How the neon-filled glow lamps came to hold a special place in enthusiasts’ hearts

UPDATE 18 JAN. 2024: The nostalgic desire to experience the mid-twentieth-century aesthetic provided by the glow and design language of Nixie tubes has still not gone away. But this niche demand has not been nearly great enough to keep them in production. And now, the last backstock versions of true Nixie tubes, produced in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the 1980s, are at the end of their lifespans. At this point, anyone seeking that old-school glow can find it only in lookalikes made from more contemporary display technologies, like OLEDs that run on much lower voltages and whose manufacturing processes are much less labor intensive. //

Original article from 25 June 2018 follows:

On a cold December morning in the Czech village of Březolupy, a man stops his truck in front of a 17th-century castle. He puts on some heavy gloves, steps out of the truck, and opens the back hatch. Carefully, almost lovingly, he unloads crate after crate of heavy equipment and supplies—an industrial glass lathe, a turbomolecular vacuum pump, and glass. Lots and lots of glass.

The man is Dalibor Farny. In 2012, Farny began working to revive the manufacture of a display technology called the Nixie tube, the last commercial examples of which were produced when he was still a child.

These 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, even for people who, like Farny, grew up long after the tubes had faded from common use.