My Story

While growing up, I always had a curious mind. I wondered how things worked and why things were done a certain way. It seems I always had a collection of half disassembled toys in my bedroom. As I grew up, some things did not change. As an example, in my junior year of college, I took a rather boring (to me) class in macroeconomics. In those days, the only digital clocks were the big bank clocks beside their buildings that gave the time and temperature digitally and football scoreboards that could only count down from 15:00. As my mind wandered, I thought about what was the smallest matrix that one could make the ten digits 0 to 9. It did not take long to determine a 5 x 7 matrix would work even though the numbers were rather boxy.

After that, I needed something else to think about in class so I wondered if it would be possible to make a table top digital clock. Remember this was 1966. I did not know anything about electronics so I asked a few friends who were electrical engineering majors about components. I learned that silicone diodes allowed electricity to flow in one direction but did not let if flow back. They were exactly what I needed. I built my first clock and finished it in December 1966 in time to give it to my father for Christmas. I built a second clock in time to be finished by graduation in 1967. My third and final clock was a little different. Nixie tubes were developed in the late 1960’s and they had all ten digits in one tube. So, I only needed 4 tubes. I built my last clock in 1970, about the time General Electric started selling a little 4” x 8” x 6” digital clock. Oh well.