A man named Lee De Forest invented the vacuum tube in the year 1907.
It was a little glass-and-wire device that could send the sound of the human voice out on the airwaves so that it could be picked up and listened to on the radio.
Until De Forest’s invention, radio could send and receive only such sounds as the dot dash of the Morse code. Without De Forest’s invention, we would not have either radio or TV, nor talking movies. Actually, De Forest invented what is called the audion in 1906, but he didn’t have the $15 he needed to get a patent for his invention from the U.S. Patent Office.
He had to wait another year to be able do that. This to was the last time in his life he was to be without $15. Did you know that the first real radio broadcast took place on election night in 1920?
The station was in a little shack in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and it was called KDKA. It broadcast the news of Warren Harding’s election as president.
