History
Michael Faraday (1831) was the first to notice oscillations of one frequency being excited by forces of double the frequency, in the crispations (ruffled surface waves) observed in a wine glass excited to "sing". Melde (1859) generated parametric oscillations in a string by employing a tuning fork to periodically vary the tension at twice the resonance frequency of the string. Parametric oscillation was first treated as a general phenomenon by Rayleigh (1883,1887).
One of the first to apply the concept to electric circuits was George Francis Fitzgerald, who in 1892 tried to excite oscillations in an LC circuit by pumping it with a varying inductance provided by a dynamo. Parametric amplifiers (paramps) were first used in 1913-1915 for radio telephony from Berlin to Vienna and Moscow, and were predicted to have a useful future (Ernst Alexanderson, 1916). The early paramps varied inductances, but other methods have been developed since, e.g., the varactor diodes, klystron tubes, Josephson junctions and optical methods.
Read more about this topic: Parametric Oscillator
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“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Bias, point of view, fury—are they ... so dangerous and must they be ironed out of history, the hills flattened and the contours leveled? The professors talk ... about passion and point of view in history as a Calvinist talks about sin in the bedroom.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)