http://www.americanheritage.com/it/2002/02/tube.shtml
Cover Story: The Tube is Dead. Long Live the Tube. - Fall 2002
http://www.americanheritage.com/it/2002/02/tube.shtml
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Fall 2002 Volume 18, Number 2
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Fall 2002 Cover
The Tube is Dead. Long Live the Tube.
The vacuum tube has been obsolete for decades¯ and it's here to stay
by Mark Wolverton
Copyright 2002 by Forbes, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
It's 1960 or so, and you're a 12-year-old living in a suburb somewhere on the East Coast. It's late on a school night and you're in bed, but you're not
sleeping; you're listening to a big old Atwater Kent radio that you inherited when your mother got one of those new transistor radios for the kitchen.
Tonight you're tuned to WOR in New York at 710 AM, and you're listening to this guy named Jean Shepherd who's telling a funny story about when he was a
kid and blew up his ham radio one day, scaring his mother and almost burning down the house. Then he starts talking about radio and vacuum tubes, and he
says that those new things called transistors may be good for some stuff, but they'll never replace tubes altogether: *When you get down to putting out
50,000 watts of radio frequency, no sir. You gotta call in the big boys with the fans blowing on 'em. With the water running through 'em to keep 'em cool.*
Then you look over at the nightstand, and see the orange glow behind the Atwater Kent giving the only light in the room, and even under the sheets you can
feel the reassuring warmth of the radio's tubes, and you know Shepherd is right. Your mom's new transistor set doesn't sound nearly as good as the Atwater
Kent, or a real hi-fi with tubes. How could some dinky little gadget that doesn't even light up replace all that?
What you didn't know at the time, of course, was that the writing was already on the wall. Even while the vacuum tube was still the undisputed king of the
electronics world, in the 1950s and early 1960s, engineers were diligently experimenting, learning how to build solid-state circuits with the recently
invented transistor. As the sixties dissolved into the seventies, transistors and integrated circuits pushed tubes aside in all sorts of consumer electronics,
from stereo systems to radios to television sets, until by 1980 you would be hard pressed to find a tube in any device in your home¯except for the single,
huge picture tube in the TV. Yet the vacuum tube remains on the scene, stubbornly hanging on almost a century after its invention. Is this mere nostalgia?
Perhaps, or at least in part. But nostalgia or not, there are still some jobs for which the obsolete vacuum tube is the better choice.
thank you!
BRETT K WINCHESTER PM KD7JN VOLUNTEER & READING SERVICES MANAGER
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