Vacuum tube
All these early technologies were superseded by the vacuum tube feedback electronic oscillator, invented in 1912 by Edwin Armstrong and Alexander Meissner, which used the triode vacuum tube invented in 1906 by Lee De Forest. Vacuum tube oscillators were a far cheaper source of continuous waves, and could be easily modulated to carry sound. Due to the development of the first high-power transmitting tubes by the end of World War I, in the 1920s tube transmitters replaced the arc converter and alternator transmitters, as well as the last of the old noisy spark transmitters.