History of electronic components[edit]

Further information: Timeline of electrical and electronic engineering

Vacuum tubes (Thermionic valves) were one of the earliest electronic components. They were
almost solely responsible for the electronics revolution of the first half of the Twentieth
Century. They took electronics from parlor tricks and gave us radio, television, phonographs,
radar, long distance telephony and much more. They played a leading role in the field of
microwave and high power transmission as well as television receivers until the middle of the
1980s.[1] Since that time, solid state devices have all but completely taken over. Vacuum tubes
are still used in some specialist applications such as high power RF amplifiers, cathode ray
tubes, specialist audio equipment, guitar amplifiers and some microwave devices.
In April 1955 the IBM 608 was the first IBM product to use transistor circuits without any
vacuum tubes and is believed to be the world's first all-transistorized calculator to be
manufactured for the commercial market.[2][3] The 608 contained more than
3,000 germanium transistors. Thomas J. Watson Jr. ordered all future IBM products to use
transistors in their design. From that time on transistors were almost exclusively used for
computer logic and peripherals.

The history of electronics is a story of the twentieth century and three key components
the vacuum tube, the transistor, and the integrated circuit. In 1883, Thomas Alva Edison
discovered that electrons will flow from one metal conductor to another through a vacuum.
This discovery of conduction became known as the Edison effect. In 1904, John Fleming
applied the Edison effect in inventing a two-element electron tube called a diode, and Lee
De Forest followed in 1906 with the three-element tube, the triode. These vacuum tubes were
the devices that made manipulation of electrical energy possible so it could be amplified and
transmitted.
The first applications of electron tubes were in radio communications. Guglielmo Marconi
pioneered the development of the wireless telegraph in 1896 and long-distance radio
communication in 1901. Early radio consisted of either radio telegraphy (the transmission of
Morse code signals) or radio telephony (voice messages). Both relied on the triode and made
rapid advances thanks to armed forces communications during World War I. Early radio
transmitters, telephones, and telegraph used high-voltage sparks to make waves and sound.
Vacuum tubes strengthened weak audio signals and allowed these signals to be superimposed
on radio waves. In 1918, Edwin Armstrong invented the "super-heterodyne receiver" that
could select among radio signals or stations and could receive distant signals. Radio
broadcasting grew astronomically in the 1920s as a direct result. Armstrong also invented
wide-band frequency modulation (FM) in 1935; only AM or amplitude modulation had been
used from 1920 to 1935.
Communications technology was able to make huge advances before World War II as more
specialized tubes were made for many applications. Radio as the primary form of education
and entertainment was soon challenged by television, which was invented in the 1920s but
didn't become widely available until 1947. Bell Laboratories publicly unveiled the television in
1927, and its first forms were electromechanical. When an electronic system was proved
superior, Bell Labs engineers introduced the cathode ray picture tube and color television.
But Vladimir Zworykin, an engineer with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), is
considered the "father of the television" because of his inventions, the picture tube and the
iconoscope camera tube.

THE HISTORY OF ELECTRONICS

The vacuum tube era

Theoretical and experimental studies of electricity during the 18th and 19th centuries led to
the development of the first electrical machines and the beginning of the widespread use of
electricity. The history of electronics began to evolve separately from that of electricity late in
the 19th century with the identification of the electron by the English physicist Sir Joseph John
Thomson and the measurement of its electric charge by the American physicist Robert A.
Millikan in 1909.
At the time of Thomsons work, the American inventor Thomas A. Edisonhad observed a bluish
glow in some of his early lightbulbs under certain conditions and found that a current would
flow from one electrode in the lamp to another if the second one (anode) were made
positively charged with respect to the first (cathode). Work by Thomson and his students and
by the English engineer John Ambrose Fleming revealed that this so-called Edison effect was
the result of the emission of electrons from the cathode, the hot filament in the lamp. The
motion of the electrons to the anode, a metal plate, constituted an electric current that would
not exist if the anode were negatively charged.
This discovery provided impetus for the development of electron tubes, including an
improved X-ray tube by the American engineer William D. Coolidge and Flemings thermionic
valve (a two-electrode vacuum tube) for use in radio receivers. The detection of a radio signal,
which is a very high-frequency alternating current (AC), requires that the signal be rectified;
i.e., the alternating current must be converted into a direct current (DC) by a device that
conducts only when the signal has one polarity but not when it has the otherprecisely what
Flemings valve (patented in 1904) did. Previously, radio signals were detected by various
empirically developed devices such as the cat whisker detector, which was composed of a
fine wire (the whisker) in delicate contact with the surface of a natural crystal of lead sulfide
(galena) or some othersemiconductor material. These devices were undependable, lacked
sufficient sensitivity, and required constant adjustment of the whisker-to-crystal contact to
produce the desired result. Yet these were the forerunners of todays solid-state devices. The
fact that crystal rectifiers worked at all encouraged scientists to continue studying them and
gradually to obtain the fundamental understanding of the electrical properties of
semiconducting materials necessary to permit the invention of the transistor.
In 1906 Lee De Forest, an American engineer, developed a type of vacuum tube that was
capable of amplifying radio signals. De Forest added a grid of fine wire between the cathode
and anode of the two-electrode thermionic valve constructed by Fleming. The new device,
which De Forest dubbed the Audion (patented in 1907), was thus a three-electrode vacuum
tube. In operation, the anode in such a vacuum tube is given a positive potential (positively
biased) with respect to the cathode, while the grid is negatively biased. A large negative bias
on the grid prevents any electrons emitted from the cathode from reaching the anode;
however, because the grid is largely open space, a less negative bias permits some electrons
to pass through it and reach the anode. Small variations in the grid potential can thus control
large amounts of anode current.
The vacuum tube permitted the development of radio broadcasting, long-distance telephony,
television, and the first electronic digital computers. These early electronic computers were, in
fact, the largest vacuum-tube systems ever built. Perhaps the best-known representative is
the ENIAC (Elctronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), completed in 1946.
The special requirements of the many different applications of vacuum tubes led to numerous
improvements, enabling them to handle large amounts of power, operate at very high
frequencies, have greater than average reliability, or be made very compact (the size of a
thimble). The cathode-ray tube, originally developed for displaying electrical waveforms on a
screen for engineering measurements, evolved into the television picture tube. Such tubes
operate by forming the electrons emitted from the cathode into a thin beam that impinges on
a fluorescent screen at the end of the tube. The screen emits light that can be viewed from
outside the tube. Deflecting the electron beamcauses patterns of light to be produced on the
screen, creating the desired optical images.

Notwithstanding the remarkable success of solid-state devices in most electronic applications,

there are certain specialized functions that only vacuum tubes can perform. These usually
involve operation at extremes of power or frequency.
Vacuum tubes are fragile and ultimately wear out in service. Failure occurs in normal usage
either from the effects of repeated heating and cooling as equipment is switched on and off
(thermal fatigue), which ultimately causes a physical fracture in some part of the interior
structure of the tube, or from degradation of the properties of the cathode by residual gases
in the tube. Vacuum tubes also take time (from a few seconds to several minutes) to warm
up to operating temperaturean inconvenience at best and in some cases a serious
limitation to their use. These shortcomings motivated scientists at Bell Laboratories to seek
an alternative to the vacuum tube and led to the development of the transistor.