5 ms·

Children of the Geissler Tube (2023)

47 points by paulkrush 1y ago

eternityforest 1y ago
How would the novelty versions have been powered? Would they have been running on batteries using a mechanical buzzer type relay to drive an induction coil?
paulkrush 1y ago
Core claim: “Geissler tubes as a computer ancestor” I was really surprised at this and had to verify it “: Fair: Geissler’s 1857 gas-discharge tubes popularized controlled glow discharges and directly led to Crookes tubes, cathode rays, and gas-discharge lighting. Earlier glow experiments existed (Hauksbee, Faraday), but Geissler standardized the form that kicked off the tech tree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geissler_tube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geissler_tube” It is odd that Heinrich Geissler does not have a bigger place in history. I guess he was just a “toy” builder… Also interesting: Most keyword searches treat ß ≈ ss, so “Geißler” and “Geissler” have the same search results.
- cubefox 1y ago
  His actual name is in fact written "Geißler", not "Geissler".
  - foxglacier 1y ago
    Names have languages too, just like other words. Eszett isn't an English letter so we transliterate and it's still the way his actual name is written in English. We do this all the time, for example Wang or Wong instead of 王.
    - cubefox 1y ago
      If that were the case here, the correct translation for "Sein Name war nicht Geissler sondern Geißler" would be "His name was Geissler rather than Geissler." Which is clearly wrong, as the first makes sense but the second doesn't. (I agree though that the noun "Geissler tube" is it's own thing and indeed language specific.)
      - aidenn0 1y ago
        Is your argument that "If a literal translation of a sentence doesn't make sense, then the translation for each word must be wrong?" If so, that's trivial to find counterexamples for: It's not hard to find Japanese sentences that would literally translate to English as roughly: "O I think it's so cute that you say 'I' (僕) instead of 'I' (私)." Claiming therefore that translating 僕 and 私 each to the word "I" is always wrong is nonsensical. If you are making some weaker claim that excludes my example, please fill me in because I couldn't think of one.
Animats 1y ago
Interesting. But not really the history of electronic tubes. Geissler tubes are gas-discharge tubes. There's a whole family of those - neon lamps, gas-discharge rectifiers, thyatrons, ignitrons, krytrons, etc. Those were the first electronic devices with significant power-handling capacity. All have some gas inside that can be ionized. They usually don't have a heated filament, and don't work by thermionic emission. They're definitely the ancestors of fluorescent light bulbs. As power devices, they were used in specialty devices such as lamp dimmers (rarely, but I've seen one), motor controllers (rarely, but done during WWII), and, of all things, centrally controlled school clocks (IBM/Simplex). Niche. Then there were vacuum tubes. Their genealogy starts with the Edison Effect (put an extra element in a vacuum light bulb, and there's some current flow), and go on to Fleming's diode and then De Forest's triode. At last, gain! These were all low-power devices, but they could amplify small signals. They made radio, TV, and computers go before semiconductors. Gas-discharge tubes and vacuum tubes aren't that closely related. They work on different physical principles. During the tube era, they often came in the same tube packages, so people think they're similar.
- paulkrush 1y ago
  OK, I get it now: "The article conflates two parallel branches with shared glass/vacuum know-how when it starts talking about diodes."
  - adrian_b 1y ago
    The article is right that the vacuum tubes, whose first application were the Edison lighting bulbs, then the Fleming diodes, which evolved directly from the incandescent lighting bulbs, are descendants of the Geissler tubes. During the evolution of the Geissler tubes, the techniques of making efficient vacuum pumps and of sealing well the glass tubes were developed. Only when the pumps and the glass tubes had become good enough, it became possible to experiment with the first vacuum tubes, by omitting the filling of the tubes with low-pressure gas. Without the decades of playing with Geissler tubes there would have never been any incentive to develop the technologies without which making vacuum tubes would have been impossible. Therefore there is no doubt that what the article says is correct, i.e. that the vacuum tubes are descendants of the low-pressure gas tubes, which were initially known as Geissler tubes. So the vacuum tubes are a lateral branch of the development of the low-pressure gas tubes. After splitting, both branches have continued to evolve in parallel until they both have been replaced in most of their applications by semiconductor devices. While vacuum tubes were better known by the general public, because they were present in things like radio receivers or TV sets, which many people owned, in industrial applications gas tubes have always had a similar importance to vacuum tubes. Even the first electronic counter, which can be considered the ancestor of all electronic computers, has been made with gas tubes, not with vacuum tubes. (The first electronic counters were made to count the pulses from detectors of nuclear or cosmic radiation, for which the existing electro-mechanical counters were too slow. The circuits developed for this application were the basis for the development during WWII of the digital electronic circuits used in the first electronic computers.)
userbinator 1y ago
Apparently these were somewhat widely used as decorative lighting in events like circuses in the late 19th and early 20th century, and would've been viewed with the same futuristic attitude as blue LEDs were in the early 21st.

