Nixie tube (nonfiction)
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A Nixie tube (English /ˈnɪk.siː/ nik-see), or cold cathode display, 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.
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 40 °C (104 °F) even under the most severe of operating conditions in a room at ambient temperature.
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, and shaped bare metal cathodes.
In the News
Mathematician Alice Beta wins Pulitzer Prize for The Nixie Economy, hailed as "a startlingly prescient document, anticipating economic and political events of the 1990s."
Fiction cross-reference
- Alice Beta
- The Nixie Economy - nonfiction book by Alice Beta about the economic and historical significance of Nixie tubes.
Nonfiction cross-reference
External links
- Nixie tube @ Wikipedia
- The Art of Making a Nixie Tube @ YouTube
- The Nixie Watch @ YouTube
- How Steve Wozniak Made Famous The Nixie Watch By Juan