I think the vacuum tube has a bit of a different chain of history, with thermionic emission being discovered several times going back to the 1850s and the first

I think the vacuum tube has a bit of a different chain of history, with thermionic emission being discovered several times going back to the 1850s and the first real attempt at manipulating it by Edison in 1880 and patented it in 1883, but the first commercial diodes didn't appear until 1904 well after Johnson's experiments