In article ,
Scott Dorsey wrote:

Though he invented the triode and recognized at once it's value, there
was no where in the book where he gave a cogent explanation of how it
actually worked.

I think he had some basic idea of how amplification worked (with the
grid attracting or repelling electrons passing by), but he clearly had
absolutely no understanding of how the tube worked as an oscillator or
how regeneration worked. And he certainly never got to the point of
working out a transfer function as a characteristic curve.
--scott

I've always felt that deForest's history was another exercise in
alchemical strangeness. It seems fairly clear that he did not have any
real understanding of why or how his tubes worked, or what they might be
capable of actually doing. Nor did he ever devise any practical
circuitry for using them. A much larger contributor to circuitry was
Armstrong, whose patents were overturned in favor of deForest later
on---generally regarded as a travesty of justice. Development of the
high-vacuum triode with a scientific understanding of what the control
grid was doing to the electron stream---and development of a concomitant
technology for series production of the devices was more an AT&T/Bell
Labs effort. Also, the first major use of these devices was as
telephony repeater amplifiers.

Hank