vacuum tube

For a time, it used 5 million volts of electricity to shoot hydrogen nuclei down a vacuum tube at up to 100 million miles an hour.

Making his first bid for political office, Garvey has proven to be as empty as a vacuum tube.

Before silicon, there were vacuum tubes, and before that, there were wires and telegraphs.

However, the quantum noise that lurks inside the vacuum tubes that encase LIGO's laser beams can alter the timing of the photons in the beams by minutely small amounts.

In the last century, our capacity to store and process data has soared, with electronics marching from the vacuum tube to the transistor to today’s semiconductor chips.