appropos of nothing: Coketron

[mhardy6647]

OK, so 1) I don't post over on the TV side much at all and 2) this is probably, at best, old hat (more likely, just irrelevant), but I just saw this looking for some info on 'magic eye' CRT's and thought I'd share.

Welcome back, AK.

http://www.akh.se/tubes/htm/coketron.htm

In Peter A. Kellers book on page 24, the following info is to be found:
To illustrate the extremes in materials that have been used for CRT envelopes, almost every CRT lab has at one time or another fabricated a "Coketron" made from that one glass envelope that always seemed to be present in any lab, the Coca-Cola™ bottle. A little phosphor settled in the bottom and an electron gun sealed to the neck results in an operable CRT that never ceases to amuse lab visitors.

[polaraman]

that would link two of my habbits! Drinking coke and collecting televisions.


polaraman

[old_tv_nut]

When I started at Motorola out of school in 1966, I inherited a project that used a half-gallon milk bottle as a CRT. The body of the bottle was cut down to make the CRT shorter, but it used the flat bottom as the screen and the funnel-shaped part as the neck. This project was an attempt by the previous engineer (who unfortunately died a few months earlier at the age of 36 from a brain aneurism) to cut a transistor set down to the bare minimum. It had a lot of really not-production-friendly circuits that worked with the parts he selected, but probably would have a large reject rate on the assembly line. The whole thing was built by soldering parts to a large sheet of tin-plated steel - a technique commonly used for small developmental circuits at the time, but not for a whole TV! I wish I had a picture of that set.

[Bill Cahill]

:loser: When I was a teen, keeping in mind I never liked transistors, I devised, but, never developed my own idea for a solid state picture tube. It may not have worked, but, I drew a schematic at the time, and my boss at tv repair shop said it might work. I long since permanently lost schematic, and long since forgot all details, never to remember again. Yeh.. Probably wouldn't 'uve worked, anyhow....

[old_tv_nut]

When Moto came out with the "Works in a Drawer", I wondered (not too loudly) why you couldn't put more stages of the TV in the neck of the CRT and make the "Works in a Bottle" - someone suggested I might have had too much involvement with a different kind of bottle..