I was working at KGM in the 1970s when these displays were being manufactured by about 6 ladies working in a corner of the workshop, KGM's main business being CCTV. They were designed by a very clever chap called Harold Freedman, the reason they appeared in the Bond film was that KGM had directors who were associated with Twickenham Film Studios which was only a few miles away from KGM in Isleworth. I still work in instrument calibration and these displays crop up on occasion in ancient voltmeters. Never imagined they would be highly sought after and featured onYT.
Wow TWK still exists- even the telephone number still is linked to them. You can also see that it was sold before 1993 since the ZIP code format got changed after that
Oh, I like that a lot! It has been wonderful to see the many very creative approaches to non-analog displays... thanks so much for bringing this kind of thing to us all!
Beautifully retro, daggy, and desireable all at the same time! No moving parts, no electronics in the actual display, just lamps and a clear acrylic duct of sorts! Where there's a will (to create a digital display) there's a way.
Wow, what a find! I repaired a very early electronic calculator using similar displays while in college. It was about twice the size of an IBM Selectric typewriter and made from discrete transistors. The displays were not as compact or as readable as these,
I watched "Goldfinger" back in the day. ( I was 10) After sometime I was able to watch it again when digital displays became popular and noticed this. I was wondering that those kind of displays were in use on 1964 and this version was more simple and neat that current nixies that appears to resemble. This movie is my favourite James Bond. The music was awsome.
I know a guy who experimented with a 4-track and the (orchestral) Goldfinger theme cut from the vinyl. He played the theme backwards against itself at half speed, for example. His final project was "A Fistful of Goldfingers". Four instances of the same Goldfinger theme going at once with a slight time shift, slowed to half speed. It is a gigantic sound, just huge. I still wish I had my copy of the tape he made me.
When I was a kid, my mom was working as a telephone exchange operator. It was an enterprise exchange for the nearby mines. A quasielectronic type, as they call it. She had that large control panel with lots of buttons and a three digit display for the number beibg dialed. It was of this type, only produced by some other manufacturer, I guess ... Memories ...
Haha! It arrived! Finally! :) Nice you had all the necessary bulbs. I only had four but never tried it. So nice it all worked out! And look at that beautiful light conductors in action! Thanks for giving it the spotlight it deserves! :)
@@musicrinda Yes, indeed! You're all very welcome! It was actually a no-brainer since Fran is constantly showing rare displays in a devotional way ;) I'm just glad that the displays could be shown to as many interested folks as there are on this channel O:)
I believe no human on earth has designed a wider repertoire of display drivers than Fran. If you can think of a display, you can bet your bottom dollar Fran can drive it.
This can be done with a laser engraver, but you'll need some sort of thin spacer between each acrylic piece to create an air gap, otherwise light will leak into surrounding digits. Bending wouldn't be required because in 2021 we have very small LEDs suitable for lighting the edge directly.
@@marc-andreservant201 3D printer will create just about anything you need to hold just about anything....keep the lighting board in line with the edge of the acrylic and a smidgen of an air gap.
I never paid attention to the 007 timer. This is the first time I see one of these and I'm 50 years old. This is beautiful, thanks Fran for showing it.
As my son always says, people were geniuses back in the day. Love that it can be cleanly disassembled so the bulbs can be switched out. The light pipe design is so clever. Your driver is amazing too!
This is a really cool display, I love the way the elements are nested together, and the pointed adjustment screw for pressing them lightly against each other. One can almost see the 3D printing folks thinking, "Hmmm". There was a brief touch on using a gel filter to change the colour*¹ as displayed. While probably intended to make this look like a Nixie, for the love of peat*² why, this is an idea that could be further exploited beyond incandescent sources. For those of us incessant disassemblers who lived through the VFD calculator era, blue and green filters to push the spectra a little bit sideways were ubiquitous. This can also be used to change the color of other phosphor based displays, not only Nimo and some color LEDs*³, but also VFD. We don't have to be resigned to the classic colors because "that's how it's always been done" either. Crank up a display and play with some filters, the weirder the better! *¹ The subject is a British display. *² Misspelling intended. *³ ... though it may be a sacrilege for some of these vintage displays...
I love the infinity mirror effect. It gives the digits depth, and substance. From certain viewing angles the numbers almost seem to be moving FAST, like speed lines :) Thank you for sharing Fran!
