Valve amplifier thermionic valves. The simplest valve was invented by John Ambrose Fleming while working for the Marconi Company in London in 1904 and named the diode, as it had two electrodes. The diode conducted electricity in one direction only and was used as a radio detector and a rectifier. In 1906 Lee De Forest added a third electrode and invented the first electronic amplifying device, the triode, which he named the "Audion". This additional "control grid" modulates the current that flows between cathode and anode. The relationship between current flow and plate and grid voltage is often represented as a series
Triode beyond the unamplified limit of about 800 miles. The opening by Bell of the first transcontinental telephone line was celebrated 3 years later, on January 25, 1915. Other inventions made possible by the triode were television, public address systems, electric phonographs, and talking motion pictures. The triode served as the technological base from which later vacuum tubes developed, such as the tetrode (Walter Schottky, 1916) and pentode (Gilles Holst and Bernardus Dominicus Hubertus Tellegen, 1926), which remedied some of the shortcomings of the triode detailed below. The triode was very widely used in consumer electronics such as radios, televisions, and