AT&T Archives: A Modern Aladdin's Lamp, about vacuum tubes,1940
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
- See more from the AT&T Archives at techchannel.att...
There were two versions of this film made; this is the short version. Watch for footage of the ridiculously huge vacuum tubes that were used for radio transmission.
From the original 1940 documentation:
"With Western Electric Vacuum Tubes in the starring roles, this film tells the fascinating story of tube development from the first crude bulbs of Edison and De Forest to the powerful and efficient tubes in use today, and shows the prominent part they play in radio, long-distance telephony, public address systems, sound motion pictures and the phonograph.
Animated sequences depicting a traffic cop halting an on-rush of electrons inside a tube and a troupe of monkeys tossing pebbles at a grid explain the three-element tube so clearly that a non-technical audience can understand how it operates.
Scenes in the tube shop show the precision workmanship that goes into the making of broadcasting and telephone repeater tubes. The camera moves from one intricate operation to another while skilled craftsmen transform spools of wire and rods of glass into these magic lamps of today."
Footage courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center, Warren, NJ
Who are all addicted to these kind of classic educational videos?
Nice to learn english.
@@pascoaiandreta9964that's not English.
I have a 1962 Motorola radio and phonograph console that uses vacuum tubes. It still works. No tube has ever blown out but I don't use it much. The sound of both the radio and phonograph is still excellent. Love the way the radio has to warm up before it starts to emit sound.
Modern presenters could learn a lot from the clear and simple analogies and illustrations made in this video when explaining to lay people how concepts work.
+John Michaelson i saw a lot of these old documentaries and found out they teach from basics and precise about the concepts related,,, modern teaching lacks depth and precision
Good luck... the "journalists" of today don't understand how things work enough to convey it to you. They seem to love filling page space with words and jumping around. What have our colleges produced these days? I tried to find out specifics about 5G cell phone protocols and all I could find were articles that said "it is fast" and described all the things I could do with this speed... but not a word about orthogonal multiplexing, spread spectrum or even what frequencies.
John Michaelson Or from Nikola Tesla"s physics, and exxperiments.100 years from now the question will be " Who was Thomas Alva Edison.?"
@@ai4px You're comparing journalism to videos produced by the manufacturers of the product. Of course they aren't going to be on the same level. Do you think the newspapers in the 1940s went this in depth explaining how a vacuum tube works? No, they just said "it is fast".
@@ShaunDreclin you fail to realise companys refuse to cover their technology now. Showing off your technology back then was done as marketing, to show customers how their products are reliable, and why it's worth buying their luxuries. Modern products aren't made to last like back then (planned obsolescence started by the GM company), so there's no reason to show how it's made. There is also no need to explain how it works either. Showing how it works is pointless when people already know "it works because... I dunno". Explaining it back then was necessary because you needed to know which way the electricity was going to use it. You don't need to know how bluetooth works to sink to your speaker.
This actually does a better job of explaining vacuum tubes than a lot of modern presentations I've seen.
We had the last vacuum tube electronics class in high school in 1974 75 the book I had explained it pretty good. Along with the teacher we had and we made a 5-tube radio.
If this was a modern youtube video it would have lasted at least 90 minutes and used forever to get to the point
@@LangkowskiSame with schools today
That whole "monkeys throwing pebbles at a target through a shutter" bit at 9:00 had me cracking up. I never would have thought of making such an analogy to controlling electron flow, so props for creativity there!
See how America used to be great, you could say something and not offend people. now liberals ruined that. dont hurt their feelings guys. be nice now
Anyone who's been to the monkey exhibit at the Zoo knows what they're really throwing! It's the Ancient Art of Flung Poo.
You could never show that analogy as an example today, anywhere but UA-cam, the libs would be calling you racist and if that's what comes to their mind then there are the ones that are racist. There's a ridiculous amount of things you'll never see today, especially in school textbooks. You'll never see a girl using an iron or a boy using a hammer, in fact these days you'll never even see anything identifiable as a girl or boy. This world is dead.
