Radioactive Vacuum Tubes

Gas-discharge electron tubes work on the principle of electric discharge in gas, which essentially is when a current flows through gas, when a voltage is high enough. But in order for a gas-discharge electron tube to function, the gas needs to be ionized initially, to initiate a discharge. A very reliable way to accomplish this initial ionization, is with a small amount of radioactive material that emits ionizing radiation inside the tube. There are also a few other reasons why an electron tube might be radioactive. Here I show some examples of radioactive electron tubes.
Sources of information:
- Book: "Living with Radiation: The First Hundred Years", by Paul Frame and William Kolb.
- Oak Ridge: www.orau.org/h...
- Physics Open Lab: physicsopenlab...
- Carl Willis: carlwillis.wor..., carlwillis.wor..., carlwillis.wor..., www.angelfire....
- Taylor Wilson: www.sciradioact..., sites.google.c...
- Pocketmagic: www.pocketmagi...
- Russian Ni-63 tube (use Google Translate): www.155la3.ru/t...
- Radioactive tube spreadsheet (I am not sure how trustworthy it is): im13.rhbz.org/a...
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[@DrakeLuce]

That brown spot you show on the first tube is the actual Cs-137 paint spot on the glass, not radiation damage.

[@whatevernamegoeshere3644]

Yeah, it has a textbook example of the colour of Cs metal

[@Ucceah]

personally, i missed any explanation of why those tubes contained radioactive materials in the first place, and what they were used for. which is what i was most interested in! (future video idea?)

[@KG84C]

Keeps fill gas ionized, so conductivity is super rapid, ie high speed switching applications.

[@defeatSpace]

"Gas-discharge electron tubes work on the principle of electric discharge in gas, which essentially is when a current flows through gas, when a voltage is high enough. But in order for a gas-discharge electron tube to function, the gas needs to be ionized initially, to initiate a discharge. A very reliable way to accomplish this initial ionization, is with a small amount of radioactive material that emits ionizing radiation inside the tube. There are also a few other reasons why an electron tube might be radioactive. Here I show some examples of radioactive electron tubes." -I made it the fk up, jk it's in the description

[@jagmarc]

That's easy explanation, that's how they work and without it they won't work. Life as we know it for last 200 million years would probably not exist without external influence. Millions of years of random trial and error mutation in conjuction with a background process of natural selection. In the case of an electron tube, the process condensed from infinite probabilities over millions of years, into one state change over millionths of a second.

[@jagmarc]

WHAT????? I COME BACK TO EDIT THE DETAILED REPLY I LEFT THIS THREAD AND IT'S GONE YOU TUBE FRACKING CENSORED IT THIS PLATFORM SUCKS 4 SURE

[@chistinelane]

​@@jagmarcit's been happening so much lately!

[@TheHomeonbay]

when I was a kid we would eat lunch sitting on cases of these tubes from Hanford where surplussed to a store in Seattle I think they just went to a landfill in the neighborhood

[@lemonfish1890]

Fantastic Collection! You can detect levels lower than what you can by ear by using a "scalar" for timed counts and then statistics to determine the probability of the tube being above background. If you want to learn more about the shape (features) of that Cs-137 Gamma spectrum, search "Prutchi and Compton".

[@christopherleubner6633]

The promethium or kr85 in the florescent lamps is actually in the little glow tube that ignites it located in the base.

[@Yaivenov]

I possess an interesting twist on isotope doped vacuum tubes. The high range geigger muller tube (up to 5 kiloroentgen/hour) in my CDV-718 features a purified Th-232 source. It amuses me some that we use isotopes to help detect isotopes. 😊

[@christopherleubner6633]

They use carbon 14 in sprytron tubes because it makes an ion channel that the vacuum arc can propagate through.

[@danielsee1]

Very interesting. A normal tube uses a heater for thermionic emission. Maybe people need to understand this first. These seem to have potential.

[@eurokid83]

Were tubes containing Co-60 and Cs-137 used in many consumer appliances?

[@radiorob7543]

No. Quite rare.

[@KarbineKyle]

Very nice! I have a lot of radioactive tubes, including the notorious 1B22. The Cs-137 is deposited on the inside of the glass of all spark gaps. Sometimes it's hard to see in some tubes, but it's not on the electrodes. I've done Kr-85 with NaI(Tl) gamma ray spectroscopy. It requires a relatively newer Kr-85 tube that had a higher initial activity. You'll get a decent peak at 514 keV, even with its small gamma ray branching ratio. Thank you for this video! I like it! 👍

[@SansNeural]

I have a highly radioactive lizard. Or I *did* have one. It broke down the barn I kept it in, killed the guard dogs and I haven't seen it in days. I hope it's not lonely.

