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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (11653)	7/28/1998 2:14:00 PM
From: Michael Sphar	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Tubes, ancient history, and other memories My father was a tube design engineer. One of his designs, used in the WW2 B17 UHF comm radio, was a transmitter or receiver amplifier tube. A major portion of the vacuum tube industry was located in South San Francisco. The techie types of those days who later started the down-the-peninsula migration, would board the Southern Pacific commuter trains in places like Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Atherton, and commute to South City by train. (Bayshore Freeway, you probably know it as Hwy 101 hadn't been created yet.) I remember as a young child, riding to those train stations to drop him off and pick him up. This industrial base phased out in the 50s as the companies started moving southwards. Companies like Farnsworth, Heintz & Kaufmann, Varian and Litton Industries were from that era. I remember him talking about those guys on a first name basis. Charlie Litton, the Varian brothers, Dave Packard come to mind. My dad was a ham operator all his life, and he built a, then huge, one kilowatt transmitter from scratch fabricating the cabinet from scrap metal and salvaging parts that failed QC inspections. It was an enormous cabinet, about 6 foot tall and housed some major tubes that were war reject products from factory where he worked. These same tubes served night after night up until his death in 1967, occasionally interfering with reception on our black and white TV, while he pounded code away on the 20 meter band. The transmitter still sits rusting away in a garage in Menlo Park. Now speaking of ancient history, my dad's father who died when my father was but 6 years old was one of the earliest members of the IEEE. I remember him showing me some ancient records that indicated a discrepancy in those earliest member numbers. This is pre-WW1 stuff, in the waning days of telegraph.