@@8800081 I see a whole lot of people in this comment section whining about "what the liberals would say" and not any liberals actually saying anything. You've invented a caricature of what a liberal actually is so that you can feel good about yourself. Try actually _talking_ to the average moderate liberal and you'll find you agree on most topics. As much as you may think they are or want them to be, most issues are not partisan.
@@porkyfedwell ha!… true.
As an old geezer, I really enjoyed this video. I actually own a Western Electric 102-F "repeater" vacuum tube (in the original, bulb-shaped form factor). It was pulled from one of the last voice repeaters in my area - nearly identical to the repeater shown in the video. The label on it indicates it was put into service in 1931, and it was still operating flawlessly around 40 years later when it was removed from service. The combination of Bell Labs research and Western Electric manufacturing resulted in some awesome components back then.
Good thing you can still get them made. There is a few youtubers on here still hand making electron tubes. Amplifier tubes are also still manufactured today. They may be inefficient today but they still produce superior sound.
Wow. You must be so old your balls float up when you sit in the tub 😹
POV NW, why are you an ass?
I loved this video and others like it I watched last night but it's painfully obvious why are new stock tubes are so poor these days. It's no longer an art and even the duds are now sold. Less quality control less skilled workers etc. It's amazing that repeater tube lasted 40 years. Meanwhile as a guitar player im having a hard time getting my EL34 output tubes in my Marshall to last me a year, NOS (new old stock) still exists but only for so long. I just wish a company would step up and invest in making quality tubes again and not have any ties to the few company's that own all the current production tubes. As it is Tung-sol, SOVTEK, electro harmonix, JJ Tesla, Mullard and others are all owned by one or two company's and all produced side by side in a handful of factories in Russia and China. With new production tubes I often go through a few sets before I find one that doesn't have any defects. It's just pathetic.
I was a tech with AT&T and remember replacing Line Repeaters made by Western Electric that were 30 years old. Many of them were still working but they were getting tired and I didn't want to re-enter that manhole again.
From "magic" light bulbs, to my iPad, what an amazing world we live in today.
I'm a retired tech, and this was actually very informative, and easy to understand.
Great production values, fast moving, entertaining, and fun music.
Looking at all those tube repeater amps on the wall, made me think, how cool it would have been, to convert them all to guitar amps. LOL
The vacuum tube assembly line process is amazing to watch.
I felt in love with vacuum tube technology when I was a kid. My grand parents had a color tv which used tubes, and also a tubes radio we were listening to every Wednesday. I was fascinated by these glowing components. Now I'm repairing old tube radios...
My uncle used to repair radios and televisions up until the early 1980s. In the late 70s, I would take tubes to the pharmacy which had a tube tester. My folks had an Admiral 'hybrid' 25-inch(26-inch in the U.S.) colour TV. Some of its circuitry was transistorized. Its tubes ran at a reduced voltage so they needed less time to warm up, making it almost instant-on...
You just can't imagine how happy I am to watch this video ! Thank you very much .
Of all the modern illustrations and videos these old documentaries along with old tech magazines made me learn 20 times better. New documentaries tend to be as theoretic as hell and it's easy to get distracted and mislead
It's funny that no one in the end of the video says, "Please hit the like button, smash the bell icon and subscribe."
snowflaky remark
Amazing precision factory robots in use for being 1940. Clear glass tubes have fascinated me since grade school. I'm 69.
Yeah, it is . They almost look like real humans, too.
Sucks that NASA lost the tech to make them just like the moon landing telemetry and vehicle designs.
I am your age. My father gave me some small vac tubes and told me how to use my batteries to get them to work. I have loved them ever since.
At 19:30 is a policeman in his car using his mobile vacuum tube radio set. The policeman's arm patch says "Kearny Police". Kearny NJ is where Western Electric had a huge manufacturing plant.
It might be because vacuum tubes aren't nearly as common nowadays, but I learned more in a few minutes of this video than any modern video on the subject. The examples were funny and very informative, and the subject matter is clearly explained.
+AJFreeway the only difference between the tubes of today and the ones described in the video is that these days, tubes have a metal tube snuggly fit around the filament known as the cathode, it makes design easier so you only have to apply one lead to create a circuit between the plate and filament/cathode.
