Audio power amplifier inside the chassis of the main product. The audio amplifier was invented around 1912 by Lee De Forest, made possible by his invention of the first practical amplifying electrical component, the triode vacuum tube (or "valve" in British English) in 1907. The triode was a three terminal device with a control grid that can modulate the flow of electrons from the filament to the plate. The triode vacuum amplifier was used to make the first AM radio. Early audio power amplifiers were based on vacuum tubes and some of these achieved notably high audio quality (e.g., the Williamson amplifier of
Electrical ballast Early tube-based color TV sets used a ballast triode, such as the PD500, as a parallel shunt stabilizer for the CRT acceleration voltage, to keep the CRT's deflection factor constant. Electrical ballast An electrical ballast is a device placed in line with the load to limit the amount of current in an electrical circuit. It may be a fixed or variable resistor. A familiar and widely used example is the inductive ballast used in fluorescent lamps to limit the current through the tube, which would otherwise rise to a destructive level due to the negative differential resistance of the tube's