Nixie Tube

Nixie tubes were cold-cathode gas-discharge devices, each containing a stack of ten wire-mesh numerals — zero through nine — sealed inside a glass envelope filled with neon gas. When voltage was applied to a particular cathode, the corresponding numeral glowed orange behind the glass. They were never common in pinball; only a handful of machines in the late 1960s and early 1970s used them for electronic scoring before LED Seven-Segment displays made them obsolete.

Games like Bally’s Odds & Evens (1973) and several European manufacturers experimented with nixie-tube scoring as a bridge between the purely mechanical scoring of the pre-electronic era and the LED displays that would arrive with the first Solid State machines. The tubes were expensive, fragile, and required high-voltage drive circuits — impractical for the rough environment of an arcade. Their warm orange glow and the visible depth of stacked numerals give them a distinctive aesthetic that no other display technology replicates.

Nixie-tube pinball machines are extremely rare today, and working examples command a premium among collectors who value the technology’s visual character and its place as the earliest form of electronic scoring in the medium.