+Joshua Lopez they've always had a cathode, that's what releases the electrons. the animations in the film are grossly oversimplified for demonstration purposes. some cathodes are directly heated, some are indirectly heated by a filament.
michael Woods I was kinda referring to the early deforest audion tubes. They just had filaments.
That filament is what is called a directly heated cathode.
SlyPearTree yep, but since higher amounts of power applied tended to burn it out, the cathode was created to make the tube handle power beyond what the filament was handling before it burned out.
CPU water cooling in 1940
like midget data in a hyperloop tube, your voice current goes out into the ether
When the CPU was literally one transistor
@@StephenJamieson the ENIAC had something like 24,000 tubes. Imagine cooling all that
@@StephenJamieson No, that is not the proper difference to notice. It was a fully analog device with infinite continuous states, while computers uses transistor in only two states for binary coding.
Amazing.. the narrator tells elaborately about the components in the tube, how they are set up, compares them, tells what they are used for .. and doesn't breathe a word about how they actually work, amplify
"....all these things and more happened, because of a single product of individual enterprise, and THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE. And so long as they endure, there will be no end to the miracles of this modern Aladdin's lamp, the vacuum tube....". WE/Bell Labs - The greatest collection of technical talent and innovation mankind has yet known.
I learn a great deal from these and old US Army training videos. I had the pleasure of visiting CBS TV transmitter room on the 108/109 floor of WTC Building #1. The first fully Solid State (FET), high power transmitter (at least in NY). We regularly stopped by to visit on our way up to the roof to service our antenna.
Americans always seem so much more well-spoken in old videos. I also like the early-20th century American accent much better than the modern one.
we all got dumber thanks to low education standards.
So true. When Bush senior decided to implement the "No Child Left Behind" initiative to give everybody a trophy. He destroyed two generations of Americans and now we have Social Justice Warriors instituting their politically correct, censorship. And groups like BLM can call for the death of cops and white people.
You are asserting that the fact that the average teen doesn't talk like Lowell Thomas is because of George H W Bush and not pop culture? I'm guessing you were one of those left behind.
I was watching a class of students learning English and they were watching old episodes of I Love Lucy from the 1950's. This is how they learn English.
@@shopdog831 And pants on the ground. Lookin' like a fool...
I am so glad that these older movies and educational films are still in reach I learned so much. Awesome
Back in my radio days (late 80s to late 90s) our AM transmitter had four tubes that were probably as big around as my thigh. Those things put out so much heat that the AC in that room ran 24/7-even in the middle of winter.
1940's watercooled vacuum tubes ! And here I am with a watercooled processor with over 3 billion transistors... Puts things in perspective about how much progress has been achieved... Very interesting video!
lsq78 - water cooled glassware has been around as long as modern glassware has... the 10W mixed-gas white light laser I worked with at a planetarium had a water cooled laser tube (with a 5-ton water chiller out back) that was indeed a very functional work of art.
And those CPUs require a $1B Wafer fab and lots of nasty chemicals and huge amounts of water resources. Just saying 😎
@@jimc3688 shut up jim
You're comparing apples with oranges. Your microprocessor transistors are only used as fast switches, they're most suitable for digital data and a digitized world of data. The beauty of vacuum tube is their full analog capability. Thus instead of millions of semiconductor integrated transistors to encode and decode audio only a hand full of vacuum tubes is needed. And the tube audio sound is still warmer more natural to the ear than digital audio. To this days many audiophiles recognize that. It's just that with the production of tube having gone to next to none, it is no longer commercially possible to design vacuum tube audio systems. Yet the modern integrated transistor is not superior in all regards.
This was the best explanation I’ve yet seen
fantastic. Love it. Came for the monkeys, stayed for the wonderful footage of the workers making the tubes there by hand. How industrious we used to be!
Haha. I am an electrical engineer 51 years old.. and this vid still explains electricity better than I've ever seen it explained, anywhere else, ever.