When I was a kid, I had a Zenith stereo system with a "Digi-Lite" dial face. There were 2 layers, one for FM and one for AM. They worked just like this, but didn't light as evenly due to the length of each diffuser.
Really nice displays, In my early work years we had some of these in test equipment (Trend, UK made) pity I never thought to salvage them. I keep getting reminded whenever I see that Bond movie. They'd be real easy to fit LED's into them, without butchering them.
Okay, this thing is a TRUE work of beauty!! I had NO IDEA how it worked, my brain just couldn't see how it worked. Then you turned it on, oh wow that is so cool! PS - I find myself randomly singing your Fran Song lol! Seriously, I will just bust out dancing and singing "....in the lab..... fixin' somethin'....... in the lab....." hehehe I love your channel, Fran! I learn SO much! Thank you for your devotion, I know you have been struggling with a finding a new audience. I believe you will find what you need :) Thanks again!!
Note that the screw is a PoziDrive Phillips head. Using a non-pozi screwdriver can mangle the head. Many British cars, MGs and Lotus to name two, use these for ease and speed of assembly. And they are always stripped by clueless owners and shade-tree mechanics! Good video.
The crowdfunded "Gixie tube" imitation nixie tube clock project from a couple years back works on exactly the same principle as this, but with LEDs. The variety of these old non-7-segment number displays is amazing.
Bond reference is good timing. Saw the trailer in the cinema today, sorry, let me translate, "movie theatre", supposed to be more PC, but Danny still managed to say "she's so disarming". That was beautiful to see, thx
Watching this mesmerizing display gave me an idea 💡! It would be really really cool to have a Screen Saver of all of Fran's Displays to run on our Big Screens just to watch or run in the background. It would be a fun way to introduce Fran to our friends and guests!
What a glorious piece of equipment. I always loved these displays (and that clip from Goldfinger). I do recall seeing a bench meter with these displays opened up for repair - there was a matching module with a decimal point that just sat between two adjacent digit modules. It looked like a solid block with a lamp and a simple acrylic rod for the d.p.
Love the alternating pattern as it lights up in sequence. Thanks for sharing with us, and thanks to the viewer for parting with them! I hope you can find one more to recreate the Bond bomb...! Or maybe you can get some laser engraved light pipes to recreate the FRANLABS opening in as many ways as possible! Thanks again!
I like the simple straight forward curve-linear font of the display. I seem to remember seeing it in some other movie besides Goldfinger, some sci-fi flick I'm sure.
I saw something similar with a 1960's digital voltmeter in the Navy in 1973. My shop bench would receive a digital voltmeter or an analog comparator as Test Equipment would give us during the scheduled equipment rotations and calibrations. One was a 5 digit digital voltmeter with a large display window with the planes visible with only a black piece of metal separating the digits. Each character was operated by a little relay. You can hear the ponging of these relays as you supplied the voltage to the probes and the display changes. That was an accurate power hogging, heat generating beast. I wondered how much the Navy paid for that in the 1960's.
I found a very similar one to the ones you have in one of my junk boxes. mine has an edge connector rather than the solder lugs on the back. will have to have a go at powering it up.
Oh man, this brings me back... My dad had a big piece of test equipment, I don't remember precisely what it was, but it was rack mount, about 6U high, and it had edge-lit displays with a sequential relay driving each digit. I turned it on a few times and the digits would start cycling chaotically (apparently something was really wrong with it), and my dad ended up parting it out to make space in his shop after he determined it wasn't worth fixing. I hope he didn't throw away the display assemblies, they were the coolest thing to watch. I still have a sequential relay assembly from it somewhere in my collection...
I have an old frequency counter at home with 8 of these in it. I scrapped the rest but kept the displays, they are a bit crusty but you're welcome to them if you would like them.
Some clocks sold on eBay have a somewhat similar approach. They often have "nixie" in the title even though they aren't nixies at all but edge lit. On title is "LED-NIXIE-M, 6-STELLIGER BAUSATZ LED-UHR NIXIE DESIGN", another is "RGB Simulation Glow Tube Clock LED Desktop Decoration Tube Clock DIY Kit Gift", another is "Modern Digital RGB LED Clock NO Nixie Tube Clock Assembly Kit Christmas Lights". If you search for "digital clock kit" you will see some of these thiings.
