Valves (Tubes)

An American named Lee de Forest, a competitor to Marconi, set about to develop receiver technology that did not infringe any patents to which Marconi had access. He took out a number of patents in the period between 1905 and 1907 covering a variety of developments that culminated in the form of the triode valve in which there was a third electrode called a grid. He called this an audion tube. One of the first areas in which valves were used was in the manufacture of telephone repeaters, and although the performance was poor, they gave significant improvement in long distance telephone receiving circuits.
With the discovery that triode valves could amplify signals it was soon noticed that they would also oscillate, a fact that was exploited in generating signals. Once the triode was established as an amplifier it made a tremendous difference to radio receiver performance as it allowed the incoming signals to be amplified. One way that proved very successful was introduced in 1913 and involved the use of positive feedback in the form of a regenerative detector. This gave significant improvements in the levels of gain that could be achieved, greatly increasing selectivity, enabling this type of receiver to outperform all other types of the era. With the outbreak of the First World War, there was a great impetus to develop radio receiving technology further. An American named Irving Langmuir helped introduce a new generation of totally air-evacuated "hard" valves. H. J. Round undertook some work on this and in 1916 he produced a number of valves with the grid connection taken out of the top of the envelope away from the anode connection.