IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2017 - 76

figure 2. A typical thyratron-reactor dimmer schematic. (Image from Electric
Motors in Industry, by Shoults, Rife, and Johnson, Wiley, 1942.)

heat) associated with resistance dimmers, but they still required a fairly
large rheostatic control for their operation. The development of vacuum tubes
for use in radios during the 1920s led
to the possibility of similar tubes be-

ing used to supply adjustable dc for
the control winding of a saturable core
reactor, with the tube, in turn, then being controlled by means of a very low
power "potentiometer" type of device
in its grid circuitry.

It turned out that a type of tube recently developed by Albert Hull, a scientist working at the General Electric
Company (GE) plant in Schenectady,
New York, was perfect for this type of
application. This was the thyratron tube.
Besides being a scientist by occupation,
Hull was something of a Greek scholar.
Therefore, he decided to use the Greek
language to come up with the name for
this new tube. In Greek, the suffix "tron"
means an instrument, and the prefix
"thyra" (theta-upsilon-rho-alpha) means
a door, which referred to the gating action of this three-element tube in controlling the flow of current through it.
Hull went on to name other recently
developed tubes in a similar manner.
The thyratron is a gas-filled triode, and
Hull decided to call a gas-filled diode
tube a "phanotron," where "phano" ("to
appear") was a reference to the appearance of a bluish glow in the tube when
operating. Likewise, he named a high

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