segregated public schools for their children.

This summer I labor to clean an Augean stables of a moldy midwestern basement (ironically on street called Pomona, muse of fruit growing in a neighborhood carved from an apple orchard), dust- and dirt-encrusted pre-semiconductor electronics in my dad's, and other professors' workshops (their widows invited him over to come take what he wished). I remain baffled by the machinery and fetish of the Detroit car, as I do by the collections my late Electrical Engineer/Professor father, product of the final age of electrifying America, uninterested in computers or even semiconductor technology.

Reference consulted:

http://www.leedeforest.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_De_Forest

Photo:

http://www.histoire-informatique.org

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