Tube Electronics

MIT IAP 2024

Welcome to the homepage for the 2024 IAP offering of 6.S917, nominally called "Tube and Early Transistor Circuits."

The syllabus for the class is here.

1973 RCA Tube Manual

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Week 1

• Lecture 1
  • Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept by Leo Marx
• Lab 1A: Electromechanical Amplifiers
• Lab 1B: Germanium FM Detector
• Lecture 2
  • Early Radio Wave Detectors (V.J. Phillips)
  • From Branly Coherer to Chua Memristor (Chap 1 from Fractional Dynamics, Anomalous Transport, and Plasma Science)
  • Electrical conductivity in granular media and Branly's Coherer: A Simple Experiment
  • "The Italian Navy Coherer Scandal Revisited" by Probir K. Bondyopadhyay
  • "The Dynammo and the Virgin" Chapter from Henry Adams' The Education of Henry Adams
  • The Future Even by Auguste Villiers de'Isle-Adam (in French Sorry, English translation somehow not out of copyright)
  • Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss
  • The Saga of the Vacuum Tube (chapters 1-2) by Gerald F.J. Tyne

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Week 2

• Lecture 3
  • Diode Applications: (Power supplies, voltage regulators & limiters)
    • Tube Power Supplies usually used a center-tapped transofmer and dual triode tube such as the Type 80
    • Alternatively later they would often use something like the 5Y3GT
  • Early triodes were relatively simple, for example the Type 26
  • Later on as things developed, better triodes came out and their data sheets had more info such as:
    • 12AU7A medium-mu double triode
    • 12AT7 high-mu double triode
    • 6J6 common-cathode twin triode
    • The 1951 Film Adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. At 32:10, Vivienne Leigh turns ona tube radio and it starts to play music after only three seconds. Then does that again at 36:53. The rest of the movie is ok, though, and a classic.
  • Triode Equation Derivation (great, great site)
  • Article About Magnetic Amplifiers (from Lecture)
• Lecture 4
  • Fischer SW-12 Diathermy Machine, built around two types of tubes
    • 866A Mercury Vapor Rectifier
    • 822 High-Power Triode
  • Chapter 1 of Designing Valve Preamps for Guitar and Bass, Second Edition by Merlin Blencowe. Really great book if you want a tube book, this is the one to buy
  • Article on Vibrator Power Supplies
• Lab 2: Tube Amplifier

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Week 3

• Lecture 5
  • "Stabilized feed-back amplifiers" by H.S. Black Electrical Engineering vol. 53, pp. 114-120, Jan. 1934
  • "Dependence of the input impedance of a three-electrode vacuum tube upon the load in the plate circuit" Scientific Papers of Bureau of Standards (1920) by John M. Miller (of Miller Capacitance Fame)
  • Type 24A Tetrode
  • 12AU6 Pentode (a standard normal voltage pentode)
  • 12AC6 Pentode (a later, low-voltage (12V) pentode designed for car usage)
  • Very Nice Writeup on Basic Concepts in Automatic Gain Control
• Lab 3: Oscillators, FlipFlops, Pentodes
• Lecture 6
  • Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong. Out of print since 1969...copy included here
  • "Mesure en valeur absolue des périodes des oscillations électriques de haute fréquence" by Henri Abraham, Eugène Bloch 1919 J. Phys. Theor. Appl.
  • "100 years of multivibrator-history, circuits, and mathematical analysis" Wolfgan Mathis 2019
  • Good paper on oscillator theory (also cites a lot of papers so good jumping off point)
  • Cool paper linking some interesting concepts of oscillation to biology and engineering. Another good paper with lots of juicy references in it for further reading.
  • Some random guy named Claude's grad thesis
  • Somebody rebuilt the first flip-flop (Jordan-Eccles Circuit) using period-accurate tubes
  • 1940's Western Electric Newsreel "Vacuum Tube Electronics at Work"

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Week 4

• Lecture 7
  • Technical Note by Bob Widlar (famous EE) on Transistor Design
  • Note from Motorola on possible future with transistor supplanting tubes
  • Raytheon Transistor Applications
  • Great early book on "Transistor Circuits" by Turner
  • Really fascinating documentary on Japan's electronics industry buildup...which replaced a huge portion of the US share. Japan's share has in turn largely been replaced by China/Taiwan since this documentary was written. Also super weird, but the background music starting at 0:34 sounds like "Orinoco Flow" by Enya right? I'm not crazy about that?
  • "The Long Corridor", 1955 Documentary by Zenith on their Solid State Research
  • 1978 Documentary on the Closing of the last major Zenith Assembly plant in the US. Note they were still largely assembling by hand up until this point (the last manufacturer to be doing so at any significant scale). The focus on this piece is the socio-economic angle of larger trends in US labor at the time.
  • Western Electric Site. Last state-side maker of vacuum tubes (300-B, about $700 a piece)
  • Reflection article on ENIAC
• Lab 4: Solid State Triodes