Invention
The first three-element device (mercury-vapor filled with a control grid) was patented on March 4 1906 by the Austrian Robert von Lieben independent from that, on October 25 1906 Lee De Forest patented his two-element Audion. The original Audion did not provide amplification. However it was not until around 1912 that other researchers, while attempting to improve the service life of the Audion, stumbled on the principle of the true vacuum tube. The name triode appeared later, when it became necessary to distinguish it from other generic kinds of vacuum tubes with more or fewer elements (e.g. diodes, tetrodes, pentodes, etc.). The Audion tubes deliberately contained some gas at low pressure. The name triode is only applied to vacuum tubes which have been evacuated of as much gas as possible.
There was a lengthy lawsuit between von Lieben and De Forest.
Read more about this topic: Triode
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