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
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
relying on particular people or institutions or refined processes that can just fall apart very fast and never quite be put together again. These CRT procedures were just part of television repair for decades, and now there are a handful of individuals in the entire world who know how to do them.
There’s an element of progress, of course—we have a technology that’s cheaper, lighter, and better in most respects1, whatever those of us who love the aesthetic of CRTs think. But there’s also an element of loss. Not so much the loss of the technology as a consumer product, but the loss of the knowledge that went into CRTs, and the way knowledge that isn’t embodied and put to use will inevitably decay. The loss of looking at a thing we used to do and wondering how we quite did it.
All sorts of tacit knowledge—millions of little things like yeah the manual says this, but you kind of have to do it just like this for it to work—gets forgotten, because it’s tough to write down and transmit all those little just-so bits of practiced expertise. Knowledge is an embodied thing; it’s “stored” in the process of doing the thing, in many ways.
I wrote an article on this topic a few years ago, titled “Losing the Recipe,” with a few very different examples of bodies of knowledge and process that were being or have largely been lost or forgotten. I’m not sure how much any of this matters, but it feels like it does. I wrote:
One can look with detached curiosity at unknown ancient Egyptian stone-cutting techniques. But there’s something deeply unsettling about the idea that a consumer-grade product produced at scale within most Americans’ living memory is in some sense already lost to time.
The maintenance of any of this knowledge, whether construction techniques or cultural artifacts or industrial processes, is a thorny issue from the perspective of public policy. At a basic level, knowledge can be archived such that it can be studied, and at least not entirely lost. But it’s another matter to keep an obsolete product in production just in case people feel nostalgic for it in twenty years….There isn’t always an answer.
When I say “there’s something deeply unsettling,” I suppose what I mean is, there’s something deeply unsettling to me. Writing these pieces does force me to remind myself that sometimes I’m probably describing my own feelings as if they’re revelations I’m receiving about the state of the world.
When I was in college, and I was an environmentalist and against consumerism and all that stuff, this all loomed very large in my worldview. It was during this time that I developed this “sacramental” notion of consumer products.2
Probably for a number of reasons—having too much free time, making a few amazing finds at my local dump, reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, watching The Book of Eli3, reading Vance Packard, and having an environmentalist professor I really liked—I felt like every loss of an old thing was a chip away at the foundation of civilization, and so in some way I was preserving civilization by dragging home an old TV from the dump.
So on some level, I’m aware that when I write about the fragility of human knowledge and the risk of “losing the recipe” and how consumer goods are sacramental and tacit knowledge is secular apostolic succession, that in one sense all I’m really doing is abstracting a worldview out of my own idiosyncratic interests.
But also, I think it is a bad thing when hard-earned and highly evolved knowledge evaporates. I do think we have some duty to store away everything our species has learned, even if it seems of no use to us at the moment. Whether because memory is the closest thing we have to eternal life, or because God put us here to use our brains, or because we owe it to the future to decide the value of the things we wish to cast off, I think this all ultimately does matter.
Do you?
Related Reading:
You Never Know How It Falls Apart
Perfect pitch blacks and near-instant refresh rates are still the domain of the best CRTs, but most people don’t care much or even notice. The fact that you can buy or move a TV without breaking your back is also probably a good thing!
I think this is an actual idea I came up with after trying to write a short science fiction story where a post-Christian religion living in an authoritarian digital-only society replaced the communion wafer with a 1970s Panasonic clock radio. Like I said, I had too much time.
The only thing I really remember about it was the guy who knew how to recharge an iPod after a nuclear war, and the elderly cannibals who had a console television. I had a one-track (eight-track?) mind about retro electronics as a conduit for preserving civilization.