Nixie Tubes

Invented by an American Engineer at Bell Laboratories, called David Haglebarger.

A Nixie tube is called that because of a bit of clever branding history:
The name “Nixie” comes from “NIX I”, which stood for “Numeric Indicator eXperimental No. 1”.

It was a trademark coined in the 1950s by a draftsman at Burroughs Corporation (said to be Walter Hixson).
Burroughs was developing cold-cathode display tubes that could show numbers, and the engineers gave the first prototype the code name NIX I.

The name stuck, and Burroughs decided to market the tubes under the catchy name Nixie tubes.
So, even though “nixie” sounds a bit like a whimsical word, it’s really just an acronym from an internal project label that evolved into the product’s official trademark.

Nixie tubes are vintage electronic devices used to display numerals or other symbols through a glowing discharge inside a sealed glass tube.

They consist of a wire-mesh anode and multiple cathodes shaped like numerals (0-9) filled with a low-pressure neon-based gas, which glows orange when high voltage is applied to a specific cathode.

Popular in the 1950s and 1960s for use in clocks, calculators, and scientific equipment, they were eventually replaced by cheaper and more efficient LED and VFD (vacuum fluorescent) displays.