1 00:00:00,160 --> 00:00:03,034 Ah. The seven-segment display. 2 00:00:03,034 --> 00:00:10,401 Just make an 8 out of some sticks, and then you can represent the Arabic numerals zero through nine just by taking sticks away! 3 00:00:10,401 --> 00:00:13,405 You can even make some letters happen if you’re clever about it. 4 00:00:13,405 --> 00:00:15,287 These things have been around forever: 5 00:00:15,287 --> 00:00:24,815 the earliest known representation of them is in this 1910 patent where Frank Wood claims to have devised this special monogram arrangement. 6 00:00:24,815 --> 00:00:28,082 Personally I’m a little skeptical that he was the first to think of this, 7 00:00:28,082 --> 00:00:36,176 especially since this earlier patent exists where George Mason devised a segmented alphanumeric display which is even more complicated, 8 00:00:36,176 --> 00:00:39,463 and creepy looking, but that’s not important to this video. 9 00:00:39,463 --> 00:00:47,043 Going back a century you might find these boxy numbers in price signage or perhaps scoreboards at a sports stadium - 10 00:00:47,043 --> 00:00:52,046 anywhere a permanent display which needed to show different numbers made sense. 11 00:00:52,046 --> 00:00:58,723 Usually large so many people could see them, the segments might be lit with light bulbs (as Frank Wood envisioned) 12 00:00:58,723 --> 00:01:05,880 but they could even be mechanical in nature with differently colored flaps hiding or revealing the individual segments. 13 00:01:05,880 --> 00:01:09,074 But for many years, they remained pretty obscure. 14 00:01:09,074 --> 00:01:13,556 The seven segment display wouldn't really start to take off until the digital age. 15 00:01:13,556 --> 00:01:19,380 And once we got there and they started spreading, our old pals at RCA smelled opportunity 16 00:01:19,380 --> 00:01:22,206 so they got out the crayons and took a crack at it. 17 00:01:22,206 --> 00:01:24,594 And these are their handiwork. 18 00:01:24,594 --> 00:01:28,768 They’re called Numitron tubes, and they are terrible. 19 00:01:28,768 --> 00:01:33,121 They’re also rare and frustratingly expensive, probably because they didn’t sell very well at all. 20 00:01:33,121 --> 00:01:35,155 Because they’re bad! 21 00:01:35,155 --> 00:01:43,834 This is what I can only describe as the crudest possible way to produce a technically functional seven-segment display for digital devices. 22 00:01:44,319 --> 00:01:48,917 Now you might be able to tell what’s going on in here just by looking at them, 23 00:01:48,917 --> 00:01:57,040 but before I explain their absurdity I want to go back in time because by doing so, you’ll understand why these briefly made sense. 24 00:01:57,684 --> 00:01:58,727 Briefly. 25 00:01:59,000 --> 00:02:01,788 Once upon a time, there were computers. 26 00:02:01,788 --> 00:02:04,573 At first very large, very expensive computers, 27 00:02:04,573 --> 00:02:06,730 but we see the potential! 28 00:02:06,730 --> 00:02:15,800 As computing technology got cheaper and microprocessors started showing up in things like scientific equipment, cash registers, control consoles, and whatnot, 29 00:02:15,800 --> 00:02:22,814 we needed displays to allow humans to read and understand the data those processors were spitting out. 30 00:02:22,814 --> 00:02:30,812 Of course a general-purpose computer could justify using a CRT monitor and generating a video signal to display columns and rows of text, 31 00:02:30,812 --> 00:02:34,126 but something like a calculator didn’t need all that. 32 00:02:34,126 --> 00:02:35,926 It just needed to show some numbers. 33 00:02:35,926 --> 00:02:44,664 So, cheap and simple numerical display devices which microprocessor-based systems could control became a very hot item. 34 00:02:44,760 --> 00:02:49,032 Over the years equipment manufacturers tried all sorts of ideas. 