My mother worked at Bendix Radio in the middle 40s to the middle 50s and then Westinghouse Corp. She could tell you all about this,. She even built her first Tv before I was born in 55. Most people take electrics for granted what when you think about' what great minds these people had.
I agree, I was so confused in high school chemistry by the completely inaccurate way the electron cloud of an atom was portrayed.
My thoughts exactly.......................He perfectly and easily described exactly how they work, why they work and why they are designed the way they are. Today's youth have NO IDEA how things actually work, only that they work and how to cry when they don't.
If electricity and electrical components were explained like this in high school I probably would have done better with electrical theory...
@@camerond8176 Easy now, not everyone under 50 is incompetent.
Amazing explanation! Also I love the nice and clear American English they spoke back then on TV. English is not my first language and yeat I did understand every single word effortlessly.
i remember the tv set of my grandmother with vacuum tubes i was eager boy that time i used to peek the back of the tv set while it was working and amazed seeing so much bulb inside that lights
For the life of me I could not understand how vacuum tubes work, but this video explained how they work perfectly. Thank You.
"like midgets in a subway crowd" lol you can't beat the analogy. It's perfect.
If a broadcaster dared say something like that over the air nowadays , some smartassed fresh out of legal school would try to sue his ( or her ) ass off on behalf of all the midgets and try to get him ( or her ) fired . notice how careful I'm being .
Excuse me Mr. Announcer, HR would like a word with you
"And to reach the plate, the electrons would have to bump their way through them, like midgets in a subway crowd." - 6:56
Genius
I don't know... I think the "aroused monkeys" at around the 9:05 mark is a worse comment than the "midgets in a subway crowd" comment. ;-)
I love midgets. They make great pets 😐
@@povnw8985 and great snacks
sounds like a jim carr joke
"like MIDGETS in a subway crowd"!!! Electrons in AIR!
cengeb It was not a time of political correctness. It was both funny and offensive. The phrase did help me understand the reason for a vacuum.
Without the invention of the lamp,there would,ve be no computer these day's, it blows my mind how such small little device have changed the world.
Actually, FETs were already invented and being experimented with.
Not really. Vacuum tube computers were second generation of computers (electromechanical relays were the first), but once transistors became available, they switched immediately.
9:00 I’m *_so_* in love with this animation for *_so_* many reasons...
I love these videos. I have some tube radio receivers working, a tube tester and lots of circuits diagram. I enjoy actual technology, but I still love tubes and old transistor hardware. These things are important to me for the history they have behind.
Thanks for uploading this❤❤❤
This contribution here posted, is a joy to watch and appreciate. Thank you a million times over ! Thank you for posting it, and allowing the people to learn from it. I was overjoyed !!!
This is a valuable resource. Thanks for posting this! I've watched a few such vacuum tube videos now, including one about Mullard in England, and it seems women did the bulk of the factory work making tubes.
+Brad Linzy (The Guitologist) There ~was~ a World War going on at the time.....so, there's that.
+hippiekarl7 This film is U.S. made 1940, So prewar in US. The electrical industry seems to have had female workers (not just "clerical") going back many years, and not just in wartime. Westinghouse had women building components for motors and generators as far back as 1905. My grandmother, two of her sisters (Not even going to bother about male members of my family) worked for Westinghouse in peacetime. Just about every American radio manufacturing company (when such a thing existed) also had many female workers. At the risk of sounding stereotypical, I believe that they were considered more precise and less " ham handed"! of course today humans of both genders have been replaced by robots.
I think women worked for less on average than men and this kind of work - repetitive and precision oriented - was, at the risk of sounding politically incorrect today, well suited to women. It wasn't just wartime.
+The Guitologist Then, as now electronics work was precision work. On average women had, and continue to have smaller hands than the average man. This has obvious advantages for precision work. The lower pay was just a side benefit in the minds of the corporations.
Mullard made very high quality tubes..
I love these films, the amount of toil that went into making them is amazing.
My Transcendant Sound T -16s are OTL,Output Transformerless, Amplifiers. 16 Russian 6C19PI Military grade triodes/channel. A buck seventy a piece,surplus from Russia, in the circuit they make magic. Far superior to the Class A MOSFET amps I was building. This video , amazing History, many thanks.
