# 1930s VACUUM TUBE MANUFACTURING DOCUMENTARY (SILENT) WESTERN ELECTRIC CO. VALVES 17974

This silent film made by Western Electric Co. details the manufacture of vacuum tubes for electronics. It likely dates to the early 1930s. The film starts with images of stems being made (1:00) with women feeding leads into die block at (2:00). At 2:20 finished stems are placed in an annealer from the die block. At 2:57 the Assembly Department is shown with staff, most of them women, working on the tubes by hand. At 3:58 spot welding of tubes is shown, with a woman dexterously moving a stem into the welding gun. At 5:18 the assembly is sealed in a bulb. At 7:31 vacuum tube exhaust stations are shown. At 7:55 a tube is sealed on an exhaust header. At 9:25 magnesium getter is flashed using high frequency electric current. At 9:50 filament, grid and plate leads are disassembled. At 11:30 the fire setting without measured pressure is shown. Western Electric Company (WE, WECo) was an American electrical engineering and manufacturing company that served as the primary supplier to AT&T from 1881 to 1996, and to the local Bell Operating Companies until 1984. The company was responsible for many technological innovations and seminal developments in industrial management. It also served as the purchasing agent for the member companies of the Bell System. In electronics, a vacuum tube, an electron tube or valve (British usage) or, colloquially, a tube (North America) is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric potential…

- Kind: Documentary
- Genres: Western, Documentary, Silent, Industrial and advertising
- Archive: [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/17974bottlingelectronsmosvwr)
- Licence or status: [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) (as the archive states it)
- Who can watch: Teens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

Not offered: its uploader states a Creative Commons licence, but that it is the rights holder's is not shown: its record does not date the work from 2002, when the licences were first published, or the work is another's (an older work under a later date, or a video set to another's song), and nothing else the site holds shows where it is free. Unclear is not offered.