£375.00
This visually impressive large (size of a bottle of wine) experimental tube is perfect for anyone with a display about the history of our modern digital world. It was created by the Valve Division of EMI Electronics Ltd and dates to around 1957.
Although we now associate EMI with the music industry, during the 1950s and 60s it was also a giant and important player in the electronics industry producing many ground-breaking components, computers and in this case valves and tubes. While a telemetry encoder sounds quite technical, in essence it is the ability to convert an analogue signal into digital and as such is the foundation for much of our digital world today. Although such converts began to emerge from 1947 onwards, widespread application was very slow and they did not really enter mainstream use for another two decades.
Though unmarked, this tube is almost certainly associated with one of EMI’s defense contracts at the time to help provide encoding equipment for guided missiles. The ability to send and receive crisp data from a fast- moving missile was a major hurdle back in the 1950s, but it’s success also directly helped service the Space Race that came shortly after.
An EMI valve catalogue from 1960 lists a ‘Binary Encoding Tube’ (Type MX34) which has a high probability of being the released version of this item. My tube measures an impressive 12 inches long and 4 inches diameter. A retyped note that came with it tells that it was a 6 digit encoder for PAM signals using a clock rate of 2.88 Hz and a pulse width of 10 microseconds.
Prototype and developmental tubes are by nature rare, but as this one dates to the first decade of digital encoding it makes it that much more interesting.
1 in stock