I had a very similar, multidigital numeric display, from the 1950s, but silly me, left it behind when I moved to a new area. Tiny little incadescent bulbs, a few were burned out, lit up the edges of the plastic numeric panels, a beautiful example of early electronic tech it was. As I recall, the nuimbers were continuous linear traces in the plastic, rather than matrices of little dots.
Now I want to design and build my own, drive them using LEDs. You could really use some beautiful fonts for your display. Totally impractical, but hella cool.
Funkiest lamp I Ve seen. Lovely mechanism without high voltage and phosphor. If I ever take over the world I d use these on my doomsday contraption. Thanks Frantastic.
Oh, how fascinating! I've seen pictures of such displays a couple times before (and in that "Bond" movie), including someone's LED-powered interpretation of the concept, but I've never seen how a vintage part was constructed. Neat! 🙂 Thanks for showing us how it works inside and out!
It would be a cool project to replicate this with some open source DXF files to laser cut acrylic, and maybe a 3d printed bracket to hold some LEDs. It looks wonderful lit up.
If it isn't something Apollo blessed by Armstrong himself then it's something else unobtanium. Fran has the super-special stuff! Fascinating! Thanks Fran!
Last and only time I'd seen these displays was when I worked for Racal and that over 50 years ago. For those who don't know Racal was a British company into military RF communications and the like.
Fran - When you get a chance, you should go down to the Independence Seaport Museum and shoot some video. It is a very interesting place and often overlooked in the Philly museum scene.
That is a very cool display! I can only imagine the fun/trouble the prop builders for Goldfinger had getting 3 of those to run. They show up great on camera, too! Thanks for sharing this, Fran.
Hi Fran from the UK. Well I didn't plan to have a bask this afternoon, but I've just realised how I've missed a long meaningful bask. I basked repeatedly to that display and now I feel completely rela.................
I had something like this in mind several years ago bidding on an engraving pantograph. I thought that it would be awesome using UV LEDs and that fluorescent "orange" acrylic that seems to light up just sitting on a table. Interesting that the numbers are sequential back to front .. As I understood, Nixie cathode placement was thought out to allow maximum view of each digit, but that doesn't seem to matter much here. Here's a project for you Fran: Never mind those digital fish tanks and fire places. Betcha lots of us nerds would pay for a montage of all your displays doing their thing in an endless loop. :D
You'd think these would have been very common given how unbelievably simple / cheap to make they are compared to most the other weird and wonderful displays you've discovered.
The inside of that display looks like the inside of a high voltage nixie tube. Each individual wires that make the shape of each number or symbol. I wish those older displays like the one you have were still being made with different shapes for different purposes. We could’ve had a large dot matrix display, but that would probably be too much.
Saw similar large displays in a fruit machine in Spain in the 1980s, there was a numerical display for how much you had won, and credit, but the best part was the reels were this type of display showing line drawings of the various fruits in different colours.never saw machines like this before or since, you'd love seeing one I'm sure of that.
I like this so much I might try making some. I think LEDs would be a good idea instead of incandescent bulbs though. It should be easy enough to etch acrylic with a laser or possibly mill channels into it.
Very cool and inspiring display! I didn't blink when watching it run :) I noticed two things: 1) the number of reflections increasing when going towards the front layers. 2) the layers towards the bottom get dimmer - could compensate by trimming each lamp current/voltage on the driver.
I wonder if clever use of antireflective coatings could mitigate the first issue. Certainly one could also just use a dark filter in front of the whole stack and in turn increase the segment brightness (with LEDs, since they don’t produce anywhere near as much heat).
3:11 that's a *pozidriv* screw... did they already exist back then ? It looks original. The pozidriv patent dates back to 1962, Goldfinger was released in 1964 so it must have started shooting in 62-63. Tight timing ! Either that or the display you've got was manufactured later.
The way you can see each bit of acrylic light up from the side is really cool. Thanks for sharing!
I like the black foil between the layers to reduse the amount of spill from each segment. Going to have to remember this idea.
I was working at KGM in the 1970s when these displays were being manufactured by about 6 ladies working in a corner of the workshop, KGM's main business being CCTV. They were designed by a very clever chap called Harold Freedman, the reason they appeared in the Bond film was that KGM had directors who were associated with Twickenham Film Studios which was only a few miles away from KGM in Isleworth. I still work in instrument calibration and these displays crop up on occasion in ancient voltmeters. Never imagined they would be highly sought after and featured onYT.
