Fun vacuum tube history fact: the humble vacuum tube actually traces its origins back to Edison’s incandescent light bulbs. Those early bulbs would mysteriously blacken over time, and for years nobody could figure out why. It wasn’t until 1904 that John Ambrose Fleming connected the dots — the darkening came from metal burned off the filament, and in studying it, he created the first true vacuum tube. So the vacuum tube, the heart of early electronics, was born from the same simple light bulb that first lit our homes.