Nixie tube - Wikipedia. The ten digits of a GN- 4 Nixie tube. A Nixie tube (English: NIK- see), or cold cathode display,[1] is an electronic device for displaying numerals or other information using glow discharge. The glass tube contains a wire- mesh anode and multiple cathodes, shaped like numerals or other symbols. Applying power to one cathode surrounds it with an orange glow discharge. The tube is filled with a gas at low pressure, usually mostly neon and often a little mercury or argon, in a Penning mixture.[2][3]Although it resembles a vacuum tube in appearance, its operation does not depend on thermionic emission of electrons from a heated cathode. It is therefore called a cold- cathode tube (a form of gas- filled tube), or a variant of neon lamp.

Such tubes rarely exceed 4. C (1. 04 °F) even under the most severe of operating conditions in a room at ambient temperature.[4]Vacuum fluorescent displays from the same era use completely different technology—they have a heated cathode together with a control grid and shaped phosphor anodes; Nixies have no heater or control grid, typically a single anode (in the form of a wire mesh, not to be confused with a control grid), and shaped bare metal cathodes. History[edit]. Systron- Donner frequency counter from 1. Nixie- tube display. The early Nixie displays were made by a small vacuum tube manufacturer called Haydu Brothers Laboratories, and introduced in 1. Burroughs Corporation, who purchased Haydu.

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Watch Full-Length Documentaries Online for Free. New Documentaries Added Daily, Top Documentary Films. A Nixie tube (English: / ˈ n ɪ k. s iː / NIK-see), or cold cathode display, is an electronic device for displaying numerals or other information using glow discharge.

The name Nixie was derived by Burroughs from "NIX I", an abbreviation of "Numeric Indicator e. Xperimental No. 1",[6] although this may have been a backronym designed to justify the evocation of the mythical creature with this name. Hundreds of variations of this design were manufactured by many firms, from the 1. The Burroughs Corporation introduced "Nixie" and owned the name Nixie as a trademark. Nixie- like displays made by other firms had trademarked names including Digitron, Inditron and Numicator. A proper generic term is cold cathode neon readout tube, though the phrase Nixie tube quickly entered the vernacular as a generic name.

Burroughs even had another Haydu tube that could operate as a digital counter and directly drive a Nixie tube for display. This was called a "Trochotron", in later form known as the "Beam- X Switch" counter tube; another name was "magnetron beam- switching tube", referring to their similarity to a cavity magnetron. Trochotrons were used in the UNIVAC 1. The first trochotrons were surrounded by a hollow cylindrical magnet, with poles at the ends. The field inside the magnet had essentially- parallel lines of force, parallel to the axis of the tube. It was a thermionic vacuum tube; inside were a central cathode, ten anodes, and ten "spade" electrodes.

The magnetic field and voltages applied to the electrodes made the electrons form a thick sheet (as in a cavity magnetron) that went to only one anode. Applying a pulse with specified width and voltages to the spades made the sheet advance to the next anode, where it stayed until the next advance pulse.

Count direction was not reversible. A later form of trochotron called a Beam- X Switch replaced the large, heavy external cylindrical magnet with ten small internal metal- alloy rod magnets which also served as electrodes. This ИН- 1. 9А Nixie tube displays symbols, including % and °CGlow- transfer counting tubes, similar in essential function to the trochotrons, had a glow discharge on one of a number of main cathodes, visible through the top of the glass envelope. Most used a neon- based gas mixture and counted in base- 1. Sets of "guide" cathodes (usually two sets, but some types had one or three) between the indicating cathodes moved the glow in steps to the next main cathode. Types with two or three sets of guide cathodes could count in either direction.

A well- known trade name for glow- transfer counter tubes in the United Kingdom was Dekatron. Types with connections to each individual indicating cathode, which enabled presetting the tube's state to any value (in contrast to simpler types which could only be directly reset to zero or a small subset of their total number of states), were trade named Selectron tubes. Devices that functioned in the same way as Nixie tubes were patented in the 1. National Union Co. Inditron. However, their construction was cruder, their average lifetime was shorter, and they failed to find many applications due to their complex periphery. The most common form of Nixie tube has ten cathodes in the shapes of the numerals 0 to 9 (and occasionally a decimal point or two), but there are also types that show various letters, signs and symbols. Because the numbers and other characters are arranged one behind another, each character appears at a different depth, giving Nixie based displays a distinct appearance.

A related device is the pixie tube, which uses a stencil mask with numeral- shaped holes instead of shaped cathodes. Some Russian Nixies, e. IN- 1. 4, used an upside- down digit 2 as the digit 5, presumably to save manufacturing costs as there is no obvious technical or aesthetic reason. Each cathode can be made to glow in the characteristic neon red- orange color by applying about 1. DC at a few milliamperes between a cathode and the anode. The current limiting is normally implemented as an anode resistor of a few tens of thousands of ohms.

Nixies exhibit negative resistance and will maintain their glow at typically 2. V to 3. 0 V below the strike voltage. Some color variation can be observed between types, caused by differences in the gas mixtures used. Longer- life tubes that were manufactured later in the Nixie timeline have mercury added to reduce sputtering[4] resulting in a blue or purple tinge to the emitted light. Watch Cowgirls `N Angels Online IMDB here.

In some cases, these colors are filtered out by a red or orange filter coating on the glass. One advantage of the Nixie tube is that its cathodes are typographically designed, shaped for legibility. In most types, they are not placed in numerical sequence from back to front, but arranged so that cathodes in front obscure the lit cathode minimally. One such arrangement is 6 7 5 8 4 3 9 2 0 1 from front (6) to back (1).[7][8] Russian NH- 1. A & NH- 1. 2B tubes use the number arrangement 1 6 2 7 5 0 4 9 8 3 from back to front, with the 5 being an upside down 2.

The 1. 2B tubes feature a bottom far left decimal point between the numbers 8 and 3. Applications and lifetime[edit]. The stacked digit arrangement in a Nixie tube is visible in this (stripped) ZM1. Pair of NL- 5. 44. Nixie display tubes.

Nixies were used as numeric displays in early digital voltmeters, multimeters, frequency counters and many other types of technical equipment. They also appeared in costly digital time displays used in research and military establishments, and in many early electronic desktop calculators, including the first: the Sumlock- Comptometer ANITA Mk VII of 1. Later alphanumeric versions in fourteen segment display format found use in airport arrival/departure signs and stock ticker displays. Some elevators used Nixies to display floor numbers. Average longevity of Nixie tubes varied from about 5,0. There is no formal definition as to what constitutes "end of life" for Nixies, mechanical failure excepted.

Some sources[2] suggest that incomplete glow coverage of a glyph ("cathode poisoning") or appearance of glow elsewhere in the tube would not be acceptable. Nixie tubes are susceptible to multiple failure modes, includingsimple breakage,cracks and hermetic seal leaks allowing the atmosphere to enter,cathode poisoning preventing part or all of one or more characters from illuminating,increased striking voltage causing flicker or failure to light,sputtering of electrode metal onto the glass envelope blocking the cathodes from view,internal open or short circuits which may be due to physical abuse or sputtering.