12-11-2015, 12:25 PM
Quote:I think "tube" is probably a better term. It was used also in the USA to refer to the whole TV set. I think sometimes TV repairmen used to sometimes use the term "tube" as well.
"TV" was far more common than "tube" which was a slangy contraction of "picture tube." Of course "tube" still survives in CRT.
Up to 1920 there was De Forest with his silly "audion" and General Electric's even sillier "pliotron." "Valve" was out since that was foreign. One of the most common devices in regular use was Cunningham's Audiotron; of course the name was hopeless but the gadget itself was tubular. An American Marconi engineer Elmer Bucher wrote a popular book calling them vacuum tubes, and Western Electric's guru van der Bijl did the same for his scholarly text. That seemed to be a good compromise.
