The Technology We Killed in the 1960s Is Now Worth $3.3 Billion
In 1904, a British engineer built the first vacuum tube in a London laboratory. Within decades, it became the foundation of modern electronics. Radio, television, military radar, and the first computers all ran on vacuum tubes. Then in 1947, Bell Labs demonstrated the transistor, and by the 1960s the entire industry had moved on. Factories closed permanently, and the vacuum tube was declared dead.
But it never actually disappeared. It survived in places most people would never think to look, and in 2022 a geopolitical crisis exposed just how dependent the modern world still is on a technology it supposedly abandoned sixty years ago.
This is the full story of the vacuum tube, from the invention that started it all to the billion-dollar market nobody sees.