[@Yaivenov]

Hmm. You might try scanning the box the sparkplug was stored in. Po possesses a terrifying feature: it is autosputtering. The Po-210 is long gone but it might have left some decay products splattered on the inside of the cardboard.

[@kingcanada2588]

nice dude good to see you back

[@w8lvradio]

It is always amazing (to me) that radioactive materials were used in so many consumer items, with wreckless disregard of the potential consequences. What do you know of any television receiving tubes from the radiant 1950's period that possibly contained Thorium? Supposedly, to increase the efficiency of the plate emissions? Also, Krytrons. I believe for photocopiers, and nuclear weapon divider network (to send the current to the explosive blocks.) All the Best! 73 DE W8LV BILL

[@Strike_Raid]

There is also the Western Electric 313C cold cathode thyrotron.

[@markscheutzow3446]

The tube with the uranium glass top looks a lot like a hydrogen thyratron.👍

[@gka4976]

What was the radioactive isotope used for?

[@AldoSchmedack]

Helping ionization get started

[@annaplojharova1400]

It makes the discharge starting, so the electrical properties more uniform... Same with use of some radiation sources in fluorescent starters or some HID lamps.

[@pokrec]

This TH11G (Russian one) had a warning on the leaflet not to touch the glass with fingers...

[@Cristi0986]

great video

[@fernandoroncari6839]

Krytron ???

[@fillup40]

Power them up.

[@Atom-scan]

лайк

[@tttdrr2293]

Chernobyl in a bottle.

[@alexandervonzoller-sakharo6386]

You forgot one. EG&G KN-** series, particularly KN-6, KN-8, and KN-22. These are Krytrons. Ultra-high-speed switching triode and tetrode tubes containing Ni-63 and used in certain types of lasers, flash lamps, and early nuclear bombs. They have been phased out for new semiconductor equivalents.

[@KarbineKyle]

I've been trying to find an older KP 96 Krytron tube, which contains Ra-226, but so far, I have not found one to add to my radioactive [tube] collection yet.

[@alexandervonzoller-sakharo6386]

@@KarbineKyle ... Good luck... those are classed as (in videogame terms) Epic Unobtainium

[@saumyacow4435]

Umm.. would love to know why these things use radioactive materials?

[@ahbushnell1]

I have a krytron. I used them in grad school for pulsed power systems.

[@ralfbaechle]

As I understand the spark plugs were a bit of a quack product delivering no or only a minimal actual performance increase. They should probably seen as a symptom of a time where anything atom was over hyped. Performance claims of those days seem to be either unscientific or testimonials for advertisement purposes. Other than that Po-210 these days is more known as an ingredient is a very special variant of tea ;-) My favorite example which of course predates the spark plugs by like 30 years is Doramad Radioactive Toothpaste, a thorium-enriched toothpaste sold in the 1920s in Germany by the company Auer. Auer was probably most well known for gas mantles for gas lanterns which back then were also being manufactured using thorium. Thorium was used because it created a particular white and bright light not for its radioactive properties - the later later resulted in the replacement of thorium by other elements but none could provide the same light quality.

[@KarbineKyle]

Cool! Again, very nice collection! This is my 2nd comment, because I really like this video! I've performed gamma-ray spectroscopy on Kr-85 (krypton-85) tubes, and I get a significant 514 keV photopeak, especially with newer and/or higher activity tubes. Even though the branching intensity is only 0.43%/173 keV β- decay (max), it works pretty well! You can also detect the 687 keV (max) β- particles with a decent Geiger-Müller counter, if the glass envelope of the Kr-85 tube isn't too thick. I also have the _far_ more "notorious" Westinghouse WL-1B41 tube, which is like the Western Electric JAN-CW-1B22 tube's bigger and meaner sibling. It is a _hot_ tube-with _at least_ 6 μCi of Ra-226 (radium-226), according to my measurements thus far. The glass envelope is very thick-almost 0.5 cm, so it's a heavy tube, too! I do have _a lot_ of other radioactive tubes, too. When it comes to spark-gap tubes, the Cs-137 (cesium-137) is deposited on the inside of the glass-near the middle. My _best_ guess is that the Cs-137 is measured-as a liquid source-or sources, with varying activities-for various spark-gap tube models. When the tube is/was being constructed, a "drop" or "droplet" of said liquid (probably water)-with Cs-137 (probably as cesium chloride) was placed on the inside of the tube envelope, and either put under an infrared lamp, or just left to dry, leaving behind the solid Cs-137 residue, which can be difficult to see sometimes. Also, it could have been boiled off as the air was being evacuated during construction. But, I'm not entirely sure. Thank you for making and sharing this video! It has quality, which I like! I appreciate the information and measurements you've provided! Thanks! 👍

