Robert von Lieben

Robert von Lieben (September 5, 1878, in Vienna – February 20, 1913, in Vienna) was an Austrian entrepreneur, and self-taught physicist and inventor. Lieben and his associates Eugen Reisz and Siegmund Strauss invented and produced a gas-filled triode – the first thermionic valve with a control grid that was designed specifically for amplification rather than demodulation of signals, and is a distant ancestor of the thyratron. After Lieben's death, the "Lieben valve", which is also known in English as the "Lieben-Reisz valve" and in German as the "LRS-Relais" (Lieben-Reisz-Strauss relay), was used in the world's first continuous wave radio frequency generator designed for radio telephony.