{"id":5655,"date":"2021-08-28T10:01:28","date_gmt":"2021-08-28T17:01:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=5655"},"modified":"2021-08-31T08:25:35","modified_gmt":"2021-08-31T15:25:35","slug":"the-difficult-world-of-relays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattfife.com\/?p=5655","title":{"rendered":"The Difficult World of Relays"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Before transistors were created in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain and vacuum tubes in 1908, electric circuit switching between on and off was a purely physical, mechanical process done via relays (invented in 1809). Some people have made whole computers from relays<\/a>. But as ElectroBOOM comedically describes, there are a lot of difficult problems that relays had to be overcome which leads to an amazing number of trade-offs of speed, heat, longevity, safety, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While we consider flipping circuits on\/off in the GHz range (1,000,000,000 times per second) common on today’s modern transistor-based circuits, many of the same problems he describes here exist in some form in transistors (switching time, etc). Instead of the more mechanical issues\/solutions relays use, transistors solve related problems with the types of substraits, power properties, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At any rate, it’s a great trip back in time and a reminder that engineers know that while a concept looks very simple on paper, the devil is in the details – and sometimes those devils take decades to work out (if ever).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n