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.

I’ll be really pleased for your shares and comments!

More info: past-indicator.com