DE FOREST, LEE

born Aug. 26, 1873, Council Bluffs, Iowa, U.S. died June 30, 1961, Hollywood De Forest, 1907 American inventor of the Audion vacuum tube, which made possible live radio broadcasting and became the key component of all radio, telephone, radar, television, and computer systems before the invention of the transistor in 1947. Additional reading Israel E. Levine, Electronics Pioneer: Lee De Forest (1964), is a simple, popularly written biography. W. Rupert Maclaurin, Invention and Innovation in the Radio Industry (1949, reprinted 1975), presents an authoritative, economically oriented survey of major technological contributions to the radio industry.