What fun! The side view is great!
Now I'm thinking laser cutter/engraver and some thin acrylic sheets and you can make your own letters/fonts
Yep! People have been doing this for a few years now to make “lixie” clocks.
Yeah, any font you like !....cheers.
Wow TWK still exists- even the telephone number still is linked to them. You can also see that it was sold before 1993 since the ZIP code format got changed after that
and Fran managed a decent ü I think
I love how each number reflects off of the previous pieces of acrylic. Kind of gives the numbers a 3d effect. Very cool!
Oh, I like that a lot! It has been wonderful to see the many very creative approaches to non-analog displays... thanks so much for bringing this kind of thing to us all!
Beautifully retro, daggy, and desireable all at the same time! No moving parts, no electronics in the actual display, just lamps and a clear acrylic duct of sorts! Where there's a will (to create a digital display) there's a way.
Wow, what a find! I repaired a very early electronic calculator using similar displays while in college. It was about twice the size of an IBM Selectric typewriter and made from discrete transistors. The displays were not as compact or as readable as these,
I watched "Goldfinger" back in the day. ( I was 10) After sometime I was able to watch it again when digital displays became popular and noticed this. I was wondering that those kind of displays were in use on 1964 and this version was more simple and neat that current nixies that appears to resemble. This movie is my favourite James Bond. The music was awsome.
I know a guy who experimented with a 4-track and the (orchestral) Goldfinger theme cut from the vinyl. He played the theme backwards against itself at half speed, for example. His final project was "A Fistful of Goldfingers". Four instances of the same Goldfinger theme going at once with a slight time shift, slowed to half speed. It is a gigantic sound, just huge. I still wish I had my copy of the tape he made me.
The amber light along the curved sides of the acrylic pieces reminds me of Clu's aesthetic in Tron: Legacy.
When I was a kid, my mom was working as a telephone exchange operator. It was an enterprise exchange for the nearby mines. A quasielectronic type, as they call it. She had that large control panel with lots of buttons and a three digit display for the number beibg dialed. It was of this type, only produced by some other manufacturer, I guess ...
Memories ...
Haha! It arrived! Finally! :)
Nice you had all the necessary bulbs. I only had four but never tried it. So nice it all worked out!
And look at that beautiful light conductors in action! Thanks for giving it the spotlight it deserves! :)
I assume that you are THE Nikolaus who gave them to Fran. I thank you for such a generous gift to share with us.
@@musicrinda Yes, indeed! You're all very welcome! It was actually a no-brainer since Fran is constantly showing rare displays in a devotional way ;)
I'm just glad that the displays could be shown to as many interested folks as there are on this channel O:)
I believe no human on earth has designed a wider repertoire of display drivers than Fran. If you can think of a display, you can bet your bottom dollar Fran can drive it.
"If they could get a washing machine to incandesce, my Fran could drive it."
Of course she just happens to already have a driver built...and can find it.
Very cool!
Naturally I immediately started thinking about what it would take to build my own.
Look at the “lixie” clocks people have made.
I was thinking the same thing......really just need thin acrylic, an engraver, a bender and a 3D printer.
This can be done with a laser engraver, but you'll need some sort of thin spacer between each acrylic piece to create an air gap, otherwise light will leak into surrounding digits. Bending wouldn't be required because in 2021 we have very small LEDs suitable for lighting the edge directly.
@@marc-andreservant201 3D printer will create just about anything you need to hold just about anything....keep the lighting board in line with the edge of the acrylic and a smidgen of an air gap.
I never paid attention to the 007 timer. This is the first time I see one of these and I'm 50 years old. This is beautiful, thanks Fran for showing it.
That music…omg, that’s awesome. Fran…you truly are amazing.
That those still work is a testament of awesome craftsmanship
That one is the most simple and practical design in your collection.
As my son always says, people were geniuses back in the day. Love that it can be cleanly disassembled so the bulbs can be switched out. The light pipe design is so clever. Your driver is amazing too!
Pure gold (no pun intended). An iconic display for an iconic movie.
This is a really cool display, I love the way the elements are nested together, and the pointed adjustment screw for pressing them lightly against each other. One can almost see the 3D printing folks thinking, "Hmmm".
