In the end, de Forest wasn’t quite sure whether to be pleased or dismayed by the world he had helped bring into being. In “Dawn of the Electronic Age,” a 1952 article he wrote for Popular Mechanics, he crowed about his creation of the Audion, referring to it as “this small acorn from which has sprung the gigantic oak that is today world-embracing.” At the same time, he lamented the “moral depravity” of commercial broadcast media. “A melancholy view of our national mental level is obtained from a survey of the moronic quality of the majority of today’s radio programs,” he wrote. Looking ahead to future applications of electronics, he grew even gloomier. He believed that “electron physiologists” would eventually be able to monitor and analyze “thought or brain waves,” allowing “joy and grief [to] be measured in definite, quantitative units.” Ultimately, he concluded, “a professor may be able to implant knowledge into the reluctant brains of his 22nd-century pupils. What terrifying political possibilities may be lurking there! Let us be thankful that such things are only for posterity, not for us.”