When most people think about vacuum tubes, they picture big glass bottles glowing inside antique radios or early computers. History often treats tubes as a dead-end technology that was suddenly swept away by the transistor in the 1950s. But the reality is much more interesting. Vacuum tube technology did not simply stop evolving when the transistor appeared. In fact, some of the most sophisticated and technically impressive tube designs emerged after the transistor had already been invented.
During the final decades of mainstream tube development, manufacturers pushed the technology in remarkable directions. Tubes became smaller, faster, quieter, more rugged, and more specialized. Designers experimented with exotic geometries, ceramic construction, metal envelopes, ultra-high-frequency operation, and even hybrid tube-semiconductor systems. Devices such as acorn tubes, lighthouse tubes, compactrons, and nuvistors represented a last gasp of thermionic electronics.
Ironically, many of these innovations arrived just as solid-state electronics were becoming commercially practical. Vacuum tubes were improving rapidly right up until the market abandoned them.
The Pressure to Improve
By the 1930s and 1940s, vacuum tubes dominated electronics. Radios, radar systems, military communications, industrial controls, and the first digital computers all depended on them. But everyone was painfully aware of their problems.
Traditional tubes were fragile, generated heat, consumed significant power, and suffered from limitations at high frequencies. Internal lead lengths created parasitic inductance and capacitance. At radio frequencies and especially microwave frequencies, those unwanted effects made design difficult.
Before the advent of electricity in the home made electrically-heated clothes irons a possibility, ironing was a cumbersome process, with self-heated irons being an arguable improvement over solid (so-called sad) irons that required heating in an external heat source like a stove or fire. These self-heating irons used a variety of fuels, with the one featured on the [Our Own Devices] YouTube channel 
Although modern-day silvered glass mirrors have pretty much destroyed the market for bronze mirrors, these highly polished pieces of metal once were the pinnacle of mirror technology. Due to the laborious process required these mirrors saw use essentially only by the affluent. That said, how hard would it be to make a bronze mirror today with all of the modern technologies that even a hobbyist can acquire for their shed? Cue [Lundgren Bronze Studios] giving it a shot, 
