First But Lost To History - The E1T Cathode Ray Counting Tube!! 

Hey mr.carlson love your vids. Neat seeing you here. Do you have any devices that uses the tube by chance?

The legend has spoken! ✌️

Wow! That is so cool! I have a prototype of a robot. (Can't wait for part 4 of the antenna build! Nice job on the base frame design. VERY sturdy! OK. Back to Fran! :-) )

Paul, maybe you could show us on your channel sometime?

Hi!

I wanna be this cool, love you down here in SC Fran! Love your work!

I was thinking of this as a sort of "display dekatron" which would be useful in a counter application. Of course dekatrons were used in some of the earliest computing machines so these might have been applicable in similar applications but I suspect a dekatron was more reliable as a counting element.

@@merashallan While the specifications referenced don't spell it out I suspect that this might be capable of a higher count rate than the Dekatron. Since it is an electronic device it is theoretically capable of much higher frequency response that the gas ionization used in the Dekatron.

@@wb5mct I think you are spot on with that. There were a few pecuiliar electron beam devices around at the time and some were quite fast, by speeds of the day. I can dimly remember some discriminator, (think multi-level comparator), devices, of the same era, used in nucleonics.

@@profpep while a college student in the late '60's I repaired instruments for the Physics lab and remember working on a counter that used Dekatron tubes. It intrigued me that the "ones" digit tube was a different color than the rest so I did a bit of digging in the manual to find out why. The answer was that the first tube used a different gas (hydrogen I think) than the rest so it would be able to count faster. That in turn clued me in on the limited speed of the standard tubes.

The model number of the counter units starting with PW, also hints at scientific equipment such as would be used with geiger counters and other lab setups.

They were.

I have some pictures of my PW4062 7 decade timer here www.fliptronics.com/E1T/ . The tubes can count at frequencies up to 30,000 Cycles Per Second (or 30 kHz )

Or higher level radiation, learning the physics of nuclear weapons and criticality testing. Safer to have a counter do it than having someone like Louis Slotin do it by listening to ticks from a Geiger counter and using a screwdriver to set the reflector clearance.

I think is going to be more weird interesting stuff

Impossible as it is to imagine, you know there's weirder ahead. Let Fran navigate that strange electron sea, in a ship steered with pedals, and see what bumps up against the side.

The same company that, only a few years before that, built those awesome Stirling generators for tube radios in rural areas. What a nice product palette!

Is this the same Philips company that was in the Netherlands after ww2?

@@mikeyoung9810 the very one

@@mikeyoung9810 the tube in the video was made there

Except the Nixie didn't inherently do any "counting". It was (is) a display device only. Any counting, or anything else, has to be handed with circuitry external to the Nixie.

@@trainliker100 Yes, I should have mentioned that. But I think you would agree that, as a display, the Nixie was far better than the E1T or the Dekatron.

@@superhet7281 Oh yes. Agree. Worked with, and repaired, a lot of equipment with Nixies. And also used them to make a digital clock back in 1968. When you work with them enough in decimal counting applications, if you can allow seeing the count instead of only having the final count latched, and the counting is not too fast, there is a certain pattern the numbers go through regarding the plane each number is at. The order of the numbers is designed to optimize clarity as they are stacked. And there is a certain pattern that even if the numbers are changing too fast to read for a digit, you can tell if they are all showing, and in the correct order. A number of frequency counters and such where I had to fix one of the decade counter sections (such as in an HP 5245L Frequency Counter) I could turn back on and just watch the raw count and right away see "that looks right".

Dekatrons were actually developed in the UK by the UK branch of Ericsson Telephones. Raytheon in the US did develop a similar tube that operated inside a ring magnet - I think it was called a Trochatron - it's advantage was that it was much faster than a dekatron, the disadvantage was that it wasn't directly readable - I can remember seeing both of them used together in some seriously ancient particle counter - the high frequency digits were implemented using Trochatrons driving neon lamps and the slower ones were using Dekatrons.

@@TrimeshSZ Thank you. I have edited my comment removing the US credit. I have a few Dekatrons and would like to build one of those "spinner" things, just for laughs.

Thanks! At first i was pissed 'cause i misread the datasheet, it was bottom view instead of topview. But after the quickfix of moving the socket it actually looked really well!

When I was in school in the mid-60s, we built a counter for a Geiger tube using Decatrons from a kit. I can see some thing similar using these, but I had no idea such a thing existed.

I made a clock using the solid state version, the CD4017. You can preset a time using thumb switches and when the times match, a hard drive head arm strikes a bicycle bell. The only other IC is a single CD4073 to reset the hours at 24:00. It made Hackaday. Although I still think my Wrectrex is a lot cooler.

Do you like analogue computers?

@@millomweb Who doesn't like analog computers!

@@MLX1401 I don't know - probably those that don't understand the concept ;)

@@millomweb :D

@@MLX1401 And to narrow it down some, I prefer electro-mechanical over electronic ;)

The thing with the dot running in circles is probably a Dekatron.

@@mfbfreak I agree!

In search of the cheapest weightless pointer !

it may have been a bit more popular if it had an end display, instead of sideways? makes it take up a lot of panel space ...