Incoming links: Semiconductor diode
The first diodes. These were apparently incredibly unreliable, especially for portable radios, as you had to randomly search for the best contact point you could find in a random polycrystalline material!!
And also quality was highly dependant on where the material was sourced from as that affected the impurities present in the material. Later this was understood to be an issue of doping.
It was so unreliable that vacuum tube diodes overtook them in many applications, even though crystal detectors are actually semiconductor diodes, which eventually won over!
For a long time, before artificial semiconductors kicked in, people just didn't know the underlying physical working principle of these detectors. What I cannot create, I do not understand basically.
Ideally can be thought of as a one-way ticket gate that only lets electrons go in one direction with zero resistance! Real devices do have imperfections however, so there is some resistance.
First they were made out of vacuum tubes, but later semiconductor diodes were invented and became much more widespread.