The early history of electronics VI. Discovery of the electron

The preceding five articles in this series described how advances in electromagnetic theory, one of the two parent sciences of today's electronics technology, led to its first successes at the turn of the century: "wireless" communications. But radiotelegraphy may well have remained an expensive and uncertain medium, restricted to emergency use in situations in which costs did not matter, if discoveries in the other parent science-particle physics-had not most conveniently come along at about the same time and opened up undreamed-of possibilities in the generation of high-frequency waves and the amplification of weak signals. The invention of the first thermionic devices, which led to the massive development of electronic telecommunications in the 20th century, was predicated on a discovery made in a British university laboratory as the 19th century drew to its close.