35 00:02:49,032 --> 00:02:51,470 One of the most famous is the Nixie tube. 36 00:02:51,470 --> 00:02:57,882 These neon-filled tubes produced a glow discharge around wire cathodes formed in the shape of numerals, 37 00:02:57,882 --> 00:03:02,556 resulting in beautifully legible displays which were readable in many conditions. 38 00:03:02,556 --> 00:03:05,721 But they had a rather huge caveat - 39 00:03:05,721 --> 00:03:09,925 they required high voltage DC to produce that discharge. 40 00:03:09,925 --> 00:03:13,394 As in, around 180V. 41 00:03:13,394 --> 00:03:18,901 That meant that while the tubes were simple, the circuitry required to drive them was complex. 42 00:03:18,901 --> 00:03:21,154 Not to mention dangerous. 43 00:03:21,154 --> 00:03:26,000 Because of this, Nixies quite naturally attracted plenty of competition. 44 00:03:26,000 --> 00:03:29,939 But, many of its contemporaries shared another of its flaws: 45 00:03:29,939 --> 00:03:34,813 the need for a dedicated output for every character it can display. 46 00:03:34,813 --> 00:03:43,261 Since Nixies use wire-form numerals, a standard Nixie tube needs 10 inputs to function: one for each of its cathodes. 47 00:03:43,261 --> 00:03:50,867 But a segmented display which forms numerals by combining different shapes together only needs one output per segment. 48 00:03:50,867 --> 00:03:57,212 That saves on wiring, but it also makes the circuitry which actually drives the display devices cheaper. 49 00:03:57,212 --> 00:04:06,837 In the early days, dedicated ICs known as BCD decoders would translate the four bits of binary-coded decimal input they received from a microprocessor 50 00:04:06,837 --> 00:04:10,408 into the correct output to drive a display device. 51 00:04:10,408 --> 00:04:15,792 The internal structure of these decoder chips was quite simple - just a few logic gates, really. 52 00:04:15,792 --> 00:04:24,021 But they could be a lot simpler with a seven-segment display compared with a Nixie tube since there were fewer outputs for it to control. 53 00:04:24,021 --> 00:04:28,781 And, many of the same outputs are active on multiple inputs. 54 00:04:28,781 --> 00:04:32,921 A 2 becomes a 3 simply by swapping these two segments, 55 00:04:32,921 --> 00:04:38,414 and that reduces the number of transistors you need in the chip which makes the chip cheaper. 56 00:04:38,414 --> 00:04:41,729 That’s extremely in the weeds, though - when we get right down to it, 57 00:04:41,729 --> 00:04:49,851 the simple fact was the seven-segment display had too many advantages over Nixies, Nimos, edge-lit displays, projection displays 58 00:04:49,851 --> 00:04:52,426 and all the other wild ideas that were floating around. 59 00:04:52,426 --> 00:04:57,422 So although they were arguably less readable and more ugly, 60 00:04:57,422 --> 00:05:02,840 they were obviously going to become the standard  display technology for numerical information. 61 00:05:04,475 --> 00:05:07,621 Except - it’s not really a technology. 62 00:05:07,621 --> 00:05:11,603 It’s just a specific graphical representation for numerals. 63 00:05:11,603 --> 00:05:18,011 So using them may simplify control circuitry and make wiring devices a little easier 64 00:05:18,011 --> 00:05:21,634 but we still have to figure out how to actually make them! 65 00:05:21,634 --> 00:05:23,629 And that wasn’t trivial. 66 00:05:23,629 --> 00:05:30,000 In the late 1960’s, our technology to make small things light up brightly was quite limited. 67 00:05:30,360 --> 00:05:36,707 We did have teeny little light bulbs, of course,  and we used those in myriad ways (including those projection displays) 68 00:05:36,707 --> 00:05:42,695 but doing that had a ton of drawbacks, especially visibility in different lighting conditions. 