A triode is an electronic amplifying vacuum tube (or thermionic valve in British English) consisting of three electrodes inside an evacuated glass envelope: a heated filament or cathode, a grid, and a plate (anode).
Developed from Lee De Forest's 1906 Audion, a partial vacuum tube that added a grid electrode to the thermionic diode (Fleming valve), the triode was the first practical electronic amplifier and the ancestor of other types of vacuum tubes such as the tetrode and pentode. Its invention helped make amplified radio technology and long-distance telephony possible. Triodes were widely used in consumer electronics devices such as radios and televisions until the 1970s, when transistors replaced them. Today, their main remaining use is in high-power RF amplifiers in radio transmitters and industrial RF heating devices. In recent years, there has been a resurgence in demand for low-power triodes due to renewed interest in tube-type audio equipment by audiophiles who prefer the sound of tube-based electronics.
Name The name "triode" was coined by British physicist William EcclesGinoux, Jean-Marc; Rosetto, Bruno, "The Singing Arc: The oldest memrister?" in some time around 1920, derived from the Greek τρίοδος, tríodos, from tri- (three) and hodós (road, way), originally meaning the place where three roads meet.
History Precursor devices
Before thermionic valves were invented, Philipp Lenard used the principle of grid control while conducting photoelectric experiments in 1902.
The first vacuum tube used in radio was the thermionic diode or Fleming valve, invented by John Ambrose Fleming in 1904 as a detector for radio receivers. It was an evacuated glass bulb containing two electrodes, a heated filament (cathode) and a plate (anode).
Invention Triodes came about in 1906 when American engineer Lee de Forest and Austrian physicist Robert von Lieben independently patented tubes that added a third electrode, a control grid, between the filament and plate to control current.Anton A. Huurdeman, The Worldwide History of Telecommunications, John Wiley & Sons - 2003, page 226John Bray, The Communications Miracle: The Telecommunication Pioneers from Morse to the Information Superhighway, Springe - 2013, pages 64-65 Von Lieben's partially-evacuated three-element tube, patented in March 1906, contained a trace of mercury vapor and was intended to amplify weak telephone signals. DRP 179807Tapan K. Sarkar (ed.) "History of wireless", John Wiley and Sons, 2006. , p.335Sōgo Okamura (ed), History of Electron Tubes, IOS Press, 1994 page 20 Starting in October 1906 De Forest patented a number of three-element tube designs by adding an electrode to the diode, which he called Audions, intended to be used as radio detectors. The link is to a reprint of the paper in the Scientific American Supplement, Nos. 1665 and 1666, November 30, 1907 and December 7, 1907, p.348-350 and 354-356 The one which became the design of the triode, in which the grid was located between the filament and plate, was patented January 29, 1907., Space Telegraphy, filed January 29, 1907, issued February 18, 1908 Like the von Lieben vacuum tube, De Forest's Audions were incompletely evacuated and contained some gas at low pressure. von Lieben's vacuum tube did not see much development due to his death seven years after its invention, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War.John Bray, The Communications Miracle: The Telecommunication Pioneers from Morse to the Information Superhighway, Springe - 2013, page 64
De Forest's Audion did not see much use until its ability to amplify was recognized around 1912 by several researchers, who used it to build the first successful amplifying radio receivers and electronic oscillators.. Republished as The many uses for amplification motivated its rapid development. By 1913, improved versions with higher vacuum were developed by Harold Arnold at American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which had purchased the rights to the Audion from De Forest, and Irving Langmuir at General Electric, who named his tube the "Pliotron", These were the first vacuum tube triodes. The name "triode" appeared later, when it became necessary to distinguish it from other kinds of vacuum tubes with more or fewer elements (diodes, tetrodes, pentodes, etc.). There were lengthy lawsuits between De Forest and von Lieben, and De Forest and the Marconi Company, who represented John Ambrose Fleming, the inventor of the diode.James A. Hijiya, Lee de Forest and the Fatherhood of Radio Political, and Economic Development Lehigh University Press, 1992. , pages 93-94
Wider adoption The discovery of the triode's amplifying ability in 1912 revolutionized electrical technology, creating the new field of electronics, the technology of active (amplifying) electrical devices. The triode was immediately applied to many areas of communication. During World War I, AM voice two-way radio sets were made possible in 1917 (see TM (triode)), which were simple enough that the pilot in a single-seat aircraft could use it while flying. Triode "continuous wave" radio transmitters replaced the cumbersome inefficient "damped wave" spark-gap transmitters, allowing the transmission of sound by amplitude modulation (AM). Amplifying triode radio receivers, which had the power to drive loudspeakers, replaced weak crystal radios, which had to be listened to with earphones, allowing families to listen together. This resulted in the evolution of radio from a commercial message service to the first mass communication medium, with the beginning of radio broadcasting around 1920. Triodes made transcontinental telephone service possible. Vacuum tube triode repeaters, invented at Bell Telephone after its purchase of the Audion rights, allowed telephone calls to travel beyond the unamplified limit of about 800 miles. The opening by Bell of the first transcontinental telephone line was celebrated 3 years later, on January 25, 1915. Other inventions made possible by the triode were television, public address systems, electric phonographs, and talking motion pictures.
