Instruments
Oscilloscope
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
An oscilloscope displays how an electrical signal varies over time by steering a beam onto a screen and tracing its voltage as a moving line. The German physicist Ferdinand Braun built the first cathode-ray oscilloscope in 1897, guiding a narrow stream of electrons with an alternating voltage to trace patterns on a fluorescent screen; Braun shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Guglielmo Marconi, cited for his contributions to wireless telegraphy rather than the oscilloscope itself.
Facts
Invented Year MeasuresHow an electrical signal's voltage varies over time, displayed as a waveform. 2 Operating PrincipleA digital oscilloscope samples the input signal at high speed through an analog-to-digital converter, then reconstructs and displays the waveform from those samples. 2 ResolutionVertical resolution is set by the analog-to-digital converter's bit depth; general-purpose oscilloscopes can detect signals as small as about 1 millivolt per screen division. 2 Operating RangeModern instruments reach bandwidths above 3 gigahertz and sample rates up to 10 gigasamples per second. 2 Cross-Tradition Connections
Invented By
Braun invented the cathode ray tube in 1897; the modern oscilloscope is a later elaboration of his device.
Used In
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.