Tubes From Grandpa's Attic Or How Past Indicator Was Created

Spring 2012. A Lomonosov Moscow State University Law School alumnus is disappointed in his choice of profession and starts to look for his true calling in life... After graduating I gave up the idea of practicing law and tried my hand at entrepreneurial business, but I couldn’t decide which business to pursue. Until I remembered the tubes from my grandpa’s attic…

My grandpa's first degree was in radio electronics and he always kept a lot of old technical devices at home, including radio sets and their replacement parts. He was always busy with this “treasures”: soldering, repairing… while I looked on and dreamt about being part of this sacred actions. One day I got as close to my dream as I had ever come: my grandpa asked me to help him find something in the attic and while I was looking for it I found a small box full of incredible tubes with digits inside them…

When I recalled this childhood I knew for sure that I wanted to create something remarkable with these tubes. Something that would make people feel the same admiration I felt as a small boy in the attic. I decided to make clocks, where time would be displayed on Nixie Tubes – that, as it turned out, was the term for those tubes from my childhood.

My manufacturing of clocks started with building a team of professionals capable of making an ideal product. Searching for experts in their fields is a real challenge. I worked with five electronics engineers before I could find the one, who had similar with mine attitude to work, including an urge to do an excellent work. I was looking for our artisan even longer, Petr Vasilyevich is a talented man and an amazing expert with years of experience in designing and developing from wood, metal, plastic, leather and other materials.

It took more than a half a year from a birth of idea to find and complete our team.

As for now we have been making Nixie clocks for more than 6 years and still we are pursuing the perfection. Today we produce 100 clocks a month. It’s probably not impressive number for large-scale industries, but we create our clocks manually, so they have a little bit of our hearts. Also scale of manufacturing is limited, because Nixies were stopped being produced since 1993, so one day soon they all would be used up.

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More info: past-indicator.com