The Nixie tube story

Describes the Nixie neon-filled tube display technology. Nixie neon-filled glow lamps were ubiquitous in the late 1950s and 1960s, illuminating numbers, letters, and symbols in scientific and industrial instrumentation. Born in the basement of a German-American tinkerer in the 1930s and later commercialized by the business equipment maker Burroughs Corp., Nixies displayed data vital to NASA's landing on the moon, lit up critical metrics for controlling nuclear power plants, and indicated the rise and fall of share prices on Wall Street stock exchanges, among thousands of uses. For many people, the warm glow of the Nixie came to evoke an era of unprecedented scientific and engineering achievement, of exciting and tangible discoveries, and of seemingly limitless progress. Remarkably, it continues to do so. In the 1970s, Nixies were eclipsed by LEDs, which were not only much cheaper to make and use but also more versatile. The tubes might have died the lonely death of countless other obsolete devices—and yet they did not. Some Nixies lingered on in legacy equipment, of course. But their extraordinary resurgence didn’t really begin until around 2000, when a small but devoted cadre of hobbyists, collectors, and aficionados began searching out and buying old, never-used tubes and designing clocks around them. Nearly two decades later, the movement is still going strong, and Nixies now inhabit a unique niche as ultracool retro tech aimed at discriminating consumers. We may never fully understand why this quirky technology, out of innumerable others, has been plucked from obsolescent obscurity. But some glimmers, at least, of its enduring appeal emerge from the tubes’ colorful history. It is a classic story of 20th-century innovation, complete with a quirky genius, shrewd corporate maneuvering, and brilliant flashes of insight.