Later Years and Death
De Forest sold one of his radio manufacturing firms to RCA in 1931. In 1934, the courts sided with De Forest against Edwin Armstrong.
In 1940 he sent a open letter to the National Association of Broadcasters in which he demanded to know, "What have you done with my child, the radio broadcast? You have debased this child, dressed him in rags of ragtime, tatters of jive and boogie-woogie."
Also in 1940, De Forest and early TV engineer Ulises Armand Sanabria presented the concept of a primitive unmanned combat air vehicle using a television camera and a jam resistant radio control in a Popular Mechanics issue.
De Forest authored an autobiography Father of Radio in 1950.
De Forest was the guest celebrity on the May 22, 1957, episode of the television show This Is Your Life, where he was introduced as "the father of radio and the grandfather of television". Highlights of this episode, as well as a film clip of his 1940 NAB letter, can be found in the 1992 Ken Burns PBS documentary film based on Tom Lewis' book Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio.
De Forest's initially rejected, but later adopted, movie soundtrack method brought De Forest an Academy Award in 1959/1960 for "his pioneering inventions which brought sound to the motion picture" and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
He suffered a severe heart attack in 1958, and remained mostly bedridden.
He died in Hollywood on June 30, 1961, aged 87, and was interred in San Fernando Mission Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. De Forest died relatively poor, with just $1,250 in his bank account.
Read more about this topic: Lee De Forest
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