VACUUM TUBE
October 20, 1906 - American Institute, U.S.A.
Dr. Lee DeForest (26 Aug 1873 - 30 Jun 1961), one of the “fathers of radio,'' announced his three-element electrical vacuum tube (now known as a triode) to a meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers He had discovered that when a mesh, or grid, of wire was placed between the filament and collector “plate†in a diode tube (first made by J. Ambrose Fleming, 1904), a large voltage-amplifying effect could be produced. DeForest patented this vacuum tube on 15 Jan 1907. The ability of this tube to amplifiy weak signals was an invention as great as radio itself, because it made long-distance communication possible.
DIFFERENTIAL ANALYSER
October 20, 1927 - U.S.A.
A new electrical machine with a mechanical mind has been perfected at Massachusetts Institute of Technology / MIT by Professor Vannevar Bush which can solve problems to complex for human engineers. The Product a differential analyser allows the mathematician or engineer to feed in the equation and parts of the problem which cannot be solved by formal mathematics. The machine can take from 8 minutes to several hours to provide the answer which man alone can not solve today.