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Hand-Made Vacuum Tubes
Posted by jns on 3 November 2008The title of the film, “Fabrication d’une lampe triode” (“Build a triode vacuum tube”) may sound unusually recherché or highly metaphorical, but it is meant literally. M. Claude Paillard is an amateur radio enthusiast with an interest in historic radio equipment (or, poetically in the original: “Amoureux et respectueux des vieux et vénérables composants”). As far as I can make out from the page about this film and M. Paillard — my French is getting rusty and the Google translator is useful but not nuanced — he was involved in a project to restore an old radio station and needed to build some triode vacuum tubes.
This film illustrates how he did this from scratch. It amazes me. He demonstrates so many skills and techniques that simply are not called upon much anymore and are largely being forgotten. It all makes me feel rather dated just because I know what a vacuum tube is.
But the beauty of this film, which is almost entirely nonverbal and requires no skills in French, is that watching it will fill you in on exactly what a vacuum tube is. Okay, it won’t tell you how it works or why that’s useful in electronic circuitry, but you’ll get a remarkably tangible understanding of what’s inside, and seeing its manufacture by hand, by someone actually touching all the pieces, shaping them and putting them together to make a functional whole, is a remarkable learning experience.