General Information

Serial #

N/A

Part Number

1

Total Parts

1

AKA

Braun tube

Patents

N/A

General Description

Glass tube with metal parts/ Wood stand with rubber padding/ Cast iron stand/ Non-ferrous metal parts/ Copper wire coils on cardboard tubes

Dimensions

Note: These reflect the general size for storage and are not necessarily representative of the object's true dimensions.

Length

63.0 cm

Width

13.0 cm

Height

45.6 cm

Thickness

N/A

Weight

N/A

Diameter

N/A

Volume

N/A

Lexicon

Group

Communications

Category

Television

Sub-Category

N/A

Manufacturer

AKA

Unknown

Country

Europe

State/Province

Unknown

City

Unknown

Context

Country

Europe

State/Province

Unknown

Period

circa 1910+

Canada

This Braun tube does not have any direct connection with Canada. It appears to be a piece of apparatus used in a school setting for demonstration purposes.

Function

An early cathode ray tube which appears to havebeen used in an academic setting for demonstration purposes.

Technical

This is a very early example of a cathode ray tube, the essential component in television cameras and receivers for most of the 20th century. Instead of the electro-mechanical process pursued in the 19th and early 20th centuries, television in the 1920s and 1930s developed along a fully electronic path, building on the cathode ray tube. As early as 1878, Sir William Crookes (Britain) had built a long glass vacuum tube with a cathode at one end and anode at the other and used it to study 'cathode rays', beams of a particles (later called electrons) emitted by the heated cathode. The Crookes tube was used and modified by other physicists, particularly Sir J.J. Thomson, to explore the properties of these particles. In 1897, Karl Ferdinand Braun (Germany) found a way to focus and deflect these electron beams and to observe their path. The Braun tube was essentially a modified Crookes tube that used magnetic fields to direct the beam across the face of the tube, which had been coated with a fluorescent screen that lit up when struck by electrons. The Braun tube, or cathode ray tube(CRT), was the genesis of both the oscilloscope and the television picture tube. In 1907, Boris Rosing (Russia) proposing using the Braun tube for displaying an image that had been scanned and converted to an electronic signal. Patented in Britain in 1908 and 1911, Rosing's system assumed a mechanical scanning system at the transmission end. But in 1911 A.A. Campbell-Swinton (Britain) described a fully electronic television system based on CRTs for both transmission and reception. Soon after, the perfection of the vacuum tube triode provided the first means of amplifying the weak electrical signals of early experimental scanning devices. The essential elements for television were in place. Through the 1920s and 1930s researchers in the U.S. and Europe successfully developed a fully electronic television system based on the cathode ray tube. Only at the end of the 20th century did it begin to be supplanted by advance, semi-conductor based devices like the charge-coupled device (CCD) and the liquid crystal display (LCD).

Area Notes

Unknown

Details

Markings

Black hand printed lettring on parts reads on tube '767/1'; wood stand '767/2'; coil holder '767/3'; base '767/4'; coils '767/5' and '767/6'/ Hand written lettering on one coil is illegible because the top half is missing.

Missing

Unknown

Finish

Colourless transparent glass tube with white wide end, metallic parts/ Medium brown coated wood stand with black rubber padding/ Unfinshed grey base/ Black painted metal parts/ Copper coloured wire coils, brown cardboard tubes with bown coating

Decoration

N/A