-Date

-Achievement

-Inventor/Contributor

1870

Invention of Geissler Tubes

Heinrich Geissler

1878

Invention of the Crookes Tube

Sir William Crookes

1879

Discovery of the "Edison Effect"

Thomas Edison

1895

Discovery of X-rays

Wilhelm K. Roentgen

1895

Discovery of negatively charged particles flowing through vacuum tube

Jean B. Perrin

1895-97

Experiments with vacuum tubes and particle flow

Joseph J. Thomson

1901

Electrolytic Detector

Reginald Fessenden

1904

Fleming Valve, a diode tube

John A. Fleming

1907

Audion amplifier tube, a triode tube

Lee De Forest

1912-1913

Triode tube oscillator

Lee De Forest

Edwin H. Armstrong

1916

Tetrode tube

Walter Schottky

1926

Pentode tube

Benjamin D. H. Tellegen

1923, 1928

Iconoscope and kinescope (TV tubes)

Vladimir K. Zworykin

1939

Magnetron tube

John T. Randall

Henry A. H. Boot

1939

Klystron microwave tube

Russel H. Varian

Sigurd F. Varian

1939-1940

("ABC" digital computer) John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry Construct their vacuum tube based digital computer

1943

Travelling-wave tube

Rudolph Kompfner

1947

Invention of Transistor

J. Bardeen

W. H. Brattain

1953

MIT builds the MIT-TX-0 transistorized computer

1957

Tunnel-diode

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