The Humble Beginnings of Electronics
Digital electronics has been one of the most important technological revolutions of mankind. Its preamble, can be summarized as: Beginnings of electronics in general terms.
Electronics and electricity are born with the work of several prominent physicists such as Coulomb, Ampere, Gauss, Faraday, Henry, and Maxwell. Such works were collected in 1865 in the formal framework of the theory of electromagnetism, by Maxwell (deduced from the equations that bear his name). That theory, however, had to wait until 1888 for his demonstration. The demonstration referred to the Hertz realize with generation in the laboratory from electromagnetic waves. Later, in 1896, Marconi achieved transmission and detection of these waves (called terrestrial) and opened the way for future developments as important as television and telecommunications.
More specifically, the rise of electronics, as a branch of science was in 1895, the year in which Lorentz postulated the existence of charged particles called electrons, which was demonstrated experimentally by Thompson two years later. Braun, in 1897 published his invention of the first electronic tube, rudimentary ancestor of cathode ray tubes that are part of the TV valve transistor.
Electronics did not assume the connotations that characterize modern technology until the early twentieth century with the invention of the first components and in particular in 1904, with the creation of the vacuum tube or diode, by the British physicist John Ambrose Fleming. The diode, then, consisted essentially of two metal electrodes contained in a vacuum tube, one of which (the cathode) is heated by a filament.
Because of this warming, the cathode emits electrons (thermo-ionic effect) that are accelerated toward the other electrode (the anode) when the latter is maintained positive with respect to the cathode. Inserted in a circuit, the diode shows the important property of only conducting current when voltage is applied to it a certain direction. In this way, it allows the conduction of an alternating current.
The current that is obtained by connecting an appliance to one of the jacks on the walls of the houses (mains). From these early beginnings to today’s iPods and cell phones, electronics has taken a real leap.