1906: Triode - The book of science

Triode
He said
Radio jamming
Commentary

Lee de Forest, Irving Langmuir electromagnetism

Triode

Audion
Lee de Forest took a Fleming valve
added a grid electrode between filament and plate.
He left a rarified gas in the tube,
believing it was necessary for electrical conduction,
and wired it so a small current flowing to the grid
controls a larger current flowing from the filament to the plate.
Kenotron
Irving Langmuir built a Fleming diode with a complete vacuum
and found it could rectify higher voltages.
Pliotron
Irving Langmuir built an Audion with a complete vacuum
and found it could amplify higher frequencies.

He said

De Forest said he didn’t copy Fleming.
He said he didn’t know how the Audion worked.
He said a low-pressure gas was needed,
but the gas made the Audion unpredictable.
He said his “spade detector” didn’t infringe
on Fessenden’s electrolytic detector.
He said his “sparkless” arc transmitter didn’t infringe
on Valdemar Poulsen’s arc transmitter.
He said he created his “ultra-audion” circuit
before Edwin Howard Armstrong’s regeneration circuit.
In his 1950 autobiography, de Forest said
that he was the father of radio.

Radio jamming

For the 1901 International Yacht races,
de Forest and two other companies—Marconi and
the American Wireless Telephone and Telegraph
Company—jammed each others’ transmissions
because no one at the time had effective tuning.
For the 1902 races, the International Wireless Company
set up a transmitter to deliberately jam the other two.

Lee de Forest popularized the use of the term “radio” in place of “wireless” in the United States. In the British Commonwealth, the use of “wireless” meaning “radio” persisted longer.