3 ms·
Including the vacuum tube, you just need glassblowing equipment and a good vacuum pump, and some other specialized tools. That said, the first voice transmissio
by Aloha 7y ago
Including the vacuum tube, you just need glassblowing equipment and a good vacuum pump, and some other specialized tools. That said, the first voice transmissions used either alternators or high speed rotary spark gap transmitters.
Another thing is audio amplification can be done without tubes or transistors, you can use a mechanical amplifier which is literally a transducer that is mechanically coupled to a carbon microphone, and a local power source (battery) making it possible to build analog phone lines that run several hundred miles without tube type amps.
See https://www.youtube.com/user/glasslinger https://www.youtube.com/user/glasslinger
- derefr 7y agoSure, I mostly brought up vacuum tubes as an endpoint because constructing the specialized tools to make one is no longer a four-hour job. You run into a wall where, to get to the point where you can do the glassblowing, you have to first bootstrap an entirely-separate set of primitives (kiln, quench, anvil, grinding/polishing stones, etc.) that you may not have needed up until that point if you’d just been working with scrap stock. (And then the same is true of everything after that, because transistors require photolithography, and photolithography requires good lenses.) Of course, if you’re unlocking your tech-tree in a breadth-first direction, you’ll already have the glassworking primitives around due to them being common prerequisites for refining metal ore :)
- jdkee 7y agoSpeaking of vacuum tubes, this gentleman makes them by hand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzyXMEpq4qw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzyXMEpq4qw