Virginia, in which speech was first transmitted across the Atlantic to Paris and across the Pacific to Honolulu, required the use of nearly 300 of the most powerful tubes then available, each capable of handling about 25 watts, and the difficulties encountered in operating so many tubes in paralle gave added impetus to the development of high power units.
It is the object of the present paper to deal with the various steps in the development of high power tubes as carried out in the Bell System research laboratories at the Western Electric Company.
The usual type of vacuum tube consists of an evacuated glass vessel in which are enclosed three elements, the filament, the plate, and the grid. When the tube is in operation an electron current flows between the filament which is heated by an auxiliary source of power and the plat, the magnitude of this current being controlled by the grid.
The passage of the current through a thermionic tube is accompanied by the dissipation in the plate of an amount of power which is comparable to the power delivered to the output circuit and which manifests itself in the form of heat. Thise causes the temperature of the plate in the usual type of tube to rise until the rate of loss of heat by radiation is equal to the power dissipated. Some of the heat liberated by the plate is absorbed by the walls of the containing vessel which consequently rise in temperature. These factors, together with a consideration of the size of the plate that be conveniently suspended inside a glass bulb and the size of the glass bulb that can be conveniently worked, set a limit of about 1 to 2 k. w. for the power that can be dissipated in the plate of a commercial vacuum tube of this type. The plates are generally constructed of molybdenum or some other refractory metal and the containing vessel made of hard glass.
The use of quartz as the containing vessel offers certain advantages which tend to raise the power limit somewhat and this material has been used for power tube purposes in England.
It is apparent then that in the development of vacuum tubes capable of handling large amounts of power means other than radiation must be used for removing the heat dissipated at the plate, and development of tubes along these lines was undertaken by Dr. E. R. Stoekle and Dr. O. E. Buckley.
Dr. Stoekle had already worked for some years on the problem of removing the heat dissipated at the anode of a thermionic tube by making the anode a part of the outside wall of the vessel and thus making it possible to convey the heat directly away from it by means of circulating water. This was clearly the right principle but as is obvious to those who are familiar with these devises, great difficulties
