Was the military interested in unijunction transistors?
Yes, they were. As a matter of fact, we used one in an Apollo simulator later on to generate a very linear sawtooth wave for a TV output. Anyway, the types of applications were just exactly what you would use a thyratron for, in the vacuum tube days. Anything that a relaxation oscillator could do, the unijunctuion could do. Also, with the advent of digital electronics, we thought these could be used for clocks in computers. Eventually, the silicon controlled rectifier put it out of business, because the SCR could operate at a much higher power level. Initially, they were used together, with the unijunction used at low power levels for triggering. This was a combination that interested the power companies a great deal, and that is one of the reasons, I think, that GE jumped on the unijunction transistor, and became the leading manufacturer of the device. The unijunction was big seller in those days and it made a lot of money for GE.