[@PosthumanKindergarten]

oh, hi, you seem into it enough to help me with a dilemma, i have a stupid Telefunken DY86 (HV rectifier for picture tubes of like the '50 or '60), and it has a radioactive getter, the getter is a 6mm pan filled with dark-gray stuff, electrowelded to the internal skirt on a side, it's not flashed unlike most "noval" tubes... i have only an SBM20 geiger and a diy photodiode alpha detector, and it gives like 60CPM above ambient on the SMB20 and a medium intensity "hit" on the photodiode (i don't have other tools sadly)... what element can it be???? cos i read that getters can be made with barium or zirconium or other stuff but the radioisotopes of those are synthetic or outlived, and vacuum rectifiers aren't radioactive, only gas ones are, so my guess is that mine is radioactive for some odd reason, like they used radioactive waste for making the getter material (if you ask, yes, it's the getter being radioactive, if i rotate the tube on the geiger and let the getter (that is on a side) get far from the geiger without distancing the tube from the geiger, the counts reduce, no uranium glass, no (relevant) thorium filament... )

[@danielsee1]

Hot metal can more easily liberate electrons. A current can then be induced to flow between electrodes. Put a grid with a controlled voltage between these electrodes. Controlled voltage can be amplified. Radiation emits ions without the need of a heater.

[@milmaxleo7268]

Ahh you have answered a question I have had for a while about my anton tubes, I could not detect anything and this explains it! I had no idea what specific isotope warranted the trefoil!

[@janvanderlinde3039]

first thing you learn when you work with vacuum tubes don,t touch it with your bare hands !!!

[@iceberg789]

what is the purpose of radiation in all these tubes ? is it safe to handle them like that ?

[@monalisabernido6859]

Give me a DP-5A Geiger counter im in the philippines

[@Graeme_Lastname]

Short half life = Planned obsolescence?

[@Sir-Dexter]

och

[@fotongammadosimetry]

Nice

[@robertfinnigan1005]

USNavy 1970s RADAR lots of Radon tube Types mostly all used as trigger circuits. Think maybe E1 APS82 system RADAR but too long ago for me now.

[@pazsion]

I guess you’d do this for a certain spark rate or something?

[@TlD-dg6ug]

Love how the description is nothing of what he says in the video

[@stephenphilp1380]

But why. What were they used for?

[@DolezalPetr]

really nice

[@mikelee1906]

I am using 1J29B subminiature tubes that have a 1.2v filament voltage in guitar effects distortion pedals as a diode for clipping to make distortion. Because of the low filament voltage of 1.2v these and a few others work great. Recently I purchased 100 Sylvania 5642 tubes for $20.00. But their is a warning about possible Xray dangers. From what I can gather this is only at the high voltages like 25kv. I am only running at up to 1.2 usually. I am experimenting with overvolting the the 1J29B tubes at up to 5 volts. Want to do the same with the 5642. Am I correct in believing the 5642 is safe at low voltage of 1 to 5 volts?

[@Blinkerd00d]

I'm an EE and design pedal circuits, and would love to hear ur pedal. That sounds dope.

[@ocerrr]

amazing history

[@VandalIO]

What are they used for ?

[@radiorob7543]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube

[@basketballjones6782]

If only there was a place on the internet one could find out general knowledge about virtually anything in the known universe... Think of the amazing usefulness of such a web site! I bet if you invent it, you could make bazillions of dollars!

[@crock2434]

So are all tubes made with radioactive isotopes?

[@radiorob7543]

No. The radioactive ones were rare.

[@jagmarc]

I COME BACK TO CHECK THE COMMENT I LEFT FEW MINS AJO AND IT'S GONE YOU TUBE FRAOCKING CENSORED MY POSTING THIS PLATFORM SUCKS