On October 25, 1906, Lee de Forest filed for a patent for his Audion, which was the very first amplifier.  “Audion” is a portmanteau of “audio” and “ion,” for the gases inside the transistor tubes that made amplification possible..  Mostly, de Forest wanted a catchy name for something that turned invisible radiowaves into clear signals, unless you really like fuzz distortion.  But you need an amplifier for that, too.  You need an amplifier for lots of things. 

Take your average input signal, like your voice or a stereo or an electric guitar.  On its own, it’s pretty wimpy.  Without being amplified, nobody is going to tell you to turn that damned music down.  So the signal is routed through an amplifier.  In particular, it goes through a transistor, which juices it up with electricity, and makes that little signal big.  All the way to Eleven.  All told, it’s fairly simple, but somebody had to do it.  Just like somebody had to invent the electric guitar. 

The first electric guitar was the Rickenbacker Frying Pan, created back in 1931 by George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker (as if that comes as a surprise).  They wanted something loud enough to be heard above the other big band instruments.  So they made the pickups out of horseshoe-shaped magnets that they put around the strings.  When the strings were played – when they vibrated – they created an electrical current.  The current then went through an audion and came out loud.  Loud enough to be heard above the brass section.  What’s truly amazing is that it took 25 years from the invention of the amplifier to the invention of the electric guitar.

For all that Lee de Forest gave to humanity, he got very little of it back for himself.  He sold the rights to his amplifier to AT&T and Bell for very little, and they used it to make a whole lot.  When de Forest died in 1961, he had a little over a thousand dollars to his name.  Of course, that would be worth around $11,000 today, not that that’s a whole lot, either. 

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