Bell Labs – The Transistor
An evening pause: This 9-minute documentary, made in 1952 by Bell Labs, provides a short and clear history of the transistor as well as its predecessor, the vacuum tube. It also tries to imagine the future that such a new invention might bring. As the youtube page notes,
While The Transistor’s vision of the future seems somewhat quaint in retrospect, it captures a moment in time before the transistor became ubiquitous; a time when Bell Labs wanted the world to know that something important had occurred, something that was about to bring tremendous change to everyone’s daily lives.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
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I still like my tube radios.
Valves still have their place in music production and listening; they add a rich harmonic structure that gives a fuller body to sound.
Now, that is dating me!
Good video. Yes, vacuum tubes are still used today for radio amplifiers, but those days are coming close to an end with the LDMOS amplifiers. The only place I can buy tubes are either from Russia or with questionable quality from China. No more New Old Stock (NOS) U.S. tubes can be found anymore.
Yes, there is a difference in sound quality between tubes and transistors. In school I was told about this difference and one of my teachers demonstrated this, but I could not hear the difference. All I thought of was that area of that knee voltage of the push-pull amplifier and I could not hear it. Later in my career, a fellow co-worker who is an audiophile demonstrated the difference again, but he used various types of music to show the ‘warmth’ of the sound vs. a transistor type radio. I did finally hear the difference.
I got started in tube radios because I needed them for the cars I was rebuilding.
I got lucky and found an older gentleman who showed me how to get them working.
Since them i have been collecting home models that could be repaired. They make nice working furniture.