Issue #45: General Electric and the Wild West of Early Radio

This is the discussion forum for the article, "General Electric and the Wild West of Early Radio." Please see that article at this link. The story of Irving Langmuir and William C. White is one that impacts all of us, as General Electric was for many years the prime innovator of vacuum tube technology. Langmuir was also one of the developers of the regenerative circuit that gave early radio such a boost at the time. Post your thoughts on this topic or any other, in the discussion below. 73, Dave W7DGJ

 

Here are a couple of other photos of Irving Langmuir that I didn't include in the article. As an aside, Langmuir later won the Nobel Prize in physics, and White was among the most respected innovators at GE with a huge list of patents across many areas!

 

A nice article, but it contains a dubious statement, that White used "CW".

This is most likely the usual mix-up of "CW" as a technical property of a transmitter and "Morse" as radiotelegraph channel coding.

White most likely used damped waves or "spark" unless he had
an Alexanderson alternator, a Poulsen arc converter or a very early power triode in his home station, which seems unlikely.

Irving Langmuir was a brilliant physicist, and formed the future for
large-scale vacuum technology. He had obtained his degree at the University of Göttingen in Germany, where several other leading physicists worked.

He influenced Erik Tigerstedt, (uncle of OH5NW) Finnish sound-film inventor and one of those who improved vacuum tube technology when he worked at Telefunken pre-WW1.

 

Hi, That statement was mine, and it should have stated otherwise - its now fixed. While I am not certain, I believe he modulated an Alexanderson Alternator, as he had that in use when the tubes and regenerative circuits were being developed. It certainly could have been at his home. Thanks for the catch! Dave

 

Howard Armstrong invented the regenerative receiver. Also the wide band FM receiver to replace AM to eliminate static. A true genius.

 

Hi Charles, yes, he sure was. As the article discusses, however, there were many people involved in the innovation to move to a regenerative circuit. Langmuir and Armstrong both got their applications in on the same day . . . And De Forest won the Supreme Court case, many years later, that gave him the patent. But it was Armstrong, for sure. Dave

 

Let's not forget Langmuir's contributions to the research on Tungsten Filaments which advanced technology toward high power RF tubes and later to heated cathode tubes.

The Characteristics of Tungsten Filaments as Functions of Temperature, Dr. Howard A. Jones and Dr. Irving Langmuir, General Electric Company Research Laboratories, No. 419, September 1927, Schenectady, New York.

Pheel

 

Of course that also increased his value to GE’s lighting division!

 

Dave, you asked how and why we still use vacuum tubes. I have a few examples. First would be my recently restored Henry 2K-4. Yes a FET autotune amplifier is more practical and efficient but I love the plate glow of a properly running 3-500’s. Call me an impractical romantic.


Then there are audio amplifiers. I have several McIntosh tube based audio amplifiers. The biggest ones are 300 wpc and use 8 KT-88’s per channel. I prefer the sound of tube amps over their solid state alternatives. I know it doesn’t make technical sense but I like what I like. This is what a re-tube looks like for me.


And of course with that many tubes I have to have this piece of history on hand to make sure everything is running properly.



We all owe a debt of gratitude to these radio pioneers.

 

Fantastic. I guess I too am a glow tube romantic and have an upgraded 2K-4 as well with two Hickok tube testers, a 533A and an 800.

Long live the Henry's and Hickoks.

Pheel

 

Excellent piece Dave

The problem with Ken Burns TV show is it has a 'hero' vs 'villain' slant. The book has very little of that. And history has none of it. DeForest imploded by his own failures, not from the success of others. He was a crappy business person.

DeForest was better known in his day as the inventor of 'talkie' motion pictures. His understanding of his inventions was poor and quite Keplerian--he just kept on 'doin' til it doo's...

Langmuir did key work on scattering, and also cloud seeding BTW.

Look up:LANGMUIR CLOUD SEEDING WEATHER MODIFICATION ;-)

 

Thanks Chip. I can't believe the many varied and seemingly unconnected areas that Langmuir was working on at any one time! (I wasn't aware of cloud seeding). His cousin, White, told a newspaper interviewer one time that Langmuir had an interest only where he had some curiosity and then, once the discovery was made and published, his interests would go away completely and it was up to someone else in the lab to take it and run with the idea (as White did in commercializing all those tubes, for example). That's the way his mind worked -- brilliant guy. Dave W7DGJ

 

Hi Tom,

Great pictures thanks. I don't know why, but QRZ did not notify me of your post until today. Anyway, the photos are great because the tubes in photo one just look gorgeous. And there's nothing nicer than the smell and gentle heat they impart to a radio shack in the wintertime! By the way, in an earlier life, I was an audiophile and constantly buying one piece of tube gear or another. You've got wonderful taste in equipment. My ears are the problem now . . . nothing I can do about the high frequency roll-off and the inability I have to detect minor but important changes in an amplifier circuit. Dave, W7DGJ

 

Chip, very interesting reading on the cloud seeding work that Langmuir did. Do you (as an inventor yourself) think that there's merit to this in light of the horrendous damage we've seen just this year from hurricanes? Seems to me that SOMEONE needs to be thinking about this. Dave, W7DGJ

 

My sense is that the results are nonlinear and as such any assumed initial conditions may be sufficiently off the mark to make things far worse rather than far better.

There was an incident in Suadi Arabia(?) with cloud seeing a year ago that flooded somewhere in the mideast--Dubai? Unintended.

Yup. A non linear system...

There's a fictionalized version of your comment as the premise of the 'meh' movie Twister 2...