Radio Age - 1944, January - 36 Pages, 3.3 MB ... - VacuumTubeEra

in
Tubes Key to Progress
ULTRA- H/GH FREQUENCY. MICROWAVE FIELDS ARE LIKENED BY
THOMPSON TO UNDEVELOPED LANDS OF WEST 80 YEARS AGO
By B. J. Thompson
Associate Research Director
RCA Laboratories,
Princeton, N. J.
ONE
hears a great deal about
electronics these days. It is
promised that electronics will do
almost everything- to make life
easier and more enjoyable after the
war. The scientists and engineers
who have been engaged in vacuumtube
research and development find
themselves a little bewildered and
perhaps a little resentful of all the
talk about electronics for two reasons.
First, they have called their
own field of specialization "electronics":
the name of their profession
is being stolen before their
eyes. Second, they feel that electronics
its present broad
I
meaning)
is not new, and they wonder
at the sudden shouting and excitement.
Those who have time these busy
days to philosophize briefly over the
matter may readily reconcile themselves
to the situation, however.
The theft of the name of their profession
is a tribute to the importance
of the work which these men
and their predecessors have done.
And the sudden excitement may be
justified by the remarkable wartime
accomplishments of electronics and
the reasonable expectations for
peacetime contributions to come.
Normally, it is not for the scientist
to blow his own horn. But the
men who have been devising new
kinds of vacuum tubes have heard
so often that "the tube is the heart
of radio" and, more recently, that
"the tube is the heart of electronics"
that they may be forgiven for
believing it. The engineers and
scientists who create new radio
transmitters and receivers, television
equipment of all sorts, and the
electronic devices used in war and
in industry seem almost invariably
to start their work by coming to the
vacuum-tube engineers and saying
"we need a new tube to meet our
requirements; without it we cannot
do our job." The tube engineer is
convinced that his work is either
the keystone of electronics progress
or the chief obstacle to progress,
depending on its success or failure.
In any event, he knows that he personally
is one of the principal bottlenecks
in the war effort. That is
why he looks even a little more haggard
than his fellow technical
workers. Nothing can be said publicly
of his wartime accomplishments
to cheer him up. but it might
not be inappropriate to look at some
of his past work.
RCA Laboratories is one of a
number of important American laboratories
in which the full technical
eflfort of the staff is devoted to developing
new military applications
of radio and electronics—developments
which have contributed and
will contribute to shortening the
war and to assuring victory to the
United Nations. The engineers and
physicists of RCA Laboratories
who are engaged in developing new
vacuum tubes were fortunate in
being able to turn as a team from
their peace-time pursuits to an allout
war effort with little change in
the nature of their work.
In the davs before the war, the
IN RC.'V LABORATORIES, DR. D. 0. NORTH (LEFT) COMPUTES THE PERFORMANCE TO
BE EXPECTED OF A NEW TUBE, ONE OF THE E.VRLY STEPS IN A RESEARCH PROJECT;
B. KULLEY (CENTER), USING JEWELER'S LATHE AND MAGNIFYING SPECTACLES,
MAKES A SMALL PRECISION PART, AND DK. R. TRUELL (RIGHT) OPERATES A HYDRO-
GEN-FILLED, QUICK-HEATING BRAZING U.MT.
[8 RADIO AGE]