Van Etten, Herbert B.

One of the four men involved in the development of the audion amplifier at the Federal Telegraph Company's Palo Alto laboratory in 1912, the other three being Lee de Forest, Cyril F. Elwell, and Charles V. Logwood. Van Etten was responsible for setting up the feed-back circuit that led to the discovery of the vibrating or oscillating capacity of the audion, a three-element vacuum tube.

Herbert B. Van Etten worked for many years in the field of communications, most notably the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Co. In 1912, while at the Federal Telegraph Co., he was the assistant of Lee De Forest, who was credited with inventing and developing much of the technology used in radio, film, and television. Van Etten was responsible for recording information in notebooks, which were used as evidence in the patent disputes between de Forest and Edwin Armstrong.