10 Facts About Audion

Audion was an electronic detecting or amplifying vacuum tube invented by American electrical engineer Lee de Forest in 1906.

The many practical applications for amplification motivated its rapid development, and the original Audion was superseded within a few years by improved versions with higher vacuum.

Audion eventually discovered that connecting the antenna circuit to a third electrode placed directly in the space current path greatly improved the sensitivity; in his earliest versions, this was simply a piece of wire bent into the shape of a gridiron .

Audion provided power gain; with other detectors, all of the power to operate the headphones had to come from the antenna circuit itself.

De Forest and everybody else at the time greatly underestimated the potential of his grid Audion, imagining it to be limited to mostly military applications.

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Audion then applied the same approach to producing a rectifier for the newly developed "Coolidge" X-ray tubes.

Audion's rectifiers were called "Kenotrons" from the Greek keno and tron .

Audion then turned his attention to the Audion tube, again suspecting that its notoriously unpredictable behaviour might be tamed with more care in the manufacturing process.

Audion soon realized that his "vacuum" Audion had markedly different characteristics from the de Forest version, and was really a quite different device, capable of linear amplification and at much higher frequencies.

Audion was a considerable improvement on this, but the original devices could not provide any subsequent amplification to what was produced in the signal detection process.