For the Milan design week held last April, [Patrick Stevenson Keating] made a cathode ray tube and exhibited it in a department store.

The glass envelope of [Keating]’s tube is a very thick hand-blown piece of glass. After finishing the inside of the tube with  a phosphorescent lining, [Keating] installed an electrode in a rubber plug and evacuated all the air out of the tube. When 45,000 Volts is applied to the electrode, a dazzling purple glow fills the tube and illuminates the phosphor.

Since the days of our grandfathers, CRTs have normally been made out of thick leaded glass. The reasoning behind this – and why your old computer monitor weighed a lot – is that electron guns can give off a substantial amount of x-rays. This normally isn’t much of a problem for basic devices such as a Crookes tube and monochrome CRTs. even though [Keating] doesn’t give us any indication of what is being emitted from his tube, we’re fairly confident it’s safe for short-term exposure.

Despite being a one-pixel CRT, we can think of using the same process to make a few very interesting pieces of hardware. The Magic Eye tube found in a few remarkably high-end radios and televisions of the 40s, 50s, and 60s could be replicated using the same processes. Alternatively, this CRT could be used as a Williams tube and serve as a few bits of RAM in a homebrew computer.

You can check out the tube in action while on display after the break, along with a very great video showing off the construction.