69 00:05:42,695 --> 00:05:50,151 To maximize contrast under bright ambient light, ideally the glowing element of the display should be directly viewable - 70 00:05:50,151 --> 00:05:53,357 which was one of the Nixie tube’s greatest strengths. 71 00:05:53,357 --> 00:05:59,299 So you might just make a seven-segment nixie tube, which was indeed a thing (more or less). 72 00:05:59,299 --> 00:06:07,883 But glowing neon cathodes still needed the same high-voltage DC as ordinary Nixies which was annoying and expensive to implement. 73 00:06:07,883 --> 00:06:12,232 Luckily, the vacuum fluorescent display had just popped on the scene. 74 00:06:12,232 --> 00:06:20,942 These devices required low-er voltage than neon discharge tech which was good,  but the tubes themselves were more complex. 75 00:06:20,942 --> 00:06:28,858 These vintage IV-11 tubes might look simple enough but a closer look reveals there are several layers here. 76 00:06:28,858 --> 00:06:35,224 At the front of the tube is a cathode made  of two heater wires which emit electrons through thermionic emission. 77 00:06:35,224 --> 00:06:45,172 There’s the seven segments forming an 8 at the back, of course, but look closely and you’ll see that right in front of the 8 is a control grid. 78 00:06:45,172 --> 00:06:52,661 In operation, that grid is positively charged and will absorb  the electrons coming from the cathode wires at the front of the tube. 79 00:06:52,661 --> 00:06:58,257 But the individual segments behind the grid can also be positively charged. 80 00:06:58,257 --> 00:07:04,839 When energized, they also attract electrons and are able to  yank some of them through the control grid. 81 00:07:04,839 --> 00:07:09,858 When those electrons collide with the phosphors on top of the segments, they glow. 82 00:07:09,858 --> 00:07:11,252 Pretty neat. 83 00:07:11,252 --> 00:07:13,864 But that’s even more complex than nixies! 84 00:07:13,864 --> 00:07:17,903 And for every problem they solved they introduced another. 85 00:07:17,903 --> 00:07:22,179 These tubes didn’t need high voltage,  but they needed two voltages: 86 00:07:22,179 --> 00:07:28,911 a low voltage for the cathode wires and something around 30 volts for the anodes and control grid. 87 00:07:28,911 --> 00:07:30,925 Better than 180, of course, 88 00:07:30,925 --> 00:07:37,823 but still much higher than the logic circuitry of whatever you want to put these in, which was typically 5 volts. 89 00:07:37,823 --> 00:07:39,786 And, as you might be able to tell, 90 00:07:39,786 --> 00:07:47,653 these early tubes have pretty poor contrast under even modest ambient lighting since the phosphors are white when unlit. 91 00:07:47,653 --> 00:07:52,111 So, both neon tech and VFDs had their problems. 92 00:07:52,111 --> 00:07:59,676 But we were already building a lot of electronic devices which needed numerical displays, and there wasn’t time to wait. 93 00:07:59,676 --> 00:08:03,561 So, the fine folks at RCA barfed out an idea. 94 00:08:03,561 --> 00:08:05,254 Here’s my impression of how that went: 95 00:08:06,616 --> 00:08:07,535 What if… 96 00:08:08,452 --> 00:08:10,406 why don’t we just make a weird little light bulb? 97 00:08:10,406 --> 00:08:13,865 [fart noise] And thus explains the Numitron! 98 00:08:13,865 --> 00:08:19,460 First hitting the market in 1970, these really are just weird little light bulbs… 99 00:08:19,460 --> 00:08:22,010 but with seven filaments. 100 00:08:22,010 --> 00:08:28,799 Each filament is stretched across little pegs on a support board so they become the segments of a seven-segment display. 101 00:08:28,799 --> 00:08:33,999 Then that assembly got shoved into a standard 9-pin miniature vacuum tube enclosure. 102 00:08:33,999 --> 00:08:42,897 Just apply power to those pins to light up the right combination of those filaments and you technically have a functional digital display device. 