Mathematics had no place in the embryo days of radio. It was to be many years before anyone learned how to measure wavelengths, and they knew nothing about measuring capacity. Either an experiment worked, or it didn't. There were no textbooks nor editors to ask for advice. You had to be an eccentric with a dream. - Lee DeForest, Ph.D.

Those were the days, eh?

Today's RF design work involves, at the least, a textbook education, mathematics (supported by software and computers) and highly accurate tests and measurements.

DeForest invented the three-element electron tube. His work amplified (sorry) that of English scientist John Ambrose Fleming, who had used a two-element tube to detect electromagnetic waves. In 1906, DeForest placed a metal grid between the cathode and anode, connected it with an independent source of current, and found that his rudimentary device could multiply a signal three times.

It was the first electronic amplifier.

I was about to say that electronics, the science of the control of electron flow, would have little to show if all it could do were to turn current flow on and off. But that would ignore digital techniques, wouldn't it? Even so, without amplification, RF development would amount to little.

My friend Maurice H. Zouary gives us a look into RF design in the early years with his new book, DeForest - Father of the Electronic Revolution. (www.1stbooks.com; ISBN 1-58721-449-0)

Have you ever heard of inventors or engineers who have ideas and prototypes, yet little money to develop them? Have you ever heard of initial public stock offerings in start-up companies and of promoters who run up the price of shares, only to have the company fail? That's part of DeForest's story, too. Maybe RF development in the first decade of the 20th century wasn't so different from some of the wireless development in the first decade of the 21st!

Zouary is sympathetic to DeForest. Other biographers have found at least some culpability on DeForest's part in stock manipulations, for example. Zouary casts him more as an unworldly intellect who made and lost three fortunes while pursuing invention and leaving his finances and developmental secrets unguarded. Whichever may be true, DeForest's experience can teach lessons across the span of 100 years.

Where Zouary covers relatively new ground is where DeForest's work departs from the world of wireless: the inventor's development of sound on film.

After RF, DeForest turned his interest to adding synchronized sound to the movies by placing the soundtrack onto the film. Previous efforts involved playing the soundtrack from a phonograph record, and synchronization was virtually impossible. By 1922, DeForest conducted public demonstrations.

Zouary documents DeForest's achievement with reproductions from 1922 film strips with soundtracks and newspaper coverage of the demonstrations.

Imagine - DeForest did it all without advice from editors.