The triode served as the technological base from which later vacuum tubes developed, such as the tetrode (Walter Schottky, 1916) and pentode (Gilles Holst and Bernardus Dominicus Hubertus Tellegen, 1926), which remedied some of the shortcomings of the triode detailed below.
The triode was very widely used in consumer electronics such as radios, televisions, and audio equipment until it was replaced in the 1960s by the transistor, invented in 1947, which brought the "vacuum tube era" introduced by the triode to a close. Today, triodes are used mostly in high-power applications for which solid-state semiconductor devices are unsuitable, such as radio transmitters and industrial heating equipment. However, more recently the triode and other vacuum tube devices have been experiencing a resurgence and comeback in high-fidelity audio and musical equipment. They also remain in use as vacuum fluorescent displays (VFDs), which come in a variety of implementations but all are essentially triode devices.
Construction
All triodes have a hot cathode electrode heated by a filament, which releases electrons, and a flat metal plate electrode (anode) to which the electrons are attracted, with a grid consisting of a screen of wires between them to control the current. These are sealed inside a glass container from which the air has been removed to a high vacuum, about 10−9 atm. Since the filament eventually burns out, the tube has a limited lifetime and is made as a replaceable unit; the electrodes are attached to terminal pins which plug into a socket. The operating lifetime of a triode is about 2000 hours for small tubes and 10,000 hours for power tubes. The 6J6 dual triode was found to have a .5% failure rate per 1000 hours at IBM in 1952.
Low power triodes Low power triodes have a concentric construction (see drawing right), with the grid and anode as circular or oval cylinders surrounding the cathode. The cathode is a narrow metal tube down the center. Inside the cathode is a filament called the "heater" consisting of a narrow strip of high-resistance tungsten wire, which heats the cathode red-hot (800 - 1000 °C). This type is called an "indirectly heated cathode". The cathode is coated with a mixture of alkaline earth oxides such as calcium and thorium oxide, which reduces its work function so it produces more electrons. The grid is constructed of a helix or screen of thin wires surrounding the cathode. The anode is a cylinder or rectangular box of sheet metal surrounding the grid. It is blackened to radiate heat and is often equipped with heat-radiating fins. The electrons travel in a radial direction, from the cathode through the grid to the anode. The elements are held in position by mica or ceramic insulators and are supported by stiff wires attached to the base, where the electrodes are brought out to connecting pins. A "getter", a small amount of shiny barium metal evaporated onto the inside of the glass, helps maintain the vacuum by absorbing gas released in the tube over time.
High-power triodes High-power triodes generally use a filament which serves as the cathode (a directly heated cathode) because the emission coating on indirectly heated cathodes is destroyed by the higher ion bombardment in power tubes. A thoriated tungsten filament is most often used, in which thorium added to the tungsten diffuses to the surface and forms a monolayer which increases electron emission. As the monolayer is removed by ion bombardment, it is continually renewed by more thorium diffusing to the surface. These generally run at higher temperatures than indirectly heated cathodes. The envelope of the tube is often made of more durable ceramic rather than glass, and all the materials have higher melting points to withstand higher heat levels produced. Tubes with anode power dissipation over several hundred watts are usually actively cooled; the anode, made of heavy copper, projects through the wall of the tube and is attached to a large external finned metal heat sink which is cooled by forced air or water.
Lighthouse tubes
A type of low-power triode for use at ultrahigh frequencies (UHF), the , has a planar construction to reduce interelectrode capacitance and lead inductance, which gives it the appearance of a "lighthouse". The disk-shaped cathode, grid and plate form planes up the center of the tube - a little like a sandwich with spaces between the layers. The cathode at the bottom is attached to the tube's pins, but the grid and plate are brought out to low-inductance terminals on the upper level of the tube: the grid to a metal ring halfway up, and the plate to a metal button at the top. This is one example of design. Smaller examples dispense with the octal pin base shown in the illustration and rely on contact rings for all connections, including heater and D.C. cathode.
As well, high-frequency performance is limited by transit time: the time required for electrons to travel from cathode to anode. Transit time effects are complicated, but one simple effect is input conductance, also known as grid loading. At extreme high frequencies, electrons arriving at the grid may become out of phase with those departing towards the anode. This imbalance of charge causes the grid to exhibit a reactance that is much less than its low-frequency "open circuit" characteristic.
Transit time effects are reduced by reduced spacings in the tube. Tubes such as the 416B (a Lighthouse design) and the 7768 (an all-ceramic miniaturised design) are specified for operation to 4 GHz. They feature greatly reduced grid-cathode spacings of the order of 0.1 mm.