Triode

The story of the word

The road hidden in this word is Faraday's. In 1834 he and William Whewell built electrode out of ἤλεκτρον and ὁδός, a way for the current to travel, and every later tube name simply changed the number in front. Lee de Forest built the device in 1906 and called it the Audion; the tidier Greek name arrived in the 1920s once radio engineering needed a family of terms. The third electrode, the grid, is what makes amplification possible.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English

First recorded

1920s