103 00:08:42,897 --> 00:08:51,671 Oh, and this model doesn’t have it, but they were available with a decimal point option which took the form of a tiny little X crossing these four pegs. 104 00:08:51,671 --> 00:08:58,439 These days, of course, the trendy thing to do with weird old display tubes is to build a clock so that’s what I did. 105 00:08:58,439 --> 00:09:02,683 But in the spirit of the Numitron, I didn’t bother doing it well! 106 00:09:02,683 --> 00:09:04,289 I did the bare minimum. 107 00:09:04,289 --> 00:09:06,100 But it technically works. 108 00:09:06,100 --> 00:09:09,334 I think that was the slogan for the Numitron! 109 00:09:09,505 --> 00:09:15,372 Now, I’m about to be rather unkind to this piece of alleged technology 110 00:09:15,372 --> 00:09:21,772 but before I embark on my tirade where I count all the ways this is just a terrible terrible product, 111 00:09:21,772 --> 00:09:25,000 I need to admit that I also kind of like them. 112 00:09:25,000 --> 00:09:31,339 I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of building seven-segment displays out of weird things. 113 00:09:31,339 --> 00:09:36,947 Like, imagine a clock where each segment is a four-foot fluorescent tube. 114 00:09:36,947 --> 00:09:39,933 You could read that thing from miles away! 115 00:09:39,933 --> 00:09:43,337 And, uh, when I was in college, 116 00:09:43,337 --> 00:09:47,863 I built a giant clock where the segments were sections of LED tape. 117 00:09:47,863 --> 00:09:49,529 RGB, of course. 118 00:09:49,529 --> 00:09:53,412 So Numitrons are very much up my alley. 119 00:09:53,412 --> 00:10:01,125 And while today the use of incandescent filaments  in a seven-segment display might seem objectively absurd, 120 00:10:01,125 --> 00:10:04,088 that was in fact the point! 121 00:10:04,088 --> 00:10:09,630 These tubes are dead simple and require nothing special at all to use. 122 00:10:09,630 --> 00:10:13,875 They only need 5V to glow, so they didn’t need their own power supply. 123 00:10:13,875 --> 00:10:19,828 Incandescent filaments are self-regulating, too, so there’s no need to add current-limiting resistors to the circuit. 124 00:10:19,828 --> 00:10:25,972 And since they were so tiny the segments only consumed about 25 mA each. 125 00:10:25,972 --> 00:10:35,315 This is actually the largest version of the tubes RCA made, but they don't even consume a watt of power with all segments lit. 126 00:10:35,315 --> 00:10:42,126 The ridiculous simplicity of these meant that you could drive them directly from a seven-segment BCD decoder chip, 127 00:10:42,126 --> 00:10:47,146 all powered by the same 5V supply as the rest of your newfangled digital widget. 128 00:10:47,240 --> 00:10:53,000 That would save money in the hardware design,  and since the Numitron itself is so freaking simple,   129 00:10:53,000 --> 00:10:56,137 the display tubes were cheaper than the competition. 130 00:10:56,137 --> 00:10:59,249 So it wasn’t a terrible idea. 131 00:10:59,249 --> 00:11:07,845 But, as you might be able to tell just from looking at them, the execution of the idea left quite a lot to be desired. 132 00:11:07,845 --> 00:11:12,771 If I could describe these in a word, it would be janky. 133 00:11:12,771 --> 00:11:15,379 Or perhaps slapdash. 134 00:11:15,379 --> 00:11:20,247 Nothing about these feels like a finished product that should exist. 135 00:11:20,247 --> 00:11:22,923 They just look way too crude! 136 00:11:22,923 --> 00:11:30,513 The extremely thin segments lead to them being not very legible, and the arrangement of those segments is just… 137 00:11:30,513 --> 00:11:31,584 awful. 138 00:11:31,584 --> 00:11:33,769 There’s way too much of a gap between them 139 00:11:33,769 --> 00:11:41,457 and the vertical segments extend uncomfortably beyond the top and bottom segments which just looks weird. 