The Unreliable Universal Component

Perhaps the most universally applied components are in the field of electronics, and especially in the field of electron tubes. The electron tube may be standardized in about the same degree as an automobile tire or butter, but it is often expected to serve a multitude of diverse usages, so that it is expected to be a universal component. The fact that its usages are diverse is not readily visible, since the diversity does not appear in mechanical form. It is quite apparent, however, to those dealing with tube applications that the electrical diversity is great indeed. The requirements for use as a blocking oscillator, for example, have no close relationship to the requirements for use as a DC amplifier. No common standards exist between these two usages, and, as a matter of fact, if we attempted to write standards we would be unable to write a single set, since the parameters to be used in describing one usage would have no relationship to the parameters for the other. We would need two sets of standards, just as we would need two distinct and separate sets for butter as a food and butter as a lubricant. Tubes are often required to meet not just two sets of standards, but sometimes as many as a dozen sets of unrelated standards. The significance of this situation is analyzed and discussed in some detail.