History of Electronics.
History of Electronics
Military equipment, toys, communication, home electronics, computing, cars, satellites and others. This is only a partial list of products, which contain electronics. Actually electronics won our world. We wake up with the ring of electronic clock, drink coffee from a electronic coffee machine, work with computers, learn by using video conferences, listen to the music from a sound system and go to sleep while adjusting our electronic watch for tomorrow morning. It is hard even to think that only a hundred years ago our world seemed different at all from this point of view. But how did the electronics revolution begin? Which research and discovery was the basis for this modification? Why was it so fast, relatively to other developments in history? I will try to answer these questions in this observation.
Theoretical and experimental studies of electricity started in the 18th and 19th centuries enabled the development of the first electrical machines and the wide use of electricity. During that time the first theory was founded and the rules of electricity was formulated. The event of identification of the electron in second half of 19th century by the English physicist J.J. Thompson and the measurement of its electric charge in 1909 by the American physicist A. Millikan were the point of turning the electronics evolution separately from that of electricity. Another coarse of interest to electronics was the observation of the American inventor Thomas A. Edison. He noticed that the current of electrons would flow from one electrode to another, if the second one was with relatively positive charge. This discovery led to the development of electron tubes. Electron tubes became very useful for manufactory at that time. X-ray tube, the radio signal detectors and transmitters, and the first power systems were based on electron tubes. The development of the vacuum tube and later the three-electrode tube by adding the grid between the anode and the cathode (Negative and positive electrodes in the tube) improved the characteristics of the tube by far and made it more useful for different electronic applications.
The first half of the 20th century was the era of the vacuum tubes in electronics. Using the tube permitted the development of radio, long-distance telephony, television and even the first computers. The most known one was the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) completed in 1946.
The first and the second World Wars gave...