140 00:11:41,457 --> 00:11:50,841 And they didn’t lean the 8 to accommodate the decimal point at the bottom so the display is off-center in the tube which is infuriating. 141 00:11:50,841 --> 00:11:53,304 But its problems don’t end there. 142 00:11:53,304 --> 00:11:56,433 Do you notice something wrong about the background? 143 00:11:56,433 --> 00:12:03,624 For reasons that I cannot fathom, RCA decided to make the support board for the filaments grey. 144 00:12:03,624 --> 00:12:05,259 That was a mistake. 145 00:12:05,259 --> 00:12:08,747 It should be black, or at least as dark as possible. 146 00:12:08,747 --> 00:12:17,698 Because, ya see, any ambient light that hits these things is going to brighten that background and make the glowing filaments harder to see. 147 00:12:17,698 --> 00:12:21,310 And, if that weren’t enough, even in a pitch-black room 148 00:12:21,310 --> 00:12:26,814 the filaments themselves illuminate that support board enough to where contrast is reduced, 149 00:12:26,814 --> 00:12:33,130 making the already kind of hard to parse numbers just a little bit harder to identify. 150 00:12:33,130 --> 00:12:39,797 Now, I will give them the benefit of the doubt and say that there could be some materials reason this isn’t black - 151 00:12:39,797 --> 00:12:45,075 maybe a nice, dark background wouldn’t survive the heat of the glass-sealing process. 152 00:12:45,075 --> 00:12:50,077 But I mean, these VFD tubes have a much darker background so… 153 00:12:50,160 --> 00:12:58,180 And it might be hard to tell but these aren’t even straight - and I don’t mean my handwork when installing the sockets. 154 00:12:58,180 --> 00:13:05,013 The internal support structure holding the filaments is leaning noticeably in several of these tubes 155 00:13:05,013 --> 00:13:09,833 so with all the tubes fully seated, the numbers are slightly crooked 156 00:13:09,833 --> 00:13:16,833 and with multiple tubes you’ll never have a perfectly aligned display unless you commit to a lot of fiddling. 157 00:13:16,833 --> 00:13:23,281 Honestly, I don’t think anyone at RCA was particularly proud of these things. 158 00:13:23,281 --> 00:13:27,202 I mean, if they were, I would think they would have tried a little harder. 159 00:13:27,202 --> 00:13:28,777 Just look at the datasheet. 160 00:13:28,777 --> 00:13:32,153 These are the other varieties RCA sold. 161 00:13:32,153 --> 00:13:34,578 A plus or minus tube. 162 00:13:34,578 --> 00:13:35,681 Wow. 163 00:13:35,681 --> 00:13:38,683 And a plus or minus 1 tube. 164 00:13:38,683 --> 00:13:41,118 Really workin’ hard over there. 165 00:13:41,118 --> 00:13:45,451 In this promo piece about them, we don’t learn whose idea this was. 166 00:13:45,451 --> 00:13:50,737 We just hear from Robert D. Reichert, the manager of the whole dang tube design department. 167 00:13:50,737 --> 00:13:56,316 And RCA didn’t bother putting a patent number or  even patent pending on these boxes 168 00:13:56,316 --> 00:13:59,210 which are specifically branded Numitron. 169 00:13:59,210 --> 00:14:02,306 That made me wonder if they even bothered patenting it. 170 00:14:02,306 --> 00:14:06,653 Honestly the only nice thing about these is their name: Numitron. 171 00:14:06,653 --> 00:14:08,275 That’s pretty cool. 172 00:14:08,275 --> 00:14:10,113 But it’s also lazy! 173 00:14:10,113 --> 00:14:14,771 This is literally just numi (short for numerical I guess) and tron. 174 00:14:14,771 --> 00:14:19,881 And back then tron was as infectious a buzzword as AI is today. 175 00:14:19,960 --> 00:14:23,698 I was starting to lose my mind over the origin of these things. 176 00:14:23,698 --> 00:14:26,936 The idea seems simultaneously too obvious 177 00:14:26,936 --> 00:14:30,706 (this write-up in Popular Electronics even says as much) 178 00:14:30,706 --> 00:14:34,361 yet these are also just… not good. 179 00:14:34,361 --> 00:14:39,085 I could not rest until I found the patent and who invented these. 