Forest's graduation, in 1899, he went to Chicago and got a job testing and assembling dynamos for the Western Electric Company, at eight dollars a week.

It is hard now to realize that less than twenty-five years ago radio was just beginning. Marconi had succeeded in receiving wireless signals with only fair reliability by using his "coherer." This was a tube full of silver filings. When a wireless wave struck it, the filings were attracted to one another and clung closer together, and a current of electricity could be passed through them.

While he was at Yale, De Forest had become interested in wireless and believed that he would work out a better detector than the one Marconi then had. In Chicago he paid two dollars a week for a room, which he shared with two other men; his meals cost only from fifteen to twenty-five cents each, and the little he could save out of his eight-dollar salary went on materials for experimenting. He spent his evenings in his room under the gaslight, filing, tapping, and testing his detector.

Late one night, in the fall of 1900, he had put his table directly under the gaslight so that he could see better. The gas jet was fitted with a Welsbach mantle burner. Over in a closet, eight feet from the table, he had a spark coil. By pulling a string he could

turn the coil on and off. The coil generated waves, for which he listened in his detector on the table.

He was bothered, however, by periodical dimmings of the gaslight. And after a while he noticed that whenever the spark coil was working the gaslight grew dim. This interested him so much that he temporarily abandoned his experiment in order to observe the curious behavior of the gaslight. Again and again he pulled the string attached to the coil; and every time the spark coil buzzed, the light grew dim! When the coil stopped, the light blazed up again.

For several days, during every minute of his spare time, he studied the phenomenon of the gaslight which responded to radio waves, trying to discover why it dimmed and brightened. Then he stumbled on a disheartening fact: When the closet door was closed the light no longer responded. Experimenting further he found that the gas flame was responding to the sound of the coil, and not to its electrical waves.

Philosophically, De Forest swallowed his disappointment, and went back to his original experimenting. For the time being, he tried to drop the idea in regard to the gas light, but it stuck in his mind. While he worked on his detector, it recurred to him again and again. He had a "hunch" that heated gas might offer a better solution of the problem of wireless

detection than anything else. His hunch was right, but it was not until five years later that he was able to get together the few dollars necessary for him to work out his idea. The vacuum tube was the result.

During the Chicago period the most money that De Forest earned was ten dollars a week. In off hours he worked as an assistant in the laboratory of the Armour Institute. For this he received no pay, but he was allowed the use of the laboratory. This was some help to him, but not much. He was doing pioneer work, and the laboratories of those days contained little that could help him. Some idea of his struggles at this time is found in a letter he wrote to a friend.

"It's a great life I'm leading now," he wrote. "Here, one does not lose caste by leaving off his cuffs, by wearing a collar for a week, or a shirt even longer. If you go unshaved, you simply pass for a 'single taxer' and are given free range at the lunch counter. My pants are getting thinner every day, and my coat is perfumed with fried potatoes of the Comet lunchroom. Sometimes I have ten cents in hand, sometimes twice that sum."

In 1901, when he thought he had his apparatus fairly well perfected, came the international yacht races, bringing-as it then seemed the failure of all his hopes. But the experience was of some help to

him, and a former classmate invested a thousand dollars, for which he received one third of the stock of the newly incorporated De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company. A few years ago, when De Forest sold his patent rights and licenses, a one-third interest was worth $300,000.

He was sure, by now, that he had reached his goal, and that it only remained to get capital enough to put his invention on the market. The classmate, who was now a one-third owner of the business, suggested that this might be accomplished more easily if demonstrating stations were put up, so that prospective investors could see for themselves the practical value of wireless. De Forest accordingly built a transmitting set in the shop in Jersey City, while his friend secured permission to install the receiving station in the dome of the Manhattan Life Building, in New York.

The attempt added another failure to De Forest's long list. The system; refused to work! The signals did not come through! It was months before De Forest learned enough of radio to know why he had failed. The great dome, covered with copper, absorbed the energy of the signals. There was nothing left for the receiver.

A short time later the transmitting station was moved to State Street, in New York, with the receiv ing station in the old Castleton Hotel, on Staten

Island. This time conditions were more favorable, and the apparatus performed better.

At that time the late George Westinghouse was the outstanding figure in the electrical world. He had used the immense fortune derived from his invention of the air brake to found the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, one of the largest corporations in its field.

Two of De Forest's associates had tried to interest Westinghouse in wireless telegraphy, and De Forest awaited his visit with intense anxiety.

"Westinghouse was a big man, with great natural dignity of manner," De Forest told me. "I was so much in awe of him that, beyond shaking hands and mumbling a few confused words, I said nothing to him the whole time he was in the station..

"We sent several messages to the Staten Island receiving station, and the tests were fairly successful.

"Westinghouse maintained noncommittal silence throughout the demonstration and when we had finished he simply left, without saying anything, one way or the other. Finally, however, he sent me his verdict: He was not interested!"

Nineteen years later the Westinghouse company opened broadcasting station KDKA, the first of the big Eastern stations. This marked the beginning of the immense interest which has, in a little more than