transmitter The company was founded in
Palo Alto, California in 1909 by
Cyril Frank Elwell, and was first known as the Poulsen Wireless Company, after licensing
Valdemar Poulsen's arc transmitter for use in the United States. The company initially developed high-powered transmitters used for long distance radiotelegraph communication. In 1911–13,
Lee De Forest and two assistants worked at Federal Telegraph on the first
vacuum tube amplifier and
oscillator, which De Forest called the "Oscillaton" after his earlier
Audion. at the original location of FTC laboratory In 1912 the US Congress appropriated $1 million to build a chain of radio stations for the
United States Navy. (Company president Washington Dodge, accused of arranging to personally benefit from the transaction, committed suicide in June 1919.) Federal Telegraph continued to provide overland service using leased telephone lines. After the conclusion of the war, legislation proposed by the Navy, known as the "Alexander bill", was introduced to continue government radio station ownership. However, this received little support, and it was announced that instead the stations would be returned to their original owners, with Federal Telegraph resuming station operations in 1921. In 1924 a controlling interest in the company was acquired by
Rudolph Spreckels who then hired
Ellery W. Stone to be president of the company. Stone realised that Federal had
Shop rights to the patents that
Lee de Forest had developed while working for Federal. This meant that Federal could make and use Vacuum tubes that were covered by de Forest's five patents and not face a patent infringement case. Originally a separate entity within the Mackay Companies, when
International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) purchased the Mackay Companies in 1928, Federal remained a component of the Mackay structure as a manufacturing entity. In 1931,
Dr. Ernest O. Lawrence, inventor of the
cyclotron, convinced Federal Telegraph to donate an 80-ton magnet they had developed for a canceled project in China to his first cyclotron project on the campus of the University of California Berkeley. Lawrence's invention of the cyclotron was the basis of his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1939. In 1940,
Sosthenes Behn moved Federal Telegraph under ITT directly so that its manufacturing capabilities could help ITT replace those in Europe that had been shut down because of the war and the Fall of France. In 1954, FTR changed its name from
Federal Telegraph and Radio Corporation - an IT&T associate to
Federal Telegraph and Radio Company - division of IT&T, and its research division became the
Federal Telecommunications Laboratories, both continuing as subsidiaries of ITT after World War II through at least the 1950s. ==References==