180 00:14:39,085 --> 00:14:41,712 Luckily I did, and here it is. 181 00:14:41,712 --> 00:14:47,414 Apparently these were the brainchild of Richard Arthur Bonnette and Norman Lee Lindburg. 182 00:14:47,414 --> 00:14:55,497 Now, RCA was a huge research-driven organization back then so it’s plausible that these were just two names pulled out of a hat 183 00:14:55,497 --> 00:14:58,275 and I kind of hope it was. 184 00:14:58,275 --> 00:15:01,442 This does not scream quality. 185 00:15:01,442 --> 00:15:08,058 Editor’s note: while looking for a different patent (the one showing the projection displays which used little light bulbs) 186 00:15:08,058 --> 00:15:11,984 I ran across this patent issued in 1959 to Art Garfunkl - 187 00:15:11,984 --> 00:15:14,443 I mean A. R. Garfinkel. 188 00:15:14,443 --> 00:15:22,180 And… well, sure enough the idea was too obvious and RCA was not the first to have this idea. 189 00:15:22,180 --> 00:15:25,104 The implementation here is very different, though - 190 00:15:25,104 --> 00:15:31,889 it’s in a flat package (which is gonna come up again later) but most importantly, if I’m understanding the diagrams correctly, 191 00:15:31,889 --> 00:15:38,429 the filaments are producing light indirectly  and it’s guided towards a mask with small slits at the front. 192 00:15:38,429 --> 00:15:46,073 I’m guessing this concept never made it to production, and that drawing implies it’s got the widest bezels you’ve ever seen. 193 00:15:46,073 --> 00:15:48,185 But I wanted to throw it in here. 194 00:15:48,185 --> 00:15:53,800 You can see from the datasheet that RCA was grasping at straws trying to sell these things. 195 00:15:53,800 --> 00:15:59,648 Oh sure, low-voltage operation is very real and  objectively a good differentiator. 196 00:15:59,648 --> 00:16:03,812 But “void of clutter” is clearly a dig at Nixies, 197 00:16:03,812 --> 00:16:13,257 and the whole “oh, it’s incandescent with a wide spectral output so you can use color filters to obtain a display of any desired color” is true, 198 00:16:13,257 --> 00:16:14,923 but a stretch. 199 00:16:14,923 --> 00:16:18,345 I mean, sure, but good luck with blue. 200 00:16:18,345 --> 00:16:26,196 RCA designed them to last 100,000 hours and, well, that’s only gonna be possible if the filaments burn quite dimly. 201 00:16:26,196 --> 00:16:32,900 So they’re not producing much light towards the blue end of the spectrum and a blue filter will really cut their output. 202 00:16:32,900 --> 00:16:38,582 Now, to be fair the tubes can be a lot  brighter than they appear in this clock. 203 00:16:38,582 --> 00:16:45,834 They’re power-limited here thanks to the BCD decoders I had which are not capable of passing 25 mA. 204 00:16:45,834 --> 00:16:51,143 If I apply 5 volts directly to a tube, we can see that it can get this bright. 205 00:16:51,143 --> 00:16:52,811 Which is honestly impressive! 206 00:16:52,811 --> 00:16:57,770 That’s definitely brighter than a Nixie tube, and whiter than I was expecting. 207 00:16:57,770 --> 00:17:04,988 But this also really reveals how much the filaments  are brightening the background and reducing contrast. 208 00:17:04,988 --> 00:17:07,501 That really shouldn’t be grey. 209 00:17:07,501 --> 00:17:10,397 I mean you didn’t need a rocket surgeon to tell you that. 210 00:17:11,000 --> 00:17:14,835 While RCA didn’t seem to try very hard here, 211 00:17:14,835 --> 00:17:18,404 the concept was valuable enough to attract clones. 212 00:17:18,404 --> 00:17:23,889 There are plenty of variants available that were made in the USSR, but those are even worse! 213 00:17:23,889 --> 00:17:28,840 These IV-9 tubes have filaments that sag under their own weight. 