Vacuum electric current through

Since detailed chemical structure information is not usually required from isotope ratio measurements, it is possible to vaporize samples by simply pyrolyzing them. For this purpose, the sample can be placed on a tungsten, rhenium, or platinum wire and heated strongly in vacuum by passing an electric current through the wire. This is thermal or surface ionization (TI). Alternatively, a small electric furnace can be used when removal of solvent from a dilute solution is desirable before vaporization of residual solute. Again, a wide variety of mass analyzers can be used to measure m/z values of atomic ions and their relative abundances. 

Metallurgy. — Metallic vanadium may be prepared in a number of ways. (1) By reduction of vanadium dichloride by pure hydrogen. This method is difficult to use because at red heat vanadium unites readily with oxygen and water, so both must be carefully excluded. (2) By making a plastic mass of vanadium pentoxide with carbon and paraffin, shaping into rods and passing the electric current through them in a vacuum. 

Electric current ampere A Magnitude of the current that, when flowing through each of two straight parallel conductors of infinite length, of negligible cross-section, separated by 1 meter in a vacuum, results in a force between the two wires of 2 X 10 newton per meter of length. 

In 1948 William Bradford Shockley (1910-1989), who is considered the inventor of the transistor, and his associates at Bell Research Laboratories, Walter Houser Brattain (1902-1987) and John Bardeen (1908-1991), discovered that a crystal of germanium could act as a semiconductor of electricity. This unique property of germanium indicated to them that it could be used as both a rectifier and an amplifier to replace the old glass vacuum tubes in radios. Their friend John Robinson Pierce (1910-2002) gave this new solid-state device the name transistor, since the device had to overcome some resistance when a current of electricity passed through it. Shockley, Brattain, and Bardeen all shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. 

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