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
John Snell (electrical engineer) John Snell (electrical engineer) Sir John Francis Cleverton Snell, GBE (15 December 1859 – 6 July 1938) was a British electrical engineer and administrator. He was born in Saltash, Cornwall, the only son of Commander John Skinner Snell, RN and his wife Harriet Cleverton and educated at Plymouth Grammar School, Finsbury Technical College and King's College, London. After working for four years from 1885 with Messrs. Woodhouse and Rawson he was appointed in 1889 a resident engineer at Messrs. Crompton and Co., where he worked on electrical supply projects in London and Stockholm. From 1892 he worked as assistant to