First But Lost To History - The E1T Cathode Ray Counting Tube!!
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- čas přidán 7. 08. 2024
- Thanks Jerome for all the hard work and being generous with this contribution to the FranLab display museum!
More on the E1T here - www.dos4ever.com/trochotron/T...
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Hi Fran, and all. I have the actual prototype of the E1T tube, hand written numbers on the bulb and everything. Thanks for taking the time to share this.
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!
Oh, it was not a solution in the search of a problem. They were not intended for computers, but for instruments.
I worked with those, 45 years ago, in my first year physics lab exercises. These were not used in computers, but in scalers (physics speech for counters) counting events such as pulses from Geiger-Muller tubes, photomultipliers and such. The same with Decatrons (neon counting tubes).
The ancient multi-channel scalers we played with had a bank of five or six of them; carry signal from one would be used to reset it and increment the one in the higher decade. Neat.
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.
Fran, as you say computers of that time had no need of such a device, but this was also a time when nuclear measurements were beginning to be important. It occurs to me that they may have seen the need for counting pulses from Geiger tines to facilitate accurate measurements of low level radiation. A number or these tubes in series would fill that need nicely, being able to follow a thousand or more pulses per second.
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.
Just when I think you've shown us the most weird and obscure display devices you show us this! Awesome!
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.
Hey that looks familiar! I picked up one of these when we cleaned out the vacuum tube storage room at Philips.
Hello, Fran. I had obtained a piece of equipment from a hamfest back in 1972, when I was 14, called a Scaler. It contained two of the E1T "Bi-Directional Beam Deflection Decade Counter" tubes made by Mullard. The output of the second stage fed a 3- or 4-digit electromagnetic counter. It was this mechanical counter that limited the frequency of the input pulse stream to just around 500Hz. I found these display tubes fascinating to play with at the time. Thank you for the trip down memory lane! Bob
There used to be a division of Philips called 'Philips Scientific' that made more nuclear physics related instruments, it may very well have been Philips' attempt at a good scaler tube. For continuous scalers, a bar-graph like output like this would be preferred, so one could kinda eyeball count-rates
This is super cool. I always liked vacuum tubes as a kid. I felt like they looked like rocket ships with complex domed cities inside, like something from the covers of Asimov or vintage Popular Science and Popular Mechanics.
Hello Fran not only do I believe your a genius I'm totally impressed at the constant maintenance of your fingernails. Some people are nasty your not
These are far more clever than I initially thought. All the "display" aspects aside, I'm fascinated by the tube's ability to store the present state (using a2 anode current and negative feedback to the D-prime deflection plate). As well as the trick to increment *past* the 9th digit momentarily to a 10th position to effectively generate a "carry" pulse to the next higher tube. And a clever trick as well on this digit to cut off the beam current to reset the beam to the 0th digit. Clever, clever, clever!
"Philips, simply years ahead" as the advert used to say.
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
Something much like these were used as time display in a precision timer for photocells in my school back in grade 10. We laughed at the ancient equipment back in 1993 when the teacher would roll a steel ball down an aluminium bar and we 'd hand calculate its acceleration and speed...
Franlabs “old weird counting tubes” series has officially peaked
Fran is to obscure display formats as Techmoan is to obscure recording formats. Love it.
Fran, you have the most interesting, varied and fun general electronics channel in my list. Thank you SO MUCH for all your creative stuff! Plus, all the world loves a display nerd! Be well and take care :)
Excellent video as ever Fran! Keep up the great work curating these interesting curiosities for us!
Hi Fran! Been gone too long.
So happy to find you again, and share this. Way cool.
My inner geek was nuts.
Pc failed, no internet. Not fun.
Android it is for a while.
Have a good .
I like that they tried to disambiguate things a little by splitting odds and evens toward the top and bottom.
Fran. I so much appreciate your work. Gaps in my knowledge are filled up by what you bring to the table. Lots of love to you!
Great stuff, Fran! The Dekatron was a similar idea that at least solved the curvature issue. The display was the top end of the tube, rather than the side. But the Nixie was much more practical and much easier to manufacture.
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.
Suggestion: Modify your NIMO clock so that you can use this E1T tube to indicate tenths of seconds, and every time the indications move from left to right and jump back to the zero, the NIMO tube counts up to the next number, until it to goes back to zero.
In all my reading in old books and catalogs I've never seen this. Very cool, and a slick build to boot!
The beam divergence (bleed over) issue an artifact of CRT-ish tubes. The average deflector voltage needs to be close to the Ultor (A2) voltage. In CRTs they solve this by applying opposite voltages to the TWO deflector plates (per axis) so that the average stays fixed. The E1T drives only one deflector, while holding the 2nd fixed. If you shift the second deflector, opposite of the first, you will minimize the divergence.
