Geekfoolery

I have bought two clocks over the last week. I got one of the them at IKEA for 99 cents–not even a full dollar–and it runs on a AA battery and has that same black 2-inch square alarm clock movement that 9 billion other clocks in the world have. For 99 cents, what the hell. It beeps real loud and will work until the day it doesn’t (On a side note, Mr. Alex used to live overseas in Taipei, where in the street side electronics markets, there were people selling CD players and radios and rice cookers and TVs, and every other block or so was a little counter opened up to the sidewalk with a countertop about the size of a Monopoly board covered with alarm clocks not too different from the one I just got. And for the sake of demonstration, every single alarm clock on the counter would be going off. Behind the counter, a bored middle aged man or woman as the case may be, with the bored look one woul get of selling alarm clocks day after day, and presumably spending all day hearing a dozen or two dozen of them go off simultaneously. Two questions crossed my mind every time I would pass these people–the first, of course, was how did they keep from going insane and killing a couple dozen people, and second, and perhaps more mysterious, was how, exactly, did they wake themselves up in the morning?).

The second clock I purchased was a more expensive, and far more frivolous than my 99 cent IKEA clock. But I enjoy it far more. Remember, of course, that as the late great Douglas Adams once said, we live on a planet “whose ape-descended life forms are so mind-bogglingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” I remember my first digital watch–an LED job that I got from a newspaper ad for the screamingly low price of $30. Prior to that, a digital watch could be expected to set you back a couple of Benjamins at least, and the novelty of the reading the time… the EXACT time… off an LED display was like crack to a young proto-geek like myself.

What made a digital watch possible, of course, was the LED, the light-emitting diode. Red glowing numbers, and the thrill of waiting for the hour, or even the day to flip over to watch all the numbers change at the same time. Before LEDs, however, there was still a need for a digital display on some electronics, and the way engineers built those displays was with Nixie tubes. A Nixie tube was a vacuum tube filled with metal cutouts of each of the ten digits, and as the current is applied to the numbers, they glow, usually red. The arrival of the LED display–far smaller and using much less power–made the Nixie tube obsolete almost overnight.

In the decades since, thousands of Nixie tubes have been sitting in warehouses gathering dust, waiting to be discarded. Good thing they didn’t–because there are a band of handy and crafty people out there who are taking these Nixie tubes and building new stuff out of them. Mostly clocks, but there are few other uses out there for them. The tubes themselves come in a variety of sizes and shapes… some are vertical tubes with points on the top, some are designed to be mounted with the top of the tube facing horizontally. If you want a Nixie tube clock of your own, you can go about it a couple different ways. There are plans available, and you can provide your own parts, there kits with plans and parts, and fully assembled clocks. There are also a few other projects out there if you just want to have some fun playing with a Nixie tube.

No one will ever be able to make the case that Nixie tube clock is practical. But it is one of those geeky things that is just too damn cool.

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