Empire of the Air

The Men Who Made Radio

Tom Lewis

• Publisher: Three Hills
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501759321
• eBook ISBN: 9781501759345
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Empire of the Air tells the story of three American visionaries—Lee de Forest, Edwin Howard Armstrong, and David Sarnoff—whose imagination and dreams turned a hobbyist's toy into radio, launching the modern communications age. Tom Lewis weaves the story of these men and their achievements into a richly detailed and moving narrative that spans the first half of the twentieth century, a time when the American romance with science and technology was at its peak. Empire of the Air is a tale of pioneers on the frontier of a new technology, of American entrepreneurial spirit, and of the tragic collision between inventor and corporation.

1

THE FAITH IN THE FUTURE

“Finis to Yale” wrote Lee de Forest in his journal on the last Wednesday of June 1899, his last day at the university. The twenty-six-year-old Yale graduate was a man with unusually great ambitions, even for a doctoral student. Earlier that day he had sat in the university’s Battell Memorial Chapel with 615 candidates for degrees, listening to President Timothy Dwight tell the graduates they were at the threshold of a new century. “Let us take to ourselves,” Dwight said, “the hopes which it opens for us—the energy which it asks of us—the grand thought and purpose which it inspires—the faith in the future which may fitly find its abiding place in the soul of every man who has known the spirit and life of Yale.”

The spirit of Yale. Some called it “grit,” likening it to the sand put beneath train wheels to give them traction. Yale’s spirit and the future of the nation fused into one. Yale, and the country it served, stood poised together at the start of what they imagined would be the “American century.” They shared a faith in an American future defined by advances in science and technology, victory in war, and triumphant nationalism. Yale graduates took for granted that with their determination and training—and their connections—they would be a part of the dominant class in America and the world.

Lee de Forest shared the sentiments of the occasion and many of the experiences of his fellow graduates. Less wealthy than most of the other Yale students, he had come north from Alabama for his education. Like others, though, he had rowed on Lake Whitney, debated the merits of evolutionary theory, walked down Chanel Street with a pipe in his hand looking for girls, cheered when Yale took on Harvard or Princeton in football or baseball, jeered when William Jennings Bryan came to speak about the gold standard, and wholeheartedly supported America’s role in the recent Spanish-American War and the subscription to arm the Yale, the American gunboat named after the university. Most of all, he shared with others President Dwight’s unbridled faith in the future and of the part he would play in it.

Spending his years at Yale studying mechanics and electricity, de Forest had tinkered and invented, all the while recording his thoughts in a voluminous journal. He had invented a steam condenser for an engine and a novel trolley system, a pants creaser and an ear cleaner; he had designed improvements for the draftsman’s compass and the typewriter, and he had devised puzzles. Though manufacturers rejected all his proposals, he was undaunted. Assured of his own genius, he knew that with his grit and determination he would prevail in the coming century.

Even de Forest’s dissertation focused on the future. He had studied and extended the experiments concerning the length and velocity of electromagnetic waves that the German physicist Heinrich Hertz had recently conducted. He had studied as well the writings and patents of the great electrical engineers of the day—Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla, and Marconi—and he vowed to be counted among them by inventing in the new and largely unexplored field of wireless. “I must be brilliant, win fame, show the greatness of genius and to no small degree,” he recorded in his diary. And he believed wireless—the invention that made possible the transmission of sound through the air—would carry him to his greatness.

Lee de Forest’s family roots ran deep in the soil of America. His mother, Anna Margaret Robbins, could trace her lineage to Richard Robbins, thought to be a passenger on the Mayflower, and to John Alden, as well. His father, Henry Swift De Forest, was descended from one Isaac De Forest, a French Huguenot who in 1636 established a tobacco plantation in Harlem on Manhattan Island. Though only in his early teens, Henry’s grandfather, Gideon, fought for two years and two months in the Revolutionary War under General Light Horse Harry Lee, and received a pension of $80 annually for his service. Later he settled in Otsego County, New York, married, and named his second son after his former commander. Lee De Forest (the elder) also farmed in Otsego County, married, and raised two daughters and four sons, of whom Henry Swift De Forest was the third.

Henry De Forest was different from his brothers and sisters, for he wanted more education than the local school could provide. A combination of industriousness, frugality, and a De Forest Scholarship (long before established by a member of another branch of the family to assist those who held the name) enabled him to join the class of 1857 at Yale College.

While an undergraduate, Henry De Forest determined to enter the ministry, bringing to his Christian mission the fervor of an Old Testament prophet. As a soldier fighting in the ranks of Christ, De Forest sought to be good and valiant in God’s war, which at that time was being waged between the states on American soil. Ordained as a Congregational minister in August 1863, he was commissioned a chaplain with the 11th Connecticut Volunteers. After the Civil War, he served the Plymouth Congregational Church in Des Moines, Iowa. A few years later, he was called to pastorates in Muscatine, Waterloo, and Council Bluffs. In Muscatine, he met Anna Robbins. The daughter of the Congregationalist pastor and fourteen years his junior, Anna at first wished “Mr. De Forest would desist from his attentions.” But Mr. De Forest would not. They were married in August 1869. Their first child, Mary, was born in 1871 in the parsonage of the Congregational Church in Council Bluffs; Lee followed two years later, on August 26, 1873; and a second boy, Charles Mills, five years after that.

