Hank wrote:

DeForest's misunderstanding of the principles of the Edison effect and
the Fleming valve seems to have been pretty basic. His first attempts
to control current flow were "grids" mounted on the outside of the glass
envelope. And he always seemed to think that what he was controlling
was ionized gas conduction, not electrons emitted from a cathode
element.

Likely some of what he was controlling _was_ ionized gas conduction.
This isn't a good thing from the standpoint of getting low distortion
but if you want a high mu and don't care about reliability or repeatability
I can see it.

There were tons of texts written around 1920 that had some pretty
strange theories about what tubes did inside. As I recall, the first
really good text on radio circuits I encountered was Mary Texanna
Loomis's text from the late 20's. I learned EE basics from her text,
Ghirardi's "Radio Physics Course" from 1932, and Terman's 1937 "Radio
Engineering." One text that baffled me was Zworykin/Morton
"Television," which I got as a present at the end of WWII. No
wonder--the physics were much too advanced for me to understand.
Looking back some years later, I think the best text on vacuum tube
physics was Spangenberg's "Vacuum Tubes." It wasn't published until the
dawn of the transistor era, so never got the play that Terman and some
of the others did.

What about Seely? That's what we used in my freshman EE class and it seemed
pretty good.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."