That's amazing! Such a cool little device. It's like a TV for single numbers.
Lovely, smart old technology. Very interesting! Thanks for sharing, Fran!
I love this channel. Always so much to learn and history to visit.
Wow! What an amazing contribution. Good links,
First Mainframe I worked with (Operator first, Programmer, then System Programmer) was a Burroughs 3700 which had twelve Nixie tubes in it's console display, six for the Instruction code and six for the Address.
Thank you for your services, Fran!
I have never seen it before , thank you Fran for making this happen !
Frantastic content as always! Love your channel!
Just turned 40 (48 min ago) Your video is the first one I’ve watched in my new decade 😊.
I knew diddly about electronics before I found your channel, learning about all this stuff has been fascinating.
Interesting.
Fran, I expect you to do a Decatron clock someday ;)
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.
Wow that is a very neat bit of history, thankyou Gerome?? for giving this to Fran
Very interesting but sadly it probably had limited applications. Always good to remember where we come from, thanks Fran!
Your videos are the BEST. Thought I was one of the first here, missed out on posting one of the first messages. Oh well one day. You're an inspiration.
That's so cool, thanks for sharing. 👍
Pleasure to always watch your videos, Fran.
My ears tingled when you said MPS A42 because I’ve recently repaired a number of 1kV Gun Control boards that use MPS A42s!
That is a fascinating tube, Fran! Thanks for sharing and thanks to Jerome!
Thanks for sharing! I have a couple of these tubes I was hoping to use some day. One came with some driver circuitry that would be fun to restore for a video.
We had a couple of them in the technical department at Radio Netherlands that were left over from the Lopik on the older transmitters before the Flavo transmitter site became active with new transmitters. The transmitters they were modified to work on were was the Philips SOZ139.
I used to work for Thorn EMI and Marconi,
they were used in test rigs in strowger telephone exchanges,to test mechanical switches.
What a cute lil’ gem ! Thanks Fran !
It's probably too much voltage - the "beam" is too bright.
Thank You, Jerome! Excellent board design!
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!
that is SOOO awesome!!! Even though tubes are somewhat obsolete, there are obvious exceptions, but it's something I wish I knew far more about. I don't have any trouble biasing tubes for guitar amp the things like that but when I learned Electronics originally, I messed with the PIC16 IC's, the 741, 339, 555... the 4000 series, SN74 (SN54), etc. etc. but not enough with tubes. I'm hoping I can change that one day, and have my own version of FranLab, so to speak (a lab with LOTS of KICKASS stuff.. for example, well just keep this a shorter comment, haha, just all the really really awesome old and vintage Hardware that you use, restore and all that!! I love this channel so much! Everyone I share this channel with, basically falls in love with the variety of content and the overall top-notch quality of everything you do!
Keep kicking ass Fran! :-) 🤘🏻😊😊
I've never seen this display tube, very interesting! Similar in concept to the decatron tube for frequency counters, etc.
absolutely loved this Fran! guess I missed getting one when I had the chance a few years back, and if course its green, I am thinking a bit of over drive on the gun might make it spill over. thanks
Thanks, loose some blues, learn something and be entertained all at once. A great way to use 15 mins or so. Thanks again.
I saw a clock in the lab at university. The tubes were nicer and more colorful, one for digit. It was already old in the 80's but nice to see.
Fran you always get the coolest stuff..😁😁🙃
Fascinating. Have you ever come across The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park in England? They have some fantastic exhibits there and of course on the Bletchley site, they have ‘Colossus’, the world’s first digital computer designed and built to help break the WWII encryption codes of the German military’s Lorenz cipher machine. It is of course littered with valves and I have visited the site and done a tiny bit of work there many years ago on a complete rebuild of Alan Turing’s Bombe machine. I was told that during WWII, some of the female workers on the site had rigged up a clothes line next to Colossus so they could dry the odd pair of stockings from the heat of the valves. I thought you may be interested.
Huhh. You're right. Never seen one of those before. Interesting.
1:24 That's an analog computer! Did differentiation and integration, but not numerically.
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 ;)
I know A LOT of tubes but you're right Fran, I had never seen one quite like this.
That is really cool. I learned something new today.
Thought I had seen it all! Cheers Fran
That's so cool. Brilliant.
Great you liked it! Do notice that this tube actually counts as opposed to nixies that needed external logic to do that.
Wow! You found something a little bit cooler than a Dekatron. Nice!!
Way cool, thanks Jerome & Fran! I wonder if these could have been used the same way Dekatron display tubes were used in the old WITCH computer.
Excellent!
Lovely tube, I have quite a few of them but have not energised them yet. I think if you can reduce the beam voltage you might be able to reduce the extra illumination on the other sectors.