There was a brief touch on using a gel filter to change the colour*¹ as displayed. While probably intended to make this look like a Nixie, for the love of peat*² why, this is an idea that could be further exploited beyond incandescent sources. For those of us incessant disassemblers who lived through the VFD calculator era, blue and green filters to push the spectra a little bit sideways were ubiquitous. This can also be used to change the color of other phosphor based displays, not only Nimo and some color LEDs*³, but also VFD. We don't have to be resigned to the classic colors because "that's how it's always been done" either. Crank up a display and play with some filters, the weirder the better!
*¹ The subject is a British display.
*² Misspelling intended.
*³ ... though it may be a sacrilege for some of these vintage displays...
I love the infinity mirror effect. It gives the digits depth, and substance. From certain viewing angles the numbers almost seem to be moving FAST, like speed lines :)
Thank you for sharing Fran!
That "way down inside" at 2:53 caught me with such a low guard hahaha the giggle in the end is the cherry in the pie!
After forty years working with those things and still learning something new on your channel. Thanks.
When I was a kid, I had a Zenith stereo system with a "Digi-Lite" dial face. There were 2 layers, one for FM and one for AM. They worked just like this, but didn't light as evenly due to the length of each diffuser.
Such a beautiful piece of engineering! Thanks for sharing it with us!
Thanks Fran for showing, and thanks to Nikolaus for donating!
That's awesome. Amazing to see how much labor went into the assembly too, lots of machining steps, lots of hand fiddling.. beautiful.
I find it so therapeutic to look at, bought a led-nixi clock a few years ago and love it😊
Really nice displays, In my early work years we had some of these in test equipment (Trend, UK made) pity I never thought to salvage them. I keep getting reminded whenever I see that Bond movie.
They'd be real easy to fit LED's into them, without butchering them.
Okay, this thing is a TRUE work of beauty!! I had NO IDEA how it worked, my brain just couldn't see how it worked. Then you turned it on, oh wow that is so cool!
PS - I find myself randomly singing your Fran Song lol! Seriously, I will just bust out dancing and singing "....in the lab..... fixin' somethin'....... in the lab....." hehehe I love your channel, Fran! I learn SO much! Thank you for your devotion, I know you have been struggling with a finding a new audience. I believe you will find what you need :) Thanks again!!
Unbelievable simple yet effective design.
Very nice! Under driving keeps thermal lag to a minimum and changes colour temperature just a tad.
Note that the screw is a PoziDrive Phillips head. Using a non-pozi screwdriver can mangle the head. Many British cars, MGs and Lotus to name two, use these for ease and speed of assembly. And they are always stripped by clueless owners and shade-tree mechanics! Good video.
I dig the tunnel effect from the internal reflections on the zero.
A Nixie aesthetic without the hassle of a vacuum tube or the high voltage to drive it! Love it!
Old school electronics are so cool. Tangible tech.
The crowdfunded "Gixie tube" imitation nixie tube clock project from a couple years back works on exactly the same principle as this, but with LEDs. The variety of these old non-7-segment number displays is amazing.
A thing of beauty indeed! Now I want to watch Goldfinger again.
Thank you for the generous gift Nikolaus. And thank you Fran for sharing. So amazing.
Bond reference is good timing.
Saw the trailer in the cinema today, sorry, let me translate, "movie theatre", supposed to be more PC, but Danny still managed to say "she's so disarming".
That was beautiful to see, thx
Watching this mesmerizing display gave me an idea 💡!
It would be really really cool to have a Screen Saver of all of Fran's
Displays to run on our Big Screens just to watch or run in the background.
It would be a fun way to introduce Fran to our friends and guests!
This is the first time I have seen a Fran video. Really cool stuff. thanks for sharing.
What a glorious piece of equipment. I always loved these displays (and that clip from Goldfinger).
I do recall seeing a bench meter with these displays opened up for repair - there was a matching module with a decimal point that just sat between two adjacent digit modules. It looked like a solid block with a lamp and a simple acrylic rod for the d.p.
Nice job with the donation Nikolaus. Funky Fran tune was great as well.
Goldfinger maybe my favorite Bond movie of all time. How can any ever forget this display...and Honor Blackman!
