Will this be a leaky one?
 

1953 press photo of welder joining a color CRT faceplate to the bell.

Timeframe would make this the C series engineering tubes used in the Model 5?

RCA welder taking a break........

-Steve D.

:lmao:

Already has.
Is that a doctored photo?
There seems to be a lot of shadows where they shouldn't be.

Looks as if the socket was removed from the crt. This on never made it to a home.

The picture looks absolutely ordinary: one main, one fill, and perhaps a bit
of ambient light.

The socket can't be put on until its evacuated. The wires do look
a bit uhhhhh non-pristine.

Looks to me that indeed the tube had been pumped, sealed off (the copper evacuation tube is crimped off) and wired to the base cap (solder blobs are visible at the ends of the wires). Perhaps this is a test reject that was un-based for this photo? Another remote possibility could be that this was a re-work loop where the weld of a gassy tube was touched up and the tube would then be re-gunned and re-processed. :scratch2:

jr

A couple odd things, the evacuation nipple appears to already be pinched off, also it looks like it has Getter spots and that they are already white.
It also seems to have some base cap adhesive residue around the edge?

Possibly a bad tube being used for a publicity photo?

I see Jr and I had the same thought at the same time.

If this is the case then these tubes were leaking before the first set left the factory.

From my experience in the magazine business, magazine covers and publicity photos are always staged, sometimes with ridiculous (from a technical standpoint) results. They are created by art directors, not engineers.

The artful lighting in this one suggests they did not just walk up to an active production station with a camera. More likely, they pulled a junk tube out a bin and staged the whole scene with dramatic lighting to maximize the visual impact. For all we know, the guy in the welder's hood is a janitor or assistant layout artist, whose time was less valuable than an engineer's.

Great photo, in any case. That's a 15GP22 tube, right?

Phil Nelson
Phil's Old Radios
http://antiqueradio.org/index.html

Phil,

Look at the clothing in the picture. It's a woman in the picture, not a guy. She was probably the person who actually welded the tube.

...

They may have been given a tube that went to air, as it would be safer for non-techies to handle. No implosions if they fumble it...

Phil,

The date on the publicity notice is Nov. 1953. This tube may have been an early 15GP22 or more likely an RCA developmental C-73599 tri-color tube.

-Steve D.