Retro gamers still hunt old tube televisions because light guns refuse to work without them
Flat screens replaced bulky picture tubes years ago, yet some players still haul the old sets home. Light guns in classic games work only with cathode ray tubes, because they depend on the way a tube draws its picture line by line. Fans also prize the soft blending of pixels and the quicker response to a button press.
Inside a cathode ray tube, a heated cathode at the back gives off electrons. Electrodes focus them into a beam, coils or plates steer it, and an anode speeds it toward a screen coated with phosphor, which glows wherever it is struck. The beam sweeps the whole screen in a fixed pattern called a raster; colour sets use three beams, one each for red, green and blue. The glass must hold a vacuum below a millionth of normal air pressure, so a broken tube can implode violently, and the thick front glass also blocks most X-rays.
The name predates any understanding of what was flowing. Julius Plücker and Johann Wilhelm Hittorf noticed mysterious rays from the negative electrode that cast shadows, and in 1897 J. J. Thomson showed they were particles smaller than atoms, already named electrons by George Johnstone Stoney in 1891. Also in 1897, the German physicist Ferdinand Braun built the first display tube, and in 1908 Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton proposed using such tubes to both send and receive distant electric vision.
Television followed. Kenjiro Takayanagi demonstrated a tube receiver in 1926 and by 1928 transmitted human faces in half-tones. Vladimir Zworykin gave the device its name in 1929, Allen B. DuMont made tubes lasting 1,000 hours in the 1930s, and Telefunken sold the first commercial electronic sets in Germany in 1934. RCA's 1954 CT-100 was the first mass-produced colour set. Screens grew from 20 inches in 1938 to 43 inches by 1989, and the largest, Sony's 45-inch KX-45ED1, survives in just one known working example.
At their mid-1990s peak, some 160 million tubes were made each year. Lighter, thinner flat panels overtook them in the 2000s, and the last big maker, Videocon, stopped in 2015. Aircraft such as the Boeing 747-400 and Airbus A320 used tube instruments in their cockpits, and replacing them can cost too much, so at least one firm still makes new ones.
Source: Cathode ray tube