214 00:17:29,600 --> 00:17:35,440 Later, incandescent seven-segment displays just  like Numitrons but in flat packages appeared,   215 00:17:35,440 --> 00:17:40,738 and for some reason I have a memory that they  were common in gas pumps for a brief time 216 00:17:40,738 --> 00:17:43,930 but literally I have no idea why that’s in my head. 217 00:17:43,930 --> 00:17:46,172 I just read it somewhere somewhen. 218 00:17:46,172 --> 00:17:49,764 Those clones were all short-lived, though,  just like the Numitron, 219 00:17:49,764 --> 00:17:53,449 because of a little thing called the light-emitting diode. 220 00:17:53,449 --> 00:18:01,397 They had already been invented by the time RCA got the Numitron out the door, but they were extremely expensive in 1970. 221 00:18:01,397 --> 00:18:10,748 And, the first seven-segment displays which used LEDs were tiny things where each segment was actually multiple LEDs on a tiny little chip, 222 00:18:10,748 --> 00:18:17,597 and they relied on magnification lenses to make the tiny glowing digital dots appear larger. 223 00:18:17,597 --> 00:18:21,212 That’s why the Numitron made sense to use. 224 00:18:21,212 --> 00:18:26,202 But it didn’t take long at all for LEDs to get cheap,  and once they did? 225 00:18:26,202 --> 00:18:28,461 The Numitron was doomed. 226 00:18:28,461 --> 00:18:34,463 LED packages like this quickly became the  defacto standard for seven-segment displays. 227 00:18:34,463 --> 00:18:41,891 These are much like those really early and large displays where ordinary light bulbs were stuck down holes with lenses on the front, 228 00:18:41,891 --> 00:18:46,086 but miniaturized by replacing the light bulbs with tiny LEDs. 229 00:18:46,086 --> 00:18:54,656 Those LEDs are firing up at small lenses embedded in epoxy resin and that forms an incredibly rugged and simple structure. 230 00:18:54,656 --> 00:19:02,707 The lens shapes can also be tweaked for maximum legibility, and resin’s a lot easier to deal with than glass, too. 231 00:19:02,707 --> 00:19:08,161 So once production lines for these things  spun up the Numitron just looked ridiculous. 232 00:19:08,161 --> 00:19:11,354 And let’s not forget the vacuum fluorescent display. 233 00:19:11,354 --> 00:19:15,505 These things are still in use today - in fact there’s one in my stove. 234 00:19:15,505 --> 00:19:21,949 The single-digit tube form factor found here became just as ridiculous as the Numitron before long, 235 00:19:21,949 --> 00:19:26,918 but its the problems with contrast in ambient light were easily fixed with filtering 236 00:19:26,918 --> 00:19:33,017 and soon we learned how to make VFDs flat and pack  them with hundreds of individual segments. 237 00:19:33,017 --> 00:19:41,443 You might have 8 seven-segement displays all in a single package for a calculator, or even dot-matrix alphanumeric displays. 238 00:19:41,443 --> 00:19:49,244 Through multiplexing, a technique where the entire display is broken up into several sections addressed one at a time in rapid succession, 239 00:19:49,244 --> 00:19:55,963 we could make very complicated and very customizable  displays featuring custom graphics and multiple colors, 240 00:19:55,963 --> 00:20:00,981 all with excellent readability, longevity, and simple control circuits. 241 00:20:00,981 --> 00:20:04,485 Oh, right and then there was the liquid-crystal display. 242 00:20:04,485 --> 00:20:07,981 Which, funnily enough, was invented by George Heilmeier 243 00:20:07,981 --> 00:20:09,763 at RCA! 244 00:20:09,763 --> 00:20:11,952 And before the Numitron! 245 00:20:12,646 --> 00:20:20,119 It took quite a while to become viable, though, and RCA’s first version used a concept called dynamic scattering mode, 246 00:20:20,119 --> 00:20:21,723 and wasn’t super great. 247 00:20:21,723 --> 00:20:27,884 Other innovators improved upon it over the years,  and I’m really only including it as a footnote since it wasn’t self-illuminating 248 00:20:27,884 --> 00:20:34,510 and it was not quite a contemporary of the Numitron, at least not ones that actually worked well. 249 00:20:34,510 --> 00:20:38,455 But once we figured them out the Numitron looked even sillier. 