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:)
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!
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,
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 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.
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 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
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.
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!!
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!
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, 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.
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, 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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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...
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!
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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:)
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!
That music…omg, that’s awesome. Fran…you truly are amazing.
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,
The amber light along the curved sides of the acrylic pieces reminds me of Clu's aesthetic in Tron: Legacy.
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 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.
I love how each number reflects off of the previous pieces of acrylic. Kind of gives the numbers a 3d effect. Very cool!
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 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 find it so therapeutic to look at, bought a led-nixi clock a few years ago and love it😊
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.
Such a beautiful piece of engineering! Thanks for sharing it with us!
That those still work is a testament of awesome craftsmanship
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!!
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!
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.
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.
Pure gold (no pun intended). An iconic display for an iconic movie.
That's awesome. Amazing to see how much labor went into the assembly too, lots of machining steps, lots of hand fiddling.. beautiful.
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, 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 ...
Unbelievable simple yet effective design.
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.
This is the first time I have seen a Fran video. Really cool stuff. thanks for sharing.
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!
So good to hear you so happy. Very cool !!
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.
Nice job with the donation Nikolaus. Funky Fran tune was great as well.
Very nice! Under driving keeps thermal lag to a minimum and changes colour temperature just a tad.
That one is the most simple and practical design in your collection.
Thank you for the generous gift Nikolaus. And thank you Fran for sharing. So amazing.
I dig the tunnel effect from the internal reflections on the zero.
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.
Really cool. You are defiantly the worlds expert on displays!
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...😁
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!
That was cool! I love these old school displays.
I'm so happy i discovered your channel! Good stuff!
....and i got that song stuck in my head now xD
Damn...major score!
I remember seeing them in that movie...totally awesome that you got TWO of them :)
Your display videos are probably my favorite
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.
Video reported for pornagraphic content.
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.
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!
A thing of beauty indeed! Now I want to watch Goldfinger again.
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.
Pretty cool displays, and your music was an unexpected bonus!
Nicely done! I love the insertion of Led Zeppelin.
So cool! I remember wondering what that display was when watching Gold Finger.
Very interesting.Thank you for the presentation. I learned alot.You have gargantuan wealth of knowledge.Peace love blessings to you and yours.
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!
Oh boy, those are absolutely stunning! Seeing each piece light up from the side was certainly beautiful!
What an elegant design.
Old school electronics are so cool. Tangible tech.
Beautiful simple, thx for this information.
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...
That was super cool Fran!
Those are indeed great. Thanks for digging up the James Bond reference because I thought I had seem them somewhere.
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!
Thanks for sharing
Very nice Fran. Thanks!
A Nixie aesthetic without the hassle of a vacuum tube or the high voltage to drive it! Love it!
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
What an incredible yet such a simple design for a indicator.
Love the Fran-gasm videos 😀
Absolutely amazing. I would love to buy one on ebay or make one. So simple yet so elegant.
Nice how the 60BPM of the music was in sync to the lamps changing state as well.
These are so pretty.
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.
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 nice! How are the dots that make up the digits made?
Very, very, very cool display.
A beautiful piece of kit fran i like the old tech it makes you think how old we are now.
Greetings from the netherlands.
Fran, you are amazing.
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.................
Well that's a fascinating little display especially because it has those dot is like a nikie tube but way cooler. Thank for show it
That is gorgeous!
Very interesting thank you Fran
I remember “Nixie Light “ displays but never aware these. Totally cool!
Such a well lit video. Loved it!
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.
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.
That's neat that this type of display was used in Gold Finger!
i'm not sure how this works in a stack..can anyone show what the front of each segment looks like.
When scouring e-bay for tools, NOS is my favourite acronym to find in the description.
Thanks Fran for showing, and thanks to Nikolaus for donating!
LOVE IT!!!
Leave it to you Fran.
Loved the Led Zeppelin plug!!
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!
Way cool. Thanks for sharing.
Beautiful!!
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.