History

How electricity became electronics

Modern electronics did not appear all at once. It grew from centuries of experiments with electricity and magnetism, followed by practical inventions such as batteries, telegraphs, motors, generators, telephones, radio, vacuum tubes, transistors, and integrated circuits.

This section will follow that story in roughly chronological order while connecting the history to the components and circuits used elsewhere at LearnTronics.

A developing timeline

• Early electrical experiments — static electricity, charge, and the first attempts to understand electrical effects.
• Batteries and continuous current — making electricity available for sustained experiments and useful work.
• Electricity and magnetism — the discoveries that led to electromagnets, motors, generators, and transformers.
• Telegraph and telephone — electricity becomes a communications technology.
• Radio and vacuum tubes — amplification, oscillation, broadcasting, and the beginning of electronic circuitry.
• Test instruments — meters, cathode-ray tubes, and the development of the oscilloscope.
• The transistor — solid-state amplification and switching replace many vacuum-tube applications.
• Integrated circuits — many electronic devices are placed together on one piece of semiconductor material.
• Digital electronics and microprocessors — logic, memory, computers, and programmable electronics.
• Modern electronics — increasingly small, fast, inexpensive, and highly integrated systems.