offer was snapped up and a tug placed at De Forest's disposal.

"I worked harder then than I ever did in my life before or since," De Forest told me. "First, I got hold of a little shop over in Jersey City, where my assistant and I assembled the set. Then we took it down and installed it on the tug. But when we tested it it wouldn't work! We took it back to the shop, labored over it far into the night, carried it to the tug next morning—and again the test failed.

"This performance went on day after day. Continually new defects appeared. The time for preparation was so short that if McKinley's assassination had not delayed the races for several weeks we never could have got ready in time. But we finally assembled our apparatus, and the receiving set was installed in the ship news reporting station at Sandy Hook, where arrangements were made to relay the news to New York by wire as fast as we sent it in.

"At that critical moment I became ill. I had some sort of fever that looked very much like typhoid, and the doctors said I would have to go to the hospital and stay there if I wanted to get well. I went to the hospital-but I couldn't stay. It seemed to me that my whole destiny depended on my success in reporting the yacht races. For years I had worked hard

for this chance. I couldn't stay in bed, now that the chance had come. So I went back to the tug."

In those days there was no such thing as "tuning" apparatus. The only two transmitters in America were those operated by De Forest and Marconi. They didn't know that the transmitters, working at the same time, would "jam" each other.

At the start of the first race the transmitter used by De Forest, à complicated affair, succumbed to the damp, salt air and broke down permanently. He substituted a crude spark coil. But when his operator tried to send the racing news, Marconi's man, on the other tug, was working at the same time, and all that the receiving station got was a confused jumble of signals impossible to interpret. Nothing much got through.

When the race was over the tug swung up to the pier at Sandy Hook, De Forest leaped over the bulwarks and ran to the receiving station.

"Did you get it all right?" he cried.

The syndicate manager shook his head. "Nothing at all came through," he said.

De Forest stared at him for a moment, and then collapsed. The shock of disappointment, in his weakened state, almost knocked him out. But after a rest of three weeks he began to recover.

As his strength returned there came back with it the old determination to make a wireless set that would work. He got out of bed and went back to the shop. And there he continued the experiments which were destined to result in one of the most important inventions of the past fifty years.

That incident is typical of the life of Lee De Forest, the inventor of the wonderful "audion" vacuum tube which has made radio, as it is today, possible. Talking with him in his big studio-laboratory in New York, it was hard for me to realize that only a few years ago he was engaged in a never-ceasing struggle and meeting only with defeat. During the early part of his career, under the handicaps of poverty and unbelief, he worked out his ideas to a successful conclusion, using each failure as a stepping stone. Later, when he had perfected his invention, he had to fight just as hard to make people believe in it.

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Now, twenty-three years after he started the experi ments that led to the discovery of the audion vacuum tube, most of the radio receiving sets in the United States and the number of them is estimated at more than three million are operated with these tubes. They have made broadcasting possible,

Every radio fan knows what a vital part of his set the vacuum tube is. But not everyone knows that these tubes are used in dozens of other ways. By

means of them sound can be amplified, or magnified. A whisper can be changed to a roar.

Transcontinental wire telephony was made possible by means of this tube. With the aid of the induction coil invented by Professor Michael Pupin, of Columbia, the human voice would carry by telephone for several hundred miles, but not the three thousand miles from New York to San Francisco! It was only by using the DeForest amplifiers that the first coastto-coast telephone conversation was held, in January, 1915.

By means of these tubes President Harding's voice was magnified more than a million times when he made his inaugural address to an audience of a hundred thousand persons; yet he did not have to speak above an ordinary tone.

The tubes aid hearing by the deaf, they amplify the sound of the heart for surgeons, and when used with the radio compass, they help ships to find their way through the fog. By means of the tubes a ship can follow a charged wire down a winding channel which has no buoys or markers. In addition to all these things, the tubes will generate power.

De Forest was born in 1873, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where his father was a Congregational minister. Like most ministers, he had no income except his small salary. When De Forest was six years old the family

moved to Muscatine, Iowa; where he first went to school. In the early eighties his father was sent to Talladega, Alabama, to take charge of a mission school for educating the negroes.

He had always hoped that his son would follow him in the ministry, but De Forest wanted to be a mechanical engineer. Up to this time he had given no indication of being an electrical genius; but he began to show indications of his enormous capability for study. Night after night his father had to drag the boy from his books and send him to bed.

In 1891, when he was eighteen years old, he made up his mind to go to a preparatory school to fit himself for the school of mechanical engineering at Yale. His father had no funds with which to finance his education, so the boy had to earn his own way. He did this by working as a book agent.

In the fall of 1893 he entered Yale for the threeyear course in mechanical engineering, was graduated in 1896, and stayed three years more for post-graduate work, leaving Yale in 1899 with the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. During all that time he had paid his way by mowing lawns, waiting on tables, and taking care of furnaces. One summer he worked as a waiter in a hotel on Block Island.

His father died in 1896, leaving an estate barely sufficient for the needs of his mother; and after De