My Vintage Iconoscope TV Camera Tube.

This 1940s Iconoscope tube is a real gem in my collection of vintage electronics and scientific instruments. The Iconoscope was the first real TV camera tube featuring charge storage. That is, between video scans, each microscopic dot on the image area was accumulating and and saving charge created by light falling on it, so an entire 1/30th of a second of light energy was used in the image capture rather than just sensing the light's energy during the microsecond instant while the electron beam was reading that point. It's unprecedented light sensitivity really made TV broadcasting practical, and was the beginning of a long line of TV camera storage tubes that lasted will into the 1990s when semiconductors replaced them. Its also an amazing piece of glass blowing and is one of the few tubes where you can easily see everything inside.