47 points by paulkrush 1y ago

How would the novelty versions have been powered? Would they have been running on batteries using a mechanical buzzer type relay to drive an induction coil?

paulkrush 1y ago

Core claim: “Geissler tubes as a computer ancestor” I was really surprised at this and had to verify it “: Fair: Geissler’s 1857 gas-discharge tubes popularized controlled glow discharges and directly led to Crookes tubes, cathode rays, and gas-discharge lighting. Earlier glow experiments existed (Hauksbee, Faraday), but Geissler standardized the form that kicked off the tech tree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geissler_tube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geissler_tube” It is odd that Heinrich Geissler does not have a bigger place in history. I guess he was just a “toy” builder… Also interesting: Most keyword searches treat ß ≈ ss, so “Geißler” and “Geissler” have the same search results.

cubefox 1y ago
His actual name is in fact written "Geißler", not "Geissler".
- foxglacier 1y ago
  Names have languages too, just like other words. Eszett isn't an English letter so we transliterate and it's still the way his actual name is written in English. We do this all the time, for example Wang or Wong instead of 王.
  - cubefox 1y ago
    If that were the case here, the correct translation for "Sein Name war nicht Geissler sondern Geißler" would be "His name was Geissler rather than Geissler." Which is clearly wrong, as the first makes sense but the second doesn't. (I agree though that the noun "Geissler tube" is it's own thing and indeed language specific.)
    - aidenn0 1y ago
      Is your argument that "If a literal translation of a sentence doesn't make sense, then the translation for each word must be wrong?" If so, that's trivial to find counterexamples for: It's not hard to find Japanese sentences that would literally translate to English as roughly: "O I think it's so cute that you say 'I' (僕) instead of 'I' (私)." Claiming therefore that translating 僕 and 私 each to the word "I" is always wrong is nonsensical. If you are making some weaker claim that excludes my example, please fill me in because I couldn't think of one.

Animats 1y ago

Interesting. But not really the history of electronic tubes. Geissler tubes are gas-discharge tubes. There's a whole family of those - neon lamps, gas-discharge rectifiers, thyatrons, ignitrons, krytrons, etc. Those were the first electronic devices with significant power-handling capacity. All have some gas inside that can be ionized. They usually don't have a heated filament, and don't work by thermionic emission. They're definitely the ancestors of fluorescent light bulbs. As power devices, they were used in specialty devices such as lamp dimmers (rarely, but I've seen one), motor controllers (rarely, but done during WWII), and, of all things, centrally controlled school clocks (IBM/Simplex). Niche. Then there were vacuum tubes. Their genealogy starts with the Edison Effect (put an extra element in a vacuum light bulb, and there's some current flow), and go on to Fleming's diode and then De Forest's triode. At last, gain! These were all low-power devices, but they could amplify small signals. They made radio, TV, and computers go before semiconductors. Gas-discharge tubes and vacuum tubes aren't that closely related. They work on different physical principles. During the tube era, they often came in the same tube packages, so people think they're similar.

paulkrush 1y ago
OK, I get it now: "The article conflates two parallel branches with shared glass/vacuum know-how when it starts talking about diodes."
- adrian_b 1y ago
  The article is right that the vacuum tubes, whose first application were the Edison lighting bulbs, then the Fleming diodes, which evolved directly from the incandescent lighting bulbs, are descendants of the Geissler tubes. During the evolution of the Geissler tubes, the techniques of making efficient vacuum pumps and of sealing well the glass tubes were developed. Only when the pumps and the glass tubes had become good enough, it became possible to experiment with the first vacuum tubes, by omitting the filling of the tubes with low-pressure gas. Without the decades of playing with Geissler tubes there would have never been any incentive to develop the technologies without which making vacuum tubes would have been impossible. Therefore there is no doubt that what the article says is correct, i.e. that the vacuum tubes are descendants of the low-pressure gas tubes, which were initially known as Geissler tubes. So the vacuum tubes are a lateral branch of the development of the low-pressure gas tubes. After splitting, both branches have continued to evolve in parallel until they both have been replaced in most of their applications by semiconductor devices. While vacuum tubes were better known by the general public, because they were present in things like radio receivers or TV sets, which many people owned, in industrial applications gas tubes have always had a similar importance to vacuum tubes. Even the first electronic counter, which can be considered the ancestor of all electronic computers, has been made with gas tubes, not with vacuum tubes. (The first electronic counters were made to count the pulses from detectors of nuclear or cosmic radiation, for which the existing electro-mechanical counters were too slow. The circuits developed for this application were the basis for the development during WWII of the digital electronic circuits used in the first electronic computers.)

userbinator 1y ago

Apparently these were somewhat widely used as decorative lighting in events like circuses in the late 19th and early 20th century, and would've been viewed with the same futuristic attitude as blue LEDs were in the early 21st.