Ping!
I am in school for electrical Engineering right now, and for the life of me, I am brain dead on what he advanced!
Magnetism?
The Triode?
Nikola Tesla he is not! Now there was a genius! He invented tomorrow.
From what I can find on Fleming, he didn’t reject evolution altogether, but rejected it for man over the past 6000 years. He wasn’t a YEC’ie either.
Obviously he wasn’t a real scientist.
Without acceptance of evolution theory how could he accomplish anything in the electronic field?
Sir Ambrose Fleming: Father of Modern ElectronicsModern (cough cough) Electronics?
Did somebody just inherit a 1960's round picture tube RCA set from thier grandparents?
He decided to place a second element, a small metal plate inside the bulb at a short distance from the filament. This element was furnished with its own electrical terminal through the glass bulb.
[At that time, nobody could equal Edison in the skill of creating vacuums inside of glass bulbs and bringing wires through the glass.]
Edison noticed that he could make a current flow from the new "electrode" to the filament, through a vacuum mind you, but not in the other direction.
Ironically, because Edison based his entire power system on DC, no actual use of this one-way-only property occurred to him. Just out of habit, he patented a circuit using this device, but it turned out that a simple resistor would have functioned just as well. (The patent examiner evidently didn't know any better.)
Now, some physicists expressed interest in the device, because this was the first demonstration that electrical current could flow through a vacuum. So Edison sent some out, and others built their own upon hearing a description.
After the physicists had done all the experiments they could think of, the initial interest in the Edison device waned.
Then, in a German lab in 1887, Heinrich Hertz demonstrated the reality of the electromagnetic wave theory first forumlated by Clerk Maxwell in 1864. The race was on to harness these waves for communication. Many experimenters took to the field (a little treble entendre there ≤B^) and Tesla, Marconi, and others began to put together wireless systems.
The story of Marconi's pathbreaking commercialization of the art is well known.
One problem nagging at the early experimenters was the terrible insensitivity of the first receiving devices, requiring unbelievably large, elaborate, and above all, powerful transmitters to get any significant range, e.g., across the Atlantic. So the search was on for a better, meaning more sensitive, receiver.
The year was now 1904. The Englishman John A. Fleming had been pondering the receiver problem; he knew that the received signal came out of the antenna as a high frequency AC wave, and that the best known detectors that could deal with this wave and create a signal that humans could sense, was the "coherer" of the Frenchman Edouard Branly, but it was still the cause of the requirement for such brute power on the transmitting end. Fleming speculated that if he could just turn the AC wave into a fluctuating DC potential, "rectifying" it, that he might then be able to find a transducer that was much more sensitive; for instance, a telephone receiver (headphone) might be such a device.
And this is where the one-way-current-passing property of the Edison device came into play. It possessed precisely this rectifying property that Fleming was looking for.
He drew the dusty Edison Effect device from its drawer, figured out how to integrate it into the receiver circuit he was working on, and got amazing results. Of course, many practical improvements were soon made to the original crude laboratory device, and it helped to transform radio communications.
Who actually invented it? Historians give credit to Fleming, because he uniquely had the inspiration to see the practical application of this object, which he had inherited from another (rather more famous) inventor. So it was called then, and still in many places, "The Fleming Valve," or more technically the thermionic vacuum diode.
Just a couple of years later, a young Stanford PhD working on his own in California placed yet a third element between the filament and the plate; this he shaped into a "grid," and brought its connection out through the bulb also. Now, he found, he could control the plate-filament current with small voltages applied to the grid. Thus Lee DeForest invented the "Audion," the first thermionic electron device capable of amplification. With further improvements by Langmuir and others, it came to be known as the "vacuum triode," which enabled modern electronic communications, and even electronic computing, to come into existence.
To my mind, that year, 1907, saw the actual birth of electronics.
....aznd now TRYH to think what Sir John Ambrose Fleming would think about it with all the knowledge we’ve garnered in the 60+ years after he died. Heck, he didn’t even know about DNA.
For more on Fleming, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrose_Fleming
His signal achievement appears to be in electronics: in introducing the world to thermionic emission and vacuum tubes.
For more on Fleming, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrose_Fleming
His signal achievement appears to be in electronics: in introducing the world to thermionic emission and vacuum tubes.