In what order were the following components invented?

A) The electron tube
B) The transistor
C) The diode
D) The integrated circuit (microchip)

A, C, B, then D.

No correct answers yet. Sorry, Strider0.

A)Inventor: G.A Carey (1875)
C)Inventor: J.A Fleming (1904)
B)Inventors: Shockley/Bardeen/Brattain (1947)
D)Inventors: Kilby/Noyce (1958/9)
I got most of the info off the WWW.About.com site
"Strider0" had the same line up as me but I have included the dates.
What order/dates have you got?

.....First diode:

1885, Munk A Rosenshold discovered the rectifying properties of silver sulfide. His own expiraments included home-made diodes, even though he didn't call them that.

.....First electron tubes:

My sources (two military texts) put the tubes later in the 1890's. I have one other source to paw through; so you guys may be right here. (That's what I get for relying on military inteligence!)

.....First transistor:

1948 by the same names given above.

.....First integrated circuit:

1958 by the same names given above.

Mahal, although recifiers can indeed be constructed with silver sulphide, they are not diodes. A diode contains two components by definition, a distinction silver sulphide or selenium recifiers do not have. This alone rules Rosenshold out as the discoverer.

The earliest modern diode rectifiers were tubes (valves, for the Brits). Each contained a heated filament which acted as a cathode (an electron source) and a metal plate or anode. Currect flows only when the plate's charge is positive with respect to the cathode.

This is known as the "Edison effect", after its discoverer Thomas Alva Edison, who built and experimented with these diodes in 1883 (and filed for a patent).

Even had Rosenshold's rectifiers been diodes, Edison's discovery still came two years earlier.

Regarding electron tubes in general, the earliest was devised by George A Carey in 1875, as Bedstor states. It was a type called a phototube, or photodiode, partly for its two part construction (can you see where this is leading?). Current flow was not regulated by the voltage imposed on an internal control grid, but rather by the amount of light which reached the light-sensitive material of the cathode.

Carey is credited with inventing the first electron tube and, as it turns out, it was a diode.

TomGL: Admittedly, I'm being a little loose with my definition of a diode; I was thinking more of functionality, any single piece of "stuff" used specifically to rectify an AC signal. If Rosenshold's expiraments had not been ignored, we would have never needed to develop tubes, except perhaps for high-power applications, like the early Brit radars.

The point of a diode is not to have a two-part (or more) component, actually the goal in solid state diodes was to have a single-part component so that rectifying could be done without the big tubes and associated circuits required to produce the filiment voltage, plate voltage, grid voltage (if needed) and big heat-sinks to dissipate all the heat produced.

The two-part definition is really just an understanding of how a "solid-state" diode works. With a germanium or selenium semiconductor, you dope it at one end with a positive or negative material, like arsenic, to give the tiny piece of "stuff" the desired properties--the negative temp coefficient, the conductivity in forward bias and the high resistance in negative bias.