Originally Posted By: dalehileman
Originally Posted By: Faldage
Originally Posted By: dalehileman
[quote=Zed]Hi Dale,
........Or did I miss an additional definition of feuilleton?


******Good for you Zed, I wondered if anyone would tumble to my taking liberties, much as the first few illiterates did when they used "drive" to describe a semiconductor chip


You didn't listen to the Red Queen, did you? A drive is a place to store data.


***By that reasoning the transistor should have been called a tube [/quote]

But, the English electronic world did not standardize "tube" in naming vacuum tubes. I do not know how universal the use of "tube" was -- it may have only been American. While I cannot recall right now the term that the British used, however, it was more descriptive of the function of vacuum tubes than of their appearance. And, in some contexts the same British term was used to refer to a transistor.

When I studied electronics under the tutelage of the US Air Force, transistors were the very new thing. Most of the equipment we used still had vacuum tubes. Transistos were only utilized in electronic equipment where minaturization was an advantage as for example in equipment used within an air plane versus equipment that was used on the ground.

I worked in physical measurements laboratories, analyzing and evaluating the energy levels radiated by debris resulting from nuclear detonations. At the time -- late 1950s/early 1960s, there were three primary pieces of electronic equipment that we used routinely: a device that counted the radiation digitally; a device that was essentially a high voltage transformer; and a device that served as the detection chamber. Only the latter had transistors. The first two had vacuum tubes. The tubes in the counting device were quite large -- almost ten inches in height.

One of the laboratories in which I worked was in a country that did not use 60 cycle electricity, the system around which our equipment was designed. The local electrical system was also very unstable. We had a very complicated conversion pant that produced precise 60 cycle current. Nonetheless, because of the instability of our local source, we were suffering multiple transformer failures in the high voltage devices,

The problem was solved when I designed a automatic cut-off system based on the filament voltage circuit of the device. But, I used a vacuum tube rather than a transistor for there was none available yet to do what the vacuum tube I used did.

And, the British name still has not come to me -- so I will stop.