250 00:20:38,455 --> 00:20:41,853 Still, I can’t help but admire the Numitron. 251 00:20:41,853 --> 00:20:50,379 It’s perhaps the perfect example of the phrase “so crazy it just might work” distilled into a product. 252 00:20:50,379 --> 00:20:53,888 Trouble was, while it did technically work, 253 00:20:53,888 --> 00:21:00,249 its advantages became irrelevant approximately seven minutes after RCA brought it to market. 254 00:21:00,249 --> 00:21:07,673 Of course that’s not entirely true, but I am all but certain that device manufacturers, when shopping for display technologies, 255 00:21:07,673 --> 00:21:13,020 looked at how poorly these render numbers and how jankily they were constructed 256 00:21:13,020 --> 00:21:18,303 and quickly concluded they’d rather pay more for something a little more polished. 257 00:21:18,303 --> 00:21:22,646 Slapping these in your digital device screamed cheap. 258 00:21:22,646 --> 00:21:25,493 If there’s a lesson we can learn from the Numitron, 259 00:21:25,493 --> 00:21:32,552 it’s probably that there are times where the simplest possible option really is too simple. 260 00:21:32,552 --> 00:21:37,949 If it had a little more time in the oven and RCA tried executing it a little better, 261 00:21:37,949 --> 00:21:40,814 maybe it would have seen more success. 262 00:21:40,814 --> 00:21:46,302 But it was always going to be stuck with the shapes you can make with a filament. 263 00:21:46,302 --> 00:21:49,642 In other words, thin, straight lines. 264 00:21:49,642 --> 00:21:55,511 With every other display technology offering much more legible characters and even custom glyphs, 265 00:21:55,511 --> 00:22:02,587 the Numitron would never be able to branch out beyond seven-segment and maybe alphanumeric displays. 266 00:22:02,587 --> 00:22:06,021 But I’ll bet those would look even worse than this. 267 00:22:06,021 --> 00:22:10,836 But hey, at least they managed to get it to market when it actually made some sense. 268 00:22:10,836 --> 00:22:13,045 Unlike that Videodisc player. 269 00:22:13,045 --> 00:22:14,525 Oh look, LEDs! 270 00:22:15,467 --> 00:22:18,013 ♫ slapdashedly smooth jazz ♫ 271 00:22:19,128 --> 00:22:20,334 I have to record that line again. 272 00:22:20,334 --> 00:22:23,148 Ignore all the continuity errors.... 273 00:22:23,148 --> 00:22:24,396 It’s a running clock. 274 00:22:24,396 --> 00:22:26,035 For your benefit… 275 00:22:26,035 --> 00:22:28,600 [waits until the hour rollover] 276 00:22:31,548 --> 00:22:32,452 OK 277 00:22:32,452 --> 00:22:36,119 …and, since the Numitron itself is so dang simple, 278 00:22:36,119 --> 00:22:38,382 the tubes werech cheap chchpbbt. 279 00:22:40,141 --> 00:22:40,908 Fell apart. 280 00:22:40,908 --> 00:22:44,945 The earliest known representation of them is this eh debekadababa 281 00:22:44,945 --> 00:22:47,478 Ah, the seven-segment display. 282 00:22:47,478 --> 00:22:49,481 Make an aight… what? 283 00:22:49,481 --> 00:22:54,563 The use of incandescent filaments in a seven-segment display might seem objectibely… 284 00:22:54,563 --> 00:22:55,863 objectibely? 285 00:22:55,863 --> 00:23:00,731 Because of this, Nixies quite naturally attracted plenty of commetition. 286 00:23:00,731 --> 00:23:03,425 But, I’ve… mmm. 287 00:23:05,209 --> 00:23:08,198 RCA really did some numbers here, didn't they? 288 00:23:08,198 --> 00:23:11,004 Or should I say, they really did a number on themselves? 289 00:23:11,004 --> 00:23:14,194 Perhaps this is the product that signaled the beginning of the end for RCA. 290 00:23:14,194 --> 00:23:17,039 Imagine if they had stuck Numitron tubes in the Selectivision players though. 291 00:23:17,039 --> 00:23:20,894 Maybe that would have sold it!