For those of us who don't quite understand how tubes amps work

[dbw]

The water concept is how it was always taught, actually.... you just have to be an old fart to have learned it that way.  Today, its not taught at all.

I was taught it that way in high school less than 10 years ago.  We even had a computer program that let you draw a simple circuit and then generate a simulation of the circuit as waterworks.  ccasion14:

 

[Dan025]

well i know the water concept but dont remember how i learned it, i always tried to relate it to a pump, but that doesn't work because the pump has to be impossibly huge and pressure regulated with an impossibly powerful motor to power it. the problem i always had was that resistance is compared to a restriction, but in a water system a restriction increases the load on a pump unless it is regulated by pressure, resistance decreases the load. a pump produces a constant volume (current) electrical sources produce a constant voltage (pressure)

i never thought of comparing it to a water column which aside from inertia makes a perfect model at least initially, well it works for a battery where over time the voltage falls although in a battery it is not at a linear rate. i guess a residential source can be looked at as an infinitely large lake with a dam, a water column just a really large one where the water is replenished so the column height never changes. or it may change some under really high flow rates but not much.

 

[Patrick]

The water concept is how it was always taught, actually.... you just have to be an old fart to have learned it that way.  Today, its not taught at all.

Which sucks.  The most my class have learned yet do do with electricity and electronics (10th grade) is ohms law.   whooohoo

Ohm's Law isn't very sexy or exciting, and on the surface doesn't seem to answer much, but it's the foundation on which nearly everything else rests. To dismiss it as boring or inconsequential is akin to dismissing the alphabet because what you're really interested in is reading. You need to know Ohm's law like the back of your hand, and be able to apply it to any circuit you encounter or wish to design. Once you have that, and are forced to play with resistor matrixes for a while, everything afterward will seem like puppy chow. Capacitors, inductors, transistors, tubes, etc. all just need a bit of explanation, and you're there.

It's not that ohm's law is boring or inconsequential, it's just that that's all we've been taught. There hasn't been anything to follow it up with or any experiments to test it on. Just, here it is.....let's move on. The only way we get to use it is if we do an advances science course in 11th grade which only focuses on the subject for about a 2 weeks.

take AP Physics C
it really goes into electrical physics and real life applications of ohms law and such