The filament leads are of copper red one eighth of an inch in diameter and are sealed through 1″ copper disc seals. The grid is of molybdenum and is wound around three molybdenum supports.
The handling of the parts of this tube during manufacture presents a task of no mean magnitude and numerous fixtures have been devised to assist in the glass working. It has been found necessary for instance to suspend the anode in gimbals during the making of the tube seal owing to its great weight, and special devices have been made to hold the filament grid assembly in place while it is being sealed in, otherwise the strains produced by its weight cause cracking of the seal.
The significance of this development in the radio art cannot be overestimated. It makes available tubes in units so large that only a very few would be necessary to operate even the largest radio stations now extant, with all the attendant flexibility of operation which accompanies the sue of the vacuum tube.
From the standpoint of wireless telephony the development of these high power tubes gives us the possibility of using very much greater amounts of power than have ever been readily available before. The filaments in these tubes have been made so large that the electron emission from them will easily take care of the high peak currents accompanying the transmission of modulated power.
The 100 k. w. tube by no means represents the largest tube made possible by the present development. There is no doubt that if the demand should occur for tubes capable of handling much larger amounts of power they could be constructed along these same lines.
