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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

Aircraft, motor vehicles, vacuum tubes and telecom equipment were next on the list of top exports.

Vacuum tubes??!?

Makes (a small amount of) sense -- the only high-quality tubes I've ever seen were either manufactured in the U.S., Europe, or in various parts of the former USSR; Chinese tubes have a very poor reputation at least in audio circles.

Perhaps this is because nobody ever bothered to put a serious effort into outsourcing vacuum-tube production, in the same way ICs and microprocessors have been outsourced, leaving the remaining production still domestic?

Or maybe it's just that there are huge stockpiles of the things sitting around in the U.S. and they're slowly being sold off, both for domestic consumption and export, but the net result is an export of tubes? That wouldn't be hard to believe either.

According to this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/big-shift-for-gas-guz...

we exported $37.1B worth of vacuum tubes last year. I could be wrong but that amount seems wildly implausible. Could the category actually be "Vacuum tubes, etc." where "etc" is semiconductors?

The only things I really know of that would still use vacuum tubes are esoteric high-end audiophile amplifiers, and some "old school" guitar amps (Marshall, Hiwatt, etc). Is there really that big a market? Are they used for anything else?

You are overlooking things like magnetrons, x-ray tubes, photomultipliers, CRTs (which still have a lot of applications outside of the video display sphere), krytons and so forth. It's not all about diodes, triodes, tetrodes and pentodes.

Wikipedia lists some other modern uses including (most unexpectedly) in particle accelerators:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube#Vacuum_tubes_in_the...

I believe NORAD computers still use vacuum tubes.

One of my professors told me a few years ago that tubes were still used heavily in high-power commercial radio stations. Could be dated info though.

My money is on someone getting "facts" off Wikipedia or similar without doing any smell testing on the numbers.

I would guess that someone switched NAICS code 33411 "Computer and Peripheral Equipment Manufacturing" for NAICS code 334411 "Electron Tube Manufacturing," but that's just a guess.

X-ray emitters use vacuum tubes. That means, every doctor's office has at least one.

I guess that the radars and other high-power radio equipment still uses tubes too

Maybe in the form of CRTs?

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