Dreamers and Deceivers by Glenn Beck Read Free Book Online Page A

greatness, de Forest had been fired from his job by the dolts at the American WirelessTelegraph Company. His crime? He’d refused to surrender all rights to his work and into the grasping hands of his greedy employer! He’d then bravely struck out on his own, only to see his dreams crushed again and again by unscrupulous partners and overzealous minions of the law.
    Since the failure of his first company, he had ridden several more of them into the ground. Some of his new partners had been convicted for stock irregularities, and de Forest himself had only recently been narrowly acquitted on a trumped-up charge of fraud. The prosecutors had accused him of selling worthless pieces of junk—including his precious Audion!—and thereby fleecing hundreds of unsuspecting hobbyists by mail order.
    Mistreated, disrespected, and misunderstood—such was the path of a genius in a backward world. Over the years he’d been twice married and divorced, and betrayed many times over by a series of businessmen who only wanted to use his brilliance for their ill-gotten gains. But at last he was free from all of them, and determined to make a fresh start.
    Soon, he swore, he would show them. When de Forest was a household name, etched into history alongside those of Ohm, Volta, Faraday, Watt, Hertz, Joule, Henry, Galvani, and Ampère—then they would all be cursing the day they’d dared to disrespect him. This would be marked as the moment in history when Lee de Forest began his Phoenix rise into legend.
    With the last of his dwindling savings, de Forest had begun to broadcast little short-range programs of music and news in the city. It was a humble rebirth, but a foundation he could build on. He had made a firm resolution that he wouldn’t be stolen from again. More than that, he would take back what was his from all those who sought to rob him of his rightful legacy.
    Several months earlier, there’d been rumors floating around that some local upstart had used his Audion in a receiver of extraordinary design. Now that wop bastard Marconi had licensed the design, no doubt to rub salt in de Forest’s wounds, and he was soon to begin cranking out receivers like link sausages.
    There was more. This young thief, fourteen years his junior, thisEdwin Howard Armstrong, actually had the unmitigated gall to patent the stolen goods under his own name. When the true inventor, de Forest himself, had tried twice to submit his own registration for his new Ultra-Audion receiver, he was flatly turned down in favor of the younger man’s fraudulent precedent.
    This could not stand.
    Lee de Forest vowed he would win back his greatest invention, secure all rights to its use, and destroy this charlatan, Howard Armstrong—even if it took the rest of his natural life.
    1917
    Howard Armstrong stood outside the courtroom, waiting. He could feel the twitching in his neck and at the corner of his eye, and he wished hard that for once he could just make it stop.
    When Lee de Forest had filed this patent suit against him in 1915, the lawyers all assured Armstrong that the case would never get to trial. When it did get to trial, they told him it would all be over soon. Now, almost two years later, his bank account was almost empty and still the case showed no sign of resolution.
    “Try to relax, Howard,” his attorney said. “You’ve got a big afternoon ahead on the stand.”
    “How can I relax? Yesterday I had to listen to de Forest blather on for four straight hours. Any thinking man could tell that he doesn’t understand even the most basic principles of radio. He couldn’t even explain oscillation! And the judge sat there nodding his head through it all, as though what he was hearing made perfect logical sense!”
    “The judge isn’t an expert.”
    “Then where are the experts to testify on my behalf? Three days ago, the Institute of Radio Engineers awarded their first ever Medal of Honor to me for the development of the regenerative receiver—the