Thanks for showing us this rare piece. would have appreciated an explanation of the counting.
@fran: your comment, towards the end, about a clock. That’s what I was thinking - four or six of these would make a cool clock. Then your other comment about their rarity. Oh, well. However, a neat idea.
I love your song at the end of the video :-)
Wow this is really cool.
Very interesting piece of electronics history from my fave tech company. Of course I loved the explanation but throughout the video I was thinking: "come on, come on, turn it onnnn"...
You have great fans, Fran=)
Very clever to split the display into two rows.
Videotek!! I have done work for them. They made a wide range of broadcast video T&M gear in Pottstown, PA. Really good people there.
Thank you and who it was that sent that too you verry nice
I actually have a counter with three of these sitting under my bed. Some of them may be broken though, never got around to testing them or refurbishing the counter. If shipping wouldn't be so prohibitively expensive and risky I'd send the thing over to you.
As already mentioned by others, it was used as a Counter. In fact a Ring Counter. Nixie tubes were just displays, needing active components for doing the counting for them. Like others, I too have seen these Philips counters in the Physics lab, where we determined some radioactive decay times as exercise.
The precision and control in a tube like this is amazing especially for the time it was invented and used. Early computers were outputting in binary using panels of lights for the display. They were hard switch and patch cord programmed. Later on they devices ticker tape and then magnetic tape before data tape drives were invented.
Written in french on the tube: "Importé de Hollande" : Imported from Holland.
I have one of these tubes in my collection which my father is /was looking after.
I'd love to see a simple clock made from 4 of these! Even a repro from the rectangular LEDs we used to get from radio shack inside glass fake tubes would still be cool! Thanks for the history lesson! and thanks to the viewer for making it and sharing!
Fascinating! I wonder what the radiation output is like on this tube. Thanks for sharing. :)
I really like the number layout on the tube. Pos. on top, Neg. on bottom.
bazoo513 Explained what I suspected this to be, a decade counter, and used in an instrument, but as always Fran has our history covered.Thanks for sharing!
It's fascinating how many concepts for displays there's been throughout the years. It's almost like they made them intentionally over-engineered and complicated. Perhaps because of patent laws and licensing fees?
In search of the cheapest weightless pointer !
I have seen them used to count clicks from a ginger counter. The intensity was the type of radiation. Then counting the clicks per min the type of radio active material was determined.
I have seen these and are called scintillation counters.
oo, seen pics of those but never come across one in the flesh!
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 ...
I think I might kind of get how the driver circuit you designed works, but I've got a couple of questions:
* What kinds of steps does one go through to design the circuit and come up with what you did?
* Could you do a video on push-pull in general?
Now that is absolutely cool. Honestly Fran, to go one better than this you're going to have to find a steam powered LED!
😊
Hi Fran.. Awesome tube and presentation
Ruckstellanode a1 gives a CARRY OUT low pulse afther the 10th pulse
This is probably used in Frequency counters.. Can you measure if you see the pulse?
May be it is even possible to Reset it automatically.
Love your channel, Keep making these gems of videos, love from the Netherlands.(Philips country)
So cool.
Oh wow. I had a counter box which was used to measure very small time periods using a trip wire. So yiu linked up tin foil to crocodile clips. You then shot your gun through the two foil sections to start and stop the counter.
When it was working it made a massive noise, click, click, click amazing.
Then the five Phillips tubes would show the time, in micro seconds. I now wished I hadn’t disposed of it.
Thanks!
Thanks for posting the intersting video but there was a need for fast counting before digital computers. The Tabulating Machine Company was doing data processing with punch cards from the late 1800's. A counter using these tube could count pulses much faster than relays and I expect many of these tubes were manufactured for that purpose.
this is allot like the tec used for high speed dot printers were you charge the ink and as it is shot threw the nozzle controlling the charge on two plates on each side you can control the ink drops so it hits the product in a pattern printing info at a very high speed just like the warning labels on trash bags
According to the perspective sketch the tube should be able to auto reset. There appears to be a beam reciever following the no9 slot called 'Rückstellanode" which means reset anode. I think you can read out the beam hitting it one step after '9' and generate a reset.
Fantástic información thanks l love it
Cool stuff, if you had enough of them you could do a clock.
How well does your tube compare with the E1T collection at the Franklin Institute ?
How exactly does the storage and counting mechanism work?
Cool stuff like always :) When you click the timeline at 9:55 and go a bit up with the mouse there seems to be a bug (insect type of bug).
I am sitting outisde and bugs of exactly this shape and size are bugging me, so I thought this was a real one :-D
In the early 2000' wenn I was at highschool, in physics-class, there was a microsecond-counter using nixietubes for milliseconds and this tubes for microseconds.