Hi Jon, There are a whole bunch of patents for the early dekatrons with a similar electrode structure like the G10/241E and most of them talks about how to "improve" the previous design. They experimented a lot with different kinds of "extra" electrodes and bias voltages but mostly they could not explain how or why they "improved" the dekatrons - but that was obviously allowed in the patent as they could proove that it was an improvement. When I was searching for Ericsson Dekatron patentes I skipped most of these other patents as I was not interrested in these details then and I thought I would never get my hands on a Polyatron since they are quite rare. Most of those patents talked about all the things mentioned here in this thread - stop sputter from destroying electrodes, increase the speed of which the glow could be transferred (which at the same time means that you extinguish the previous electrode faster too) by making a small current flow in a preferable direction towards the next electrode, making the surrounding component use (mostly for cathodes, not so much for the driving stages) cheaper and simpler. I guess that the "screen" or "shield" electrode can have several uses at the same time and some of them might have been discovered accidentally while the designers where looking to improve something else. Some of how it can be used also depends on where it is placed between the electrodes and if it is used in a uni-directional or bi-directional Dekatron, if it is uniform or formed in a way to promote electron flow in a defined direction or not. Reading old patents and magazines is fascinating but takes up so much time unfortunately. I know that J.B. Dance wrote several short articles in a few brittish magazines which explained a lot about clod cathode tubes and Dekatrons but I've unfortunately never found any good reference to use to look those up, that might be a good source of more information. /Martin
On Sunday, February 17, 2013 12:47:24 AM UTC+1, Jon wrote: > Thanks Martin - hadn't seen this one. Interesting that this patent sets > out a different connection of the shield electrode in order to increase > performance of the tube. > > Jon. > > > On Saturday, February 16, 2013 11:36:40 PM UTC, Dekatron42 wrote: > >> Whoops, forgot to include the patent so here it is. >> >> /Martin >> >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/neonixie-l/-/Z5Qrj5eBQekJ. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
