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.
E-mail
this page
