I always found Argon have an interesting color. My late father was a Professor of Chemistry and I still have all of his elemental gas discharge tubes that I fire up occasionally. Years ago I posted a simple website demonstrating them all at http://schaffrath.net/Spectra. The Argon tube is at http://schaffrath.net/Spectra/Argon.jpg. Years after he passed, I added Chlorine and Mercury Vapor tubes to the collection which is why their pictures are different. It interesting to see the different colors that are possible if other gases were used. Of course as someone posted on the Nixie Clock Facebook page, a lot of research went into making Neon work right and simply swapping in one of these other gases would not have been so simple.
Somewhere I still have some fluorescent lamp starters (remember those?) that used Argon instead of the traditional Neon. You would see a bluish purple glow through the little hole in the end of the starter instead of red. I would take them apart and light them up using a small hand crank magneto but they do not provide continuous light as they momentarily short in order to provide the starting function. -- 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 view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/a0fb77fb-a5fe-4e36-8349-10c2cf0e20cf%40googlegroups.com.
