The Faith in the Future

Abstract

This chapter unfolds the education, family, and early life of Lee de Forest. It emphasizes that 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. The chapter also discusses the most important element of de Forest's informal education: his own reading. 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. As he grew older, de Forest increasingly turned from mechanical imitation to invention. The chapter recounts de Forest's final spring in Talladega College, as he prepared to leave for Yale College. It also narrates the arguments he had with his father, Henry Swift De Forest, about education.