" Fran Bla - anche (wah wah wah!)/ She's the gal, the gal with the lightest touch/ the finest touch...."
@@goodun2974 So true
Love the alternating pattern as it lights up in sequence.
Thanks for sharing with us, and thanks to the viewer for parting with them!
I hope you can find one more to recreate the Bond bomb...! Or maybe you can get some laser engraved light pipes to recreate the FRANLABS opening in as many ways as possible!
Thanks again!
Nicely done! I love the insertion of Led Zeppelin.
I like the simple straight forward curve-linear font of the display. I seem to remember seeing it in some other movie besides Goldfinger, some sci-fi flick I'm sure.
I saw something similar with a 1960's digital voltmeter in the Navy in 1973. My shop bench would receive a digital voltmeter or an analog comparator as Test Equipment would give us during the scheduled equipment rotations and calibrations. One was a 5 digit digital voltmeter with a large display window with the planes visible with only a black piece of metal separating the digits. Each character was operated by a little relay. You can hear the ponging of these relays as you supplied the voltage to the probes and the display changes. That was an accurate power hogging, heat generating beast. I wondered how much the Navy paid for that in the 1960's.
Oh boy, those are absolutely stunning! Seeing each piece light up from the side was certainly beautiful!
I found a very similar one to the ones you have in one of my junk boxes. mine has an edge connector rather than the solder lugs on the back. will have to have a go at powering it up.
Oh man, this brings me back...
My dad had a big piece of test equipment, I don't remember precisely what it was, but it was rack mount, about 6U high, and it had edge-lit displays with a sequential relay driving each digit.
I turned it on a few times and the digits would start cycling chaotically (apparently something was really wrong with it), and my dad ended up parting it out to make space in his shop after he determined it wasn't worth fixing.
I hope he didn't throw away the display assemblies, they were the coolest thing to watch.
I still have a sequential relay assembly from it somewhere in my collection...
Wow really cool it truly a rarity. I’d forgotten how I was fascinated when I saw this in the Bond film now I know! Thanks Fran!
I have an old frequency counter at home with 8 of these in it. I scrapped the rest but kept the displays, they are a bit crusty but you're welcome to them if you would like them.
Some clocks sold on eBay have a somewhat similar approach. They often have "nixie" in the title even though they aren't nixies at all but edge lit. On title is "LED-NIXIE-M, 6-STELLIGER BAUSATZ LED-UHR NIXIE DESIGN", another is "RGB Simulation Glow Tube Clock LED Desktop Decoration Tube Clock DIY Kit Gift", another is "Modern Digital RGB LED Clock NO Nixie Tube Clock Assembly Kit Christmas Lights". If you search for "digital clock kit" you will see some of these thiings.
So good to hear you so happy. Very cool !!
I had a very similar, multidigital numeric display, from the 1950s, but silly me, left it behind when I moved to a new area. Tiny little incadescent bulbs, a few were burned out, lit up the edges of the plastic numeric panels, a beautiful example of early electronic tech it was. As I recall, the nuimbers were continuous linear traces in the plastic, rather than matrices of little dots.
Your display videos are probably my favorite
That's neat that this type of display was used in Gold Finger!
Really cool. You are defiantly the worlds expert on displays!
Now I want to design and build my own, drive them using LEDs. You could really use some beautiful fonts for your display.
Totally impractical, but hella cool.
Already exists BTW, Techmoan reviewed them some time ago.
Funkiest lamp I Ve seen. Lovely mechanism without high voltage and phosphor. If I ever take over the world I d use these on my doomsday contraption.
Thanks Frantastic.
Oh, how fascinating! I've seen pictures of such displays a couple times before (and in that "Bond" movie), including someone's LED-powered interpretation of the concept, but I've never seen how a vintage part was constructed. Neat! 🙂 Thanks for showing us how it works inside and out!
Damn...major score!
I remember seeing them in that movie...totally awesome that you got TWO of them :)
That was cool! I love these old school displays.
What an elegant design.
It would be a cool project to replicate this with some open source DXF files to laser cut acrylic, and maybe a 3d printed bracket to hold some LEDs. It looks wonderful lit up.
I guess the acrylic has to be bend thermally. But would be a nice project!
@@haukeradtki3322 It would, but that would be relatively easy to DIY.
I remember “Nixie Light “ displays but never aware these. Totally cool!
