It all began with a cheap Chinese rotary vane vacuum pump and a desire to learn the witchcraft of DIY vacuum tubes. It ended with a string of successes – a working vacuum chamber, light bulbs, glow ...

The transistor revolutionized the world and made the abundant computing we now rely on a possibility, but before the transistor, there was the vacuum tube. Large, hot, power hungry, and prone to ...

Editor’s Note: This is the second in our on-going What It’s Worth series that keeps you up to date on what’s hot in Antique Technology. For Part 1, click here ...

Back in the 1950s, before the advent of transistors, valves powered all audio devices. Readers in the USA may know valves as tubes; small glass vacuum tubes that glow with heat and do the ...

Talking about vacuum tubes—or “vacuum electron devices” (VEDs), as their proponents prefer to call them—may seem like you are discussing ancient history. After all, who even considers VEDs when ...

AT a meeting of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow on December 22, 1880, I gave a very brief preliminary account of some experiments that I have been making, along with Sir William Thomson, with ...