Lee de Forest spent the first six years of his life in Congregationalist parsonages in the stern presence of his father and what he remembered as the “sainted presence” of his mother. At his father’s knee he listened to stories of the Civil War: while in the Wilderness, Henry had filled all the canteens he could find and delivered them through heavy Rebel fire to his thirsty comrades. He was greeted with shouts of “Bully for the chaplain.” He was in Richmond on April 4, 1865, to see President Lincoln ride into the city surrounded by a mob of newly liberated blacks. On quiet afternoons, De Forest and his sons would set up targets in a vacant lot and fire the Colt revolver the chaplain had removed from a Rebel prisoner.

Henry Swift De Forest had lived the words of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—he had “read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel.” His duty was to crush the serpent of the Confederacy with his heel. As Christ had died to make men holy, so he would die to make them free. When he saw Lincoln in Richmond, he declared “Nemesis is satisfied. Even handed justice is finding the scale-beam horizontal.” When the call came in 1879 to assume the presidency of Talladega, an institution founded to educate freedmen, about forty miles southeast of Birmingham, Alabama, he accepted purposefully and without hesitation. His work would be part of a larger struggle to bring justice to the former slaves by educating them. “I shall never see our Appomattox,” he told a friend, “but some one will.” And Henry De Forest was proud to count himself among those preparing the way for the conquerors to follow.

The year he came to Talladega, the American Missionary Association, a group devoted to educating the freedmen, had decided to elevate it from a school to a college. But it was a college in name only. Begun in 1867 by former slaves, with only nominal backing by the association, Talladega possessed but two buildings: Swayne Hall, a handsome three-story Greek revival structure built for a Baptist college by slave laborers in 1850, and Foster Hall, a dormitory for women. Located about a mile from the town, Talladega’s grounds suggested more a barnyard than a campus, with chickens, pigs, and cattle ranging freely across the land. Students plowed the college’s farm fields with sharpened sticks. The curriculum of the institution resembled that of a grade school. After learning the alphabet, freedmen were taught reading and writing, grammar and spelling, geography and arithmetic. Those who had mastered these elements were given classes in teaching, science, moral philosophy, theology, agriculture, and industrial arts.

The town of Talladega, a stop on the East Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia Railroad, was just as primitive. In a memorable battle, Andrew Jackson had defeated the Creek Confederacy there in 1813. A small battle of the rebellion had been fought there on April 22, 1865, after Lee’s surrender. Of its 1,933 inhabitants, 1,013 were “colored”; the rest were whites, whom Lee de Forest called “Rebs.” They were unfriendly to all northerners and hostile even to the thought of educating the freedmen.

Undaunted by his task, Henry De Forest set out to make Talladega into a college modeled on his alma mater, with a heavy emphasis on classical study. His object was to show “that the colored race were capable of receiving not only an English but a classical education.” He built new buildings, including a house for the president (before then the family of five endured two rooms in Foster Hall); created courses in the natural sciences, including botany, zoology, physiology, chemistry, and physics; began a model grade school, in which his children were educated; and raised the educational standards. Students who had graduated from the college preparatory department before his arrival voluntarily returned for a year’s additional study.

Because of Henry De Forest’s commitment to educating the blacks, the family was excluded from the daily life of the whites in the town. The wounds of the Civil War still festered in Talladega. It was the custom of the head of the theology department to keep a loaded pistol at his side in the pulpit just in case hostile whites should try to disrupt his sermon. “I don’t wish to be spoken to, suh, by a damned Yankee!” exclaimed a Confederate colonel when the elder De Forest bade him good day.

Life was harder still for the children. The blacks shunned them and the “Rebs” hated them. At times things seemed unbearable for young Lee. Acutely aware of his small size (his father called him “puny”) and his homely appearance (big ears, broad nose, and thick lips), he felt himself alienated from the rest. From the blacks, Lee quickly earned the sobriquet “Lego” for protesting “Le’ go of me; le’ go of me” when they shoved him about. To sneak into town past the white boys, he had to muster all the ingenuity of a scout in war. “May no Rebs get me today,” he would pray at the start of the journey. And if successful, he would proclaim, “No Rebs got me!” on his return. Sometimes, however, the Rebs came to him. A trio of children—the Lewis boys—frequently rode over from their farm in a pony cart filled with rocks. Before the president’s house, Rebs and the Yank fought their pitched battles. “Doggone the Rebs and Nigs anyhow” Lee de Forest exclaimed at the close of a particularly trying day.

Even Lee’s brother, Charles, tormented him in quarrels that seemed both continual and physical. He recorded them in his journal. “We pounded each other. . . . He hit me on the jaw with a rock & I caught him & slapped his head good.” One day, he reported, he hurled a hammer at Charles, barely missing him.

