The Centennial of Electronics

By Michael Geselowitz

Happy new year. A recent article in The Economist noted the mania for anniversaries (10th anniversary of this, 25th anniversary of that) in the high-tech field, and 2007 will be fertile ground for this obsession. In fact, 2007 starts with a bang. January is arguably the most important anniversary of all — the centennial of the electronic devices upon which all computers and telecommunications in a sense rely.

In 1904, J. A. Fleming had created a two-element vacuum tube that acted as a 'valve" that could rectify — and therefore detect — radio waves. This was the ancestor of today's diode. But the diode, like the resistor or capacitor, is a passive (albeit nonlinear) circuit element.

In October 2006, Lee de Forest presented a paper to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE, predecessor to the IEEE) on the 'Audion," a three-element device that was the first vacuum tube that could actually amplify a signal. One hundred years ago — on 29 January 1907 — de Forest applied for the patent on his device, which he used to produce radio receivers. This tube was the precursor to the transistor — and the age of electronics was born!

Despite the appearance of this device, the term 'electronics" did not surface for some time. Vacuum tubes came to be called "electron tubes" because their activity was due to the flow of electrons (which had been discovered by J. J. Thomson in 1897), and technical publications occasionally referred to 'electronic devices." In 1929, in response to great growth in the manufacture and use of electron tubes, O. H. Caldwell and Keith Henney were planning to launch a new magazine for McGraw-Hill that would cover the industries based on these devices. They asked around about names for the publication, and someone (there is some controversy as to who) suggested Electronics. The word caught on, and an age and an industry begun 100 years ago acquired a name that survives to this day — including its place as the middle "E" in IEEE.

 

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