I Love Me Some Nixie Tubeage
I’m a fan of vacuum tubes in general, and I’m sad that I don’t still own some of the finer examples of tube-powered hardware I acquired over the years. The best of the lot was a Dumont oscilloscope, circa 1939. It was black, weighed eight tons, and worked perfectly. I’ve currently got a nice little tube-based Philco oscilloscope from 1962 that I bought off of eBay from a guy who refurbished the whole thing, including a new complement of tubes.
The grooviest tube has to be the Nixie. It’s not actually a vacuum tube, it’s a cold-cathode tube, like the snazzy blue lights I installed on my Street Machine in 2005. Nixies were introduced commercially by the Burroughs Corporation in 1954, which means that in addition to providing us with glowy numerical displays, they also helped good old William S. pursue his smack- and wife-shooting, boy-buggering lifestyle.
The UNIVAC 1101, a 38-foot long tube-powered monstrosity of a computer, used Nixies to display its output. A decade or so later, they were still being used in some of the world’s first electronic desktop calculators. They stayed in use until 1970 or so, when they were replaced by LEDs and segmented VFDs.
Riding the coattails of the steampunk retrofuture aesthetic, Nixie tubes have regained popularity in recent years, with “new old stock” tubes turning up on eBay. They get made into clocks, mostly, but the best use I’ve seen so far is this Nixie Watch. There are other Nixie watches out there, but Cathode Corner’s adds the niftiness of a motion-activated display to a pleasing and appropriately rugged design.
I wish I had found out about this last month, when I was all manic and thus financially irresponsible enough to spring for one. I love my TokyFlash Retrofit, but I’m in love with the Nixie Watch.