Nice how the 60BPM of the music was in sync to the lamps changing state as well.
What an incredible yet such a simple design for a indicator.
If it isn't something Apollo blessed by Armstrong himself then it's something else unobtanium. Fran has the super-special stuff! Fascinating! Thanks Fran!
Last and only time I'd seen these displays was when I worked for Racal and that over 50 years ago. For those who don't know Racal was a British company into military RF communications and the like.
So cool! I remember wondering what that display was when watching Gold Finger.
Pretty cool displays, and your music was an unexpected bonus!
Fran - When you get a chance, you should go down to the Independence Seaport Museum and shoot some video. It is a very interesting place and often overlooked in the Philly museum scene.
That is a very cool display! I can only imagine the fun/trouble the prop builders for Goldfinger had getting 3 of those to run. They show up great on camera, too! Thanks for sharing this, Fran.
When scouring e-bay for tools, NOS is my favourite acronym to find in the description.
Hi Fran from the UK. Well I didn't plan to have a bask this afternoon, but I've just realised how I've missed a long meaningful bask. I basked repeatedly to that display and now I feel completely rela.................
Absolutely amazing. I would love to buy one on ebay or make one. So simple yet so elegant.
I'm so happy i discovered your channel! Good stuff!
....and i got that song stuck in my head now xD
Well hello Fran! Love your videos! Keep em' coming. You have some really neat display videos. Now I want me some of those nixie tube clocks...😁
I had something like this in mind several years ago bidding on an engraving pantograph. I thought that it would be awesome using UV LEDs and that fluorescent "orange" acrylic that seems to light up just sitting on a table.
Interesting that the numbers are sequential back to front .. As I understood, Nixie cathode placement was thought out to allow maximum view of each digit, but that doesn't seem to matter much here.
Here's a project for you Fran: Never mind those digital fish tanks and fire places. Betcha lots of us nerds would pay for a montage of all your displays doing their thing in an endless loop. :D
Video reported for pornagraphic content.
Those are indeed great. Thanks for digging up the James Bond reference because I thought I had seem them somewhere.
That Zep joke made me smile!
You'd think these would have been very common given how unbelievably simple / cheap to make they are compared to most the other weird and wonderful displays you've discovered.
Not many applications for this stuff in general until well after LEDs were dominant.
The inside of that display looks like the inside of a high voltage nixie tube. Each individual wires that make the shape of each number or symbol. I wish those older displays like the one you have were still being made with different shapes for different purposes. We could’ve had a large dot matrix display, but that would probably be too much.
Very interesting.Thank you for the presentation. I learned alot.You have gargantuan wealth of knowledge.Peace love blessings to you and yours.
Saw similar large displays in a fruit machine in Spain in the 1980s, there was a numerical display for how much you had won, and credit, but the best part was the reels were this type of display showing line drawings of the various fruits in different colours.never saw machines like this before or since, you'd love seeing one I'm sure of that.
Very nice! How are the dots that make up the digits made?
I like this so much I might try making some. I think LEDs would be a good idea instead of incandescent bulbs though. It should be easy enough to etch acrylic with a laser or possibly mill channels into it.
Yep! People have been doing this for a few years now to make “lixie” clocks.
Very cool and inspiring display! I didn't blink when watching it run :)
I noticed two things: 1) the number of reflections increasing when going towards the front layers. 2) the layers towards the bottom get dimmer - could compensate by trimming each lamp current/voltage on the driver.
I wonder if clever use of antireflective coatings could mitigate the first issue. Certainly one could also just use a dark filter in front of the whole stack and in turn increase the segment brightness (with LEDs, since they don’t produce anywhere near as much heat).
Wow, absolutely beautiful display! This is going to have to be a future project to make said unobtanium! Awesome stuff, thanks for the demo Fran!
Very, very, very cool display.
3:11 that's a *pozidriv* screw... did they already exist back then ? It looks original. The pozidriv patent dates back to 1962, Goldfinger was released in 1964 so it must have started shooting in 62-63. Tight timing ! Either that or the display you've got was manufactured later.
A beautiful piece of kit fran i like the old tech it makes you think how old we are now.
Greetings from the netherlands.
That's not at all how I imagined these worked! Cool old technology! 👍
Very cool Fran! Thanks to you and Nikolaus for sharing it with us.