No clean rooms, no special uniforms, just simple production. Yet some of these tubes still work till date.
What's equally fascinating is the machinery that makes the tubes and who invented it?
What fantastic machines they had in the 40s to manufacture these tubes. Even if there were much manual work also.
my 1969 Fender Super Reverb amp is still rocking loud with those tubes, still original. Techs love to see the amp and handle those tubes.
Отличный фильм! Выбило слезу от ностальгии. Сколько дырок в ладонях получено от удара анодного напряжения в несколько тысяч вольт! Электронные лампы живы!
HAM radio sins 1972. Born 1953. 73!
You're old if you can remember when drug stores had vacuum tube testing machines and stocked the tubes.
Robert Cuminale - did you ever see a shoe store x-ray machine? The ones to check the fit of the new shoes?
Well thanks for the reminder.
When I was a young girl, my dad took me to Walgreens to check the tubes of our Zenith color TV set. This was in the 1960s.
Ours was in the nearby Radio Shack. By the time I was about 8, dad would pull the suspected bad tube, give me enough money to replace it if necessary, and send me down to check if the tube was bad and get the replacement if necessary. He could continue with whatever he was doing while I got the new tube.
I remember when they installed the machines
Very nice. I grew up with tubes in the Air Force as an electronic tech in the Cold War. I have many in my collection, including some Marconi tubes.
13:33: "Spacings between windings are uniform to a few millionths of an inch". Why are they then THROWN INTO A PILE (13:39)?
I noticed that too. Hard to believe they would go to so much trouble and then pile them up like garbage. I think that might be a pile of rejects. Does not make sense.
Right and the glass interiors that they had coming down a chute and landing in another pile of glass interiors..?? Now I've seen vacuum tubes before and yes they are made of sturdy glass, but I just can't see how that much shock and survivedand then they're loaded into a great big Bin how are they not crushed by the weight of the other glass particles simply wonderous
*OMG* David, you look like me. I'm not kidding. My beard is bigger but other than that you could just about be my twin!
I don't think that's correct. Maybe to a uniformity of a few thousandths of an inch, but certainly not to millionths of an inch. A typical vacuum tube does not require such precision.
Probably the two most important inventions of the 20th century was the vacuum tube (Thermonic valve) in 1906 which led to modern electronics like radio, television, radar and the earliest electronic computers. Then in 1947 the transistors which led to the amazing technology we have today. The diode tube invented in 1903.
The development of the integrated circuit around 1960 solved "the connection problem:" Even though transistors could be made small and reliable, the physical aspects of connecting them and the associated resistors together in large numbers represented a major obstacle that threatened to be a limiting factor.
Beautifully inspired short document!
My HS chemistry teacher showed this in class once. I finally watched it without falling asleep after all these years.
Amazing robotics and talented women. Never knew how complicated it was to make a vacuum tube. Too bad the transistor would soon make those machines and talents obsolete.
They mostly explained simple three element triode tubes. Pentode, five element, were soon to follow. Dual tubes and subminiature also came later. Lots and lots of other types as well. Having a 2” thick RCA, Sylvania, or GE tube catalogue was a very prized possession.
These films are like time travel to me. Fascinating stuff.
And even today the Vac Tube is still being used in high end Hi -Fi , Respect for those technicians of the past
I" m using a microphone preamplifier built for audio recordings and I have an hi-fi preamp and amplifier for a high efficency loudspeakers. The tubes have again best performances for specific purpose where the mechanical requirements are not primarly requested (audio and RF power transmitter, magnetron it's a vacuum tube and X ray tube, night vision device use a photomultiplicator).
What a enjoyable film!
This is better than "How It's Made".
I love the monkeys grid control analogy of vacuum tubes
Excellent, thanks for posting this.
Finally, I have 14 tube amplifier. Least I know how they are made. 😊👍
Thermionic valves make for the best sounding amps and will never die. Hook 'em up to a trio of single coils with selector switch in position 4 and you'll be smokin' dude.
