Are vacuum tubes the same as light bulbs? What purpose do they serve?
In: Technology
Vacuum tubes are a broad category of electrical device. They’re tubes with their air evacuated, and their purposes/designs vary widely.
These days, they’ve been almost completely replaced with semiconductors like transistors, but they used to be fairly common.
Old CRT monitors and TVs were just huge vacuum tubes which contained an electron beam that drew the picture onto the inside of the glass where the screen is.
One important use of vacuum tubes was as an amplifier. Similar in purpose to the transistor, these things could produce or amplify radio signals. This made them important in early signaling and radar systems.
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