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Hand-Made Vacuum Tubes
djmoore writes "Over at Make Magazine, watch this video of a French amateur radio operator making and testing his own vacuum tubes. It looks like he built much of his own equipment as well. The Make poster notes: 'I love the ease with which he performs these rather high-end skills (like glass forming), the gestural flourishes (like it's hand magic), and the Zelig-esque soundtrack.'"
This guy isn't just a tinkerer, but an artist as well. This kind of thing is an art as much as it is a science.
While vacumn tubes are strictly in the realm of hobbyists and zealous audiophiles, nevertheless it is important for teens and young adults to understand where the electronics industry started from. They're already made to study what can argueably be considered useless information, so why not study something that is cool and informative as well? Think of it as shop class for nerds.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
for pointing out the man's website and giving him direct credit. Its sad to see something placed without naming the inventor.
For better or not, you don't need to be a zealous audiophile to appreciate the sound of a tube guitar amp.
Why do you have to see everything through the category useful/useless? Is it so hard for you to imagine that one day, let's say in the next 1000's of years, we will need a guy who can make vacuum tubes? It's never good for any technologies to be lost, even if they seem too old to be useful now.
You can learn a hell of a lot from vacuum tubes! They are far easier to understand than transistors.
There's a reason why they're called "valves" in the UK. It's like a valve controlling a powerful stream of water; a small change on the valve leads to a very large change of current. That change in current can, in turn, control a much bigger valve that controls an even larger current.
In this case, the "valve" is a control grid (that spiral thing) surrounding the cathode (the thin hot wire in the middle). The big cylinder is the "plate". The cathode itself has a cloud of electrons around it (because it's hot), and a small signal on the grid controls how much of that can scoot across to the plate (which is positively charged due to a power supply putting a strong positive voltage on it). So a weak sine wave signal on the plate will lead to a big sine wave current from the plate.
There, now you know the basics of amplification (although I skipped some details). I couldn't have done it by describing a BJT (transistor), because they're far weirder.
How about instead we push for the Flash source code to be opened up?
If it's gonna 'take over' the Internet, it should be an open standard. I should be able to build the Flash Player the same way I build Seamonkey.
not because you need wheels, but because you need inventors." Not sure who first said that.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
You can learn a hell of a lot from vacuum tubes! They are far easier to understand than transistors.
For someone studying electronics, I agree. But as a general subject? Why not teach the theory on how they used to slop pigs 100 years ago? Or the techniques for cutting hair? Or pick your esoteric piece of knowledge that is utterly useless to 99% of students.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
And what, pray tell, would be "useful" to 99% of students? I'm trying to think of something that you'd consider useful, and I'm failing.
In electronics, how transistors work is pretty fundamental. In agriculture, understanding the differences in how pigs (well, cows) were fed 100 years ago versus today is pretty fundamental to understanding prion diseases, as is the "useless, esoteric" story about the disease of "kuru" among the cannibals of New Zealand. Teach geology without the "trivia" that earthquakes and plate tectonics are inextricably linked to the shape of the continents on either side of the Atlantic ocean, and that the guy who came up with the idea was laughed at until they found the ridge in the middle of the Atlantic ocean? Teach hairdressing without talking about the greasers of the 50s, the afros of the 60s, the perms of the 70s, and the mohawks of the 80s?
Useless is in the mind of the beholden.