Happiness Is A Warm Electron Gun
How much does preserving lost arts matter?
Did you know this was possible?
This is the restoration of an old cathode ray tube, including the replacement of the electron gun inside the tube. This process involves cutting the tube open—which I thought necessarily destroyed the tube—replacing the component, and then sealing the tube back up while sucking out the air to make it a vacuum again. Here’s another video on this.
Read the comments on the videos. They’re great and informative, and so full of bits and pieces of information and memories that are becoming lost.
The last American shop doing this work closed in 2010, after 53 years of business, according to the Early Television Museum website. They also say that the last European firm closed in 2013. These apparently used to be relatively common jobs that TV repair shops could do, although they were probably less common than repairs to the electronics outside of the tube (if only because those failed more frequently than the electron guns inside).
The Early Television Museum’s page must be old, though, because in 2015 another European company, Colorvac, apparently began to do full tube restoration work. This Facebook Reel shows technicians at Colorvac doing the same job. Colorvac’s website says:
At the heart of our work is the restoration and preservation of CRT-based artworks.
The Colorvac workshop follows an intense restoration process,
with the goal of bringing all components inside the monitor back to like-new condition…Currently, we are the only company in the world able to renew picture tubes.
The only company in the world. What a strange thing to find yourself.
I found some neat comments from Reddit on this topic, too:
Many years ago there were businesses that refurbished CRTs. They probably still exist for niche areas. It involves cutting and welding glass to replace the guns, vacuum pumps to get most of the air out and firing the getter to burn off the last few molecules of air. Cool stuff but if anyone still does it they would be charging thousands.
And:
Nobody rebuilds CRTs for TVs anymore. The last guy doing it retired years ago.
When they did rebuild them, they only replaced the electron gun assembly. It wasn’t possible to repair the shadow mask or phosphor coating.
And:
I used to get specialised vector CRTs re phosphored and re gunned but that was a very long time ago.
You’ll find references to military usages too, where some of this stuff still gets done or made, because it has to. It’s kind of like those government agencies that still employ computer programmers who know obsolete languages, because the government systems run on them and it’s easier to keep them in service with a small base of knowledgeable people than to completely revamp them.
Bonus, here’s a thread about a different (and simpler) bit of old CRT knowledge: rejuvenation, an electrical process done with a CRT tester tool that temporarily brightens the picture.
I’m old enough to remember when a CRT was just…a television. I remember how exotic flatscreen TVs looked, and how “flatscreen TV” was kind of a byword for being affluent or sophisticated. Sometimes people still say that, as if there’s any other TV being made. And flatscreens are much cheaper nowadays than tubes used to be, and they can easily be made much bigger, too. (The largest CRT ever produced is a hair over 40 inches, a very rare prestige Sony model.) The speed with which CRTs disappeared is weird, and a little unnerving to have watched.
I write on this theme a lot, with consumer goods, business concepts, and other things, about how weird it is for something ubiquitous, that’s just there, to suddenly become antique, outdated, rare, forgotten, lost. You have no sense that you’re