Sorry man, but digital has replaced that. Amp models in 2023 can produce the same sound
@@jr2904 Some people like processed cheese, others artisan made real deal.
Actually, digital technology models an ideal sound (or think of it as typical response of an amp style or even that of particular existent amplifiers. As such they present a fixed transfer response subject to input parameters.
A real hard-wired tube amp is far more organic and variable and plays that way too.
They're personal.
You did me return to fantastic period of vac tubes 😭 i remember my diperation research PL95 for sound system
It's amazing to see how much they still used people in otherwise automated factory back then. The operations that humans did weren't even more complex than the things the automatic machines did. I suspect that it didn't take long for the whole thing to be automated with humans only involved in maintaining the machines and quality control. Women labor was probably cheap (cost, not quality) enough and plentiful in 1940 to compete with machine but WW2 probably changed that.
I'm currently reading "La Radio, mais c'est tres simple" (Radio, but that's simple.) an old very popular French (my first language) tutorial book about radio and tubes. The edition I have is not very old, 1966, but it is the 28th edition, it was really popular. The pages mostly don't hold to the spine anymore but it is otherwise if fine condition. The 29th editions was published in 1998 for the nostalgics. It's a very good book if you can find it. It was translated in many languages but not English as far as I know.
I just watched a similar video made in 1948, also by Western Electric, and I was wrong, they didn't even show any automation, just rows of women making tubes by doing very repetitive tasks.
Like in Japan with the transistor boom they had factory girls making germanium transistors. It's so amazing to see that women played such an integral in the development of these technologies of course they didn't actually come up with the designs but they still contributed never-the-less.
SlyPearTree - vacuum tubes are still largely produced by hand today... any kind of technical glassware will always require craftsfolk.
The end! Is this where I stand up and cheer?
I remember when these were in televisions. We called them valves in England but of course vacuum tube is their proper name. I miss the orange glow of these wonderful components.
It's true that they actually are valves - thermionic valves to be exact! I'm American but I tend to use the English name because it is more precise. A light bulb could be called a vacuum tube, but it is not a thermionic valve. I have a valve radio from 1961 so I still get to see some orange glow when I want to - and it still sounds really good :-)
If so much manual labor was required for every modern transistor, you'd need friends in high places just to compute a prime number.
In the video the guy says they build 100 million new tubes a year. Now days they have billions of transistors or "tubes" inside a single piece of silicon.
And they make my guitar amp sound great
"Like midgets in a subway crowd" Very P.C.!
lol, yeah, that stood out for me too
Yeah, in the interest of political correctness I no longer say "midget". The correct term these days is "vertically retarded"
ohger1 correct would not be anything with retarded. if you want to label midgets vertically, it still would be 'impaired'
Well, I have to admit, I literally spit my coffee out reading this... LOL!!!
Absolutely fascinating video! Who knows, maybe some of the tubes shown were the 2A3's and 300B's that reach astronomical prices on audiophile markets today?
To see all those people working on the machines... Makes me appreciate their work even more - given that a lot of them was constantly exposed to heat, hazardous materials (barium etc.) or asbestos, which wasn't known for its carcinogenic properties yet. I bet OSHA would have the place shut down for good if those were the modern times.
Modern plants like JJ, Svetlana and probably some others operate at much smaller scales now, given that they vastly limited the range of tubes they offer.
Anyway, I'd love to make vacuum tubes on a lab scale, but getting my hands on the materials and equipment is near impossible...3
It's funny how here in 1940 Bell is referring to vacuum tubes as a "modern miracle", yet they'd make another film just 13 years leter, in 1953, about how vacuum tubes were obsolete, a relic of the past, with the advent of the transistor!
Twenty five years ago (from 1940) in New York Alexander Graham Bell created the telephone!
Wow...the lightning fast advances in electronic communications. Amazing!
He didn't create the telephone then, he places a transcontinental phone call from NY to CA
I started working at WECo in Allentown, PA in the mid-1970s. There was a large tube operation in Allentown prior to manufacturing transistors and I.C.s.
vintagetubeservices.com/we.htm
I love this. Thank you.
