- Title Pages
- Epigraph
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- List of Photographs
- Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The National Physical Laboratory
- 2 The creation of the NPL Mathematics Division
- 3 The origins and development of the ACE project
- 4 The Pilot ACE at the National Physical Laboratory<sup>1</sup>
- 5 Turing and the computer
- 6 The ACE and the shaping of British computing
- 7 From Turing machine to ‘electronic brain’
- 8 Computer architecture and the ACE computers
- 9 The Pilot ACE instruction format
- 10 Programming the Pilot ACE
- 11 The Pilot ACE: from concept to reality
- 12 Applications of the Pilot ACE and the DEUCE
- 13 The ACE Test Assembly, the Pilot ACE, the Big ACE, and the Bendix G15
- 14 The DEUCE—a user's view
- 15 <i>The ACE Simulator and the Cybernetic Model</i>
- 16 The Pilot Model and the Big ACE on the web
- 17 How valves work
- 18 Recollections of early vacuum tube circuits
- 19 Circuit design of the Pilot ACE and the Big ACE
- 20 Proposed electronic calculator (1945)
- 21 Notes on memory (1945)
- 22 The Turing–Wilkinson lecture series (1946–7)
- 23 The state of the art in electronic digital computing in Britain and the United States (1947)
- Index
How valves work
How valves work
- Chapter:
- (p.341) 17 How valves work
- Source:
- Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine
- Author(s):
David O. Clayden
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
This chapter presents background information on valves. A valve consists of an evacuated glass envelope containing a number of electrodes. These are connected to the outside by wires passing though special seals. The innermost electrode is the cathode, which consists of a metal tube coated with a material that emits electrons when it is heated. In the simplest form of valve, called a diode, the cathode is surrounded by a metal cylinder called the anode. If the anode is connected to a voltage that is positive relative to the cathode, the anode attracts electrons from the cathode and a current flows. Valves as amplifiers and switches, power consumption, and valve specifications are described.
Keywords: valves, cathode, anode, amplifiers, switches, power consumption
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
- Title Pages
- Epigraph
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- List of Photographs
- Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 The National Physical Laboratory
- 2 The creation of the NPL Mathematics Division
- 3 The origins and development of the ACE project
- 4 The Pilot ACE at the National Physical Laboratory<sup>1</sup>
- 5 Turing and the computer
- 6 The ACE and the shaping of British computing
- 7 From Turing machine to ‘electronic brain’
- 8 Computer architecture and the ACE computers
- 9 The Pilot ACE instruction format
- 10 Programming the Pilot ACE
- 11 The Pilot ACE: from concept to reality
- 12 Applications of the Pilot ACE and the DEUCE
- 13 The ACE Test Assembly, the Pilot ACE, the Big ACE, and the Bendix G15
- 14 The DEUCE—a user's view
- 15 <i>The ACE Simulator and the Cybernetic Model</i>
- 16 The Pilot Model and the Big ACE on the web
- 17 How valves work
- 18 Recollections of early vacuum tube circuits
- 19 Circuit design of the Pilot ACE and the Big ACE
- 20 Proposed electronic calculator (1945)
- 21 Notes on memory (1945)
- 22 The Turing–Wilkinson lecture series (1946–7)
- 23 The state of the art in electronic digital computing in Britain and the United States (1947)
- Index
