THE VALVE (AND TRANSISTOR)
TECHIE PAGE

For an introduction to valve theory the following couple of sites are recommended reading :-

"How a Vacuum Tube Works", curtosy of Svetlana.
"Valve Basics", curtosy of Harry Lythall.

What Home Entertainment Owes to Intrinsicality	OK, try and ignore the crap title. This two-part artical from Mullard contains some interesting details on the prodction of CRT's and valves at the start of the 1960's.
Power Grid Valves	A fascinating paper presented by Jack McCullough (of Eimac) in 1965. The history of these valves plus a look forward to the future (from 1965's perspecitive). Thanks to The Tube Guy for making the article available.
Materials and Shapes of Vacuum Tube Heaters	An article all about the materials and construction of valve heaters originally published in the magazine Electronic Industries magazine in December 1961
Getter Materials	An article on the selection of materials for use as getters, originally published in "Electronics" magazine in October 1950.
Microphonics	Extracts from some research undertaken by Mullard in 1962 into the effect of valve construction upon sensitivity to microphonics.
Valves at U.H.F.	An artical written in 1954 on recent developments of UHF valves and describing the Magnetron and Klystron.
Guided Grid Valves	A valve development from around 1960 aimed at high frequency operation in TV tuners.
The Nuvistor	The nuvistor was a miniature high-frequency valve introduced fairly late in the life of valve technology.
The Manufacture of Junction Transistors	A Mullard artical on the manufacture of junction transistors such as the OC44/45 and OC71 etc you find in many early transistor sets. Its amazing just how labour-intensive the process was. OK, so its not valves but it is valve era.
Secondary Emission and the Mullard EE50 Valve	A description of the EE50 secondary emission valve released circa 1939.

A couple of the above articles were converted from some scans of the original papers. The scans can be found in the "filing cabinet" on John Atwood's One Electron website. Amongst the other files stored there the following articles are also particularly relevent here, though be warned they are big files :-

If you find the Microphonics bit of use then its worth taking the time to download "trustworthy.pdf" as a fair bit of this publication is to do with undesirable mechanical effects and useful tips on what to look for in the structure of a "good" valve. I'll be extracting the bits in the not too distant future.

Finally, the following is maintained on "Harry's Home Page" website:-

Is there a techie article you think should appear here ?
Then why not let me know via the guest page.