In the grammar school Lee de Forest surpassed everyone easily. Soon he progressed to the higher levels of arithmetic and mathematics, and when he was sixteen, “hateful Greek” and Latin were “inflicted upon” him by his father.

The opportunity for informal learning, however, offered de Forest the best chance to excel. When the college opened a carpentry shop complete with lathes, drill presses, and saws, he was there to study the workings of the machinery as much as to make things. A company from the North began an ill-fated venture of mining a nearby hill for ore and smelting it into pig iron. De Forest followed with fascination the erection of the blast furnace for smelting and the building of the narrow-gauge tracks to carry the ore from the mountain to the furnace. Later, when the smelter was operating, he studied “the details of how pig iron is made, the relative quantities of ore, limestone, and coke that are dumped into the furnaces.” Still later, when the company closed, he and Charles delighted in careening down the incline in the ore cars. “It was then,” de Forest once said, “that the real value of the blast furnace became apparent to us boys!”

The most important element of de Forest’s informal education, however, came through his own reading. His appetite was insatiable, his range eclectic. He read his Bible carefully, considering the Book of Daniel his favorite. By his early teens he had secured a key to the college library in Swayne Hall. There he spent hours poring over the Patent Office Gazette. He read voraciously in other areas as well. In fiction, his tastes ran from pulp novels and George Wilbur Peck’s Bad Boy series, to morally uplifting works, including Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, “every word” of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, romances about King Arthur, and the two volumes of Prescott’s Conquest of Peru. In poetry his tastes ranged from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to John Milton, from Anne Bradstreet to William Shakespeare.

The illustrated Youth’s Companion, published by the Perry Mason Company of Boston, arrived at the De Forest household every week. “A fine paper—couldn’t be without it,” Lee declared. “I don’t believe my offspring will have better reading matter than I have.” The tabloid-sized magazine possessed everything a boy or girl living in the late nineteenth century could possibly want to inspire the imagination: heart-stirring patriotism (an editor of the magazine first published the Pledge of Allegiance there in 1892), uplifting adventure stories (“Their Perilous Journey,” “Kathy’s Conscience—An Incident in a Girl’s School,” and “Life in a State Prison—With Illustrations”), and fact-filled articles about exotic places and practical science (“Kensington Palace, Its Remarkable History” and “How to Build an Induction Coil to Deliver Electricity to the Body”). While de Forest read the adventure stories in the Youth’s Companion faithfully, and even attempted to place a story of his own in its pages (it was rejected), he paid more attention to the scientific reports, especially those concerning mechanics and electricity. He carefully preserved articles that described how an electric motor works, how to create an induction coil, how to make an electric bell, how to make magnets, and other experiments in electricity.

Best of all, the YC, as de Forest called it, contained advertisements that inspired his enterprising and creative imagination. In addition to Bakers Cocoa, Cuticura soap, and Allcock’s Porous Plasters (to prevent “La Grippe” and pneumonia), were illustrations of bicycles costing from $20 to $100, a “complete” printing outfit for 15 cents, and a typewriter capable of “the same quality of work as a Remington” for $1. There were money-making offers to become an agent selling items from ink to patent medicine. From the YC’s pages he learned about electroplating and was able to purchase “a small silver plating outfit.” With it he renewed the utensils of his neighbors. “Got Mrs. Andrews’ 1/2 doz. forks & plated them for 75c” he recorded in his journal, “making money.” With the profits from his plating business, he purchased an electric lamp (“very good”), a Weeden upright steam engine with a small alcohol spirit lamp, and a small electric motor. Wrapping some copper wire about a steel core, probably a nail, he also built his first electrical device. Attaching it to a battery, he could create an electromagnet capable of lifting iron filings or small tacks.

Lee de Forest, relying on his imagination, powers of close observation, and ingenuity, was beginning to build and invent. With wood gathered from the cellar of his house, he created scale replicas of a locomotive engine, a blast furnace (which destroyed the family’s fire bellows), and a medieval fortress complete with m...

Table of contents

• Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Paperback Edition
• PROLOGUE: A New Empire for a New Century
• CHAPTER 1: The Faith in the Future
• CHAPTER 2: The Will to Succeed
• CHAPTER 3: “What Wireless Is Yet to Be”
• CHAPTER 4: Sarnoff and Marconi: Inventing a Legend
• CHAPTER 5: Wireless Goes to War
• CHAPTER 6: Releasing the Art: The Creation of RCA
• CHAPTER 7: Snapshots from the First Age of Broadcasting
• CHAPTER 8: Court Fight
• CHAPTER 9: The Godlike Presence
• CHAPTER 10: Armstrong and the FM Revolution
• CHAPTER 11: The Wizard War
• CHAPTER 12: “Until I’m Dead or Broke”
• CHAPTER 13: Victories Great and Small
• EPILOGUE: The Empire in Decline
• Sources and Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index