This is Stephen Fry's Great Leapiers, the stories behind inventions.

Episode 6. The Iotatron that wasn't.

In Episode 4, we looked at the development of the vacuum tube and the birth of electronics.

Bell Labs, the research element of Bell Telephone, nicknamed Mar Bell, tasked to feed Bell's two corporate entities,

American Telephone and Telegraph and Western Electric, with technology, materials and ideas,

developed vacuum tube electronics, enabling Mar Bell to go transcontinental from coast to coast,

and then transatlantic and ultimately global.

The tube, or valve, opened up the way for radio broadcasting and all kinds of unforeseen and extraordinary uses elsewhere, too.

Meanwhile, in Episode 5, we looked at the so-called War of the Currents and Edison's ultimately unsuccessful part

in trying to suppress AC power generation and transmission.

We saw, too, how a man like oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, with his repatious ambition, crossed the line in corporate ethics, attracting the legislative

eye of government. Anti-trust, anti-monopoly laws, notwithstanding, Joseph Patterson of National Cash Register,

and his lieutenant, Thomas J. Watson, employed similar, ruthless, buccaneering tactics with their companies.

Watson, a prison sentence and fine hanging over him, left NCR to head up a conglomeration of business machine companies,

eventually concentrating his focus on the Hollerith Punchcard tabulation system.

He changed the name of the company to international business machines, IBM, and led the corporation through the First World War,

the roaring 20s, and the Great Depression, creating a monopolistic corporation, nicknamed Big Blue.

Watson fell foul of the government again, being forced to offer customers the chance to buy, rather than only lease his machines.

The science of electronics, the arrangement of components into circuits that rectify, amplify, redirect, switch on and off, and otherwise manipulate current, had by no means stood still,

since the father of the telephone Alexander Graham Bell put in a call from New York to San Francisco in 1915.

Nonetheless, the principle of the vacuum tube had not altered in its essentials.

Bell labs and others had developed many kinds of tube component, but extraordinary as they were, they could hardly be called perfect.

...