On 03/28/2016 02:39 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:

Well, one of the problems is that DeForest was convinced that electron
propagation in the vacuum only took place if there was a small amount of
gas left in the tube. In fact, if you do allow a little gas in there, you
get much higher transconductance but much poorer linearity (the extreme
case being a thyratron where all of the electrons are carried by ionized
gas). Because DeForest never really got the idea of modelling the tube's
transfer function, he was never able to separate out the two mechanisms
and consequently was never able to make consistent devices.
--scott




The more I read his book the more I see he did little more than blunder
around...but the book itself is a very interesting read.