I like to imagine this guy just stood there and recited his entire speech to the techs.
This is brilliant! Thankyou so much :-)
I'm interested to know what the audience for this film was?... Scientists, Students, Public?
Perhaps it was a "short" before the beginning of the "Main Feature ", if anyone knows what that is!
Pity the Sun Set in the West for Lowell Thomas. A great broadcaster.
Such an amazing invention.
and still used in a great deal of commercial industries and safety systems. + microwaves which literally couldn't work without them.
Блин. Почему сейчас таких наглядных фильмов не делают!!! Очень наглядно показан смысл работы радиолампы. Понятно даже малышу!
I learned something new today
"They'd have to push their way through, like midgets in a subway crowd"
XD
I’ve always been amazed at manufacturing machines, jigs, presses, wire winding system to make a grid. Fascinating and I’m not smart enough to understand how engineers know how to make these machines.
We can see it in electronic, as the continuity and developement of the light bulb. Required for the first Radios and Televisions, it became the Transistor. What is fascinating, is that H.G Wells wrote War of the Worlds with Tripods in 1898 before it existed and was created in 1904. The first models of Fleming, look exactly like the Tripods of War of the Worlds. Many in ancient Arts and Science fiction predicted the future, inspired it. It is important in History. Transistor was a Mini-Tripod.
WOW!. This film bring my back memories and nostalgia. how great was AMERICA!
+vambreace how about now?
I came across a 279A tube, it’s truly a work of art. Not much info to be found unfortunately.
Look at all the good jobs there were for people back then, what are all long gone today
The number of tubes needed in a coast to coast call is staggering.
And these tubes are still being made today, virtually the same as in 1940. Google on WD300B. You will just have to take out a second mortgage to own one.
At 11:07, that figure "10 with 99 zeros" is 10 Duotrigintillion, exactly ONE *GOOGOL*!!
If you shouted a googol times louder in New York City, the city would be decimated, but all of San Francisco would hear you at a conversational volume without a telephone.
6:55 PLEASE tell me where I can find this magical subway stop. XD
SouthwesternEagle - it’s a testament to how _awfully_ lossy those lines were if it had to be amplified so ridiculously...
Imagine the tens of thousands of people across the country who contributed to the design and manufacturing of these. It’s amazing how progress stimulates need and once that need is met, progress outdates them and makes them obsolete.
I remember when I used to change those old vacuum tubes on the old entertainment radio gramophone in the '60s as a kid.
Great vid. Thanks!
The world was a better more simpler place when tubes ruled.
You do know what was going on in the world in 1940 right?
hahahahaha, yup
Gotta love that hokey orcrestra
Holy fuckin' hell that transmitter tube is fucking massive!
Very nice, if I hear it right, at 9:23 he's referring to '... a hundred million you-tubes...'. That's a real view in the future. ;-)
New tubes
I still have almist 100 WeCo tubes in my stock. The 350Bs go for $1650 apiece. No finer tubes were ever made.
I totally agree, and I would love to have a couple dozen of the Western Electric 300B's!!
@@holywells I sold out of '50s-era 300Bs years ago to the 'single-ended' freaks, and many 417A triodes to the same crowd. I still have 310A (6C6) pentodes and 311B triodes, as well as some 403Bs (6AK5) for the discerning tube RF crowd., The idiot Long Lines first line I worked for at the time told me, "Get rid of his junk," including a few retired 101A power amplifiers and Altec audio distribution amps, and oh brother, did I! Thanks for augmenting my pension, dumbbell! Sometimes, the good guys win. As far as longevity, in the '80s I pulled many a 101F out of V1 repeaters that were installed when the repeaters were...1938. 40+ years' service, and still tested as new.
in end days knowledge would increase says Daniel. It was meant to be that great inventors would discover the radio, the tube , so his word might be broadcast through out the whole earth !
I’m writing this to all of the students in Dr.Lees analog class: good luck and may we memorize this 21 min long video 🫡
Fascinating.
THEY'RE CALLED "LITTLE PEOPLE!"
I get it now. Well put.