On 9/11/2012 1:02 PM, jb-electronics wrote:
Hi folks,as some of you may know, besides Nixie tube collecting I am also interested in the history. I am writing an article, and every now and then I stumble upon something that makes me believe that I will most likely never finish it ;-)Here is the confirmed US Nixie tube history: National Union was the first to sell a readout tube product line (1954), although Northrop aircraft filed promising patents as early as Nov 1950; however, these tubes were never manufactured by Northrop (not a single one of these tubes has been found as of today). National Union was closely followed by Burroughs in 1955 who then offered their "Nixie" tube. But National Union beat Burroughs by the nose.Anyway, I was doing some casual research for patents filed by Ericsson, and found patent "GB739041", file is attached. The funny thing is, this baby was filed May 9, 1950, predating the first Northrop patent (US2618697) by more than half a year. The word "improvements" in the patent title suggests that this patent bases on other concepts already around at the time, but I cannot find out which patents it refers to. Any ideas?The most interesting thing is that Ericsson was probably the first company that commercialised the idea of a Nixie tube (and thus thought it worth to be patent-protected, that is the logic here).I feel that the European history of the Nixie tube needs further research. Has anyone been able to piece together the European side of the story?To be honest, I don't know if this patent is an entirely new discovery, but I could not find it on Randall's page:http://www.scientificsolutions.ca/patents.htm Jens
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