Built by people who could not let the technology die
Past Indicator has been making nixie tube clocks since 2012. The tubes we use are no longer manufactured, so every clock is assembled from a finite supply of glass that is now more than thirty years old. What we add is the clock case, the board and the decision to keep the light going.
A grandfather, a drawer of tubes, and thirty years of waiting
Vadim Antonov met his first indicator tube as a child. His grandfather was a radio electronics engineer and kept them in the workshop, and the glow of a cold cathode digit is not something a child forgets. The idea of building something around them stayed with him for years before it became a company.
In 2012 he made the first clock. Since then the workshop has hand-built more than 10,000 of them and released over 40 limited collections, and the brand now works out of Russia, the United States, Europe, Hong Kong and the UAE.
Four things we did not expect to happen
A clock for Elon Musk
In 2019 we built the MARS-2024 series around his Mars programme. Vadim flew to California and handed three of them over at the Tesla factory himself.
The Tretyakov Gallery
One of our clocks entered the Tretyakov as part of the history of Russian design from 1917 to 2022, and the same survey put us in the book that came out of it.
Ten thousand year old bone
For a gallery in the UAE we built a clock around a genuine mammoth femur. Stabilising the bone so it could carry electronics took three months of hand work.
Design press
Our work has been covered by ELLE Decoration, Architectural Digest, Design Mate, INTERIOR.RU and Gooood, and reviewed on camera by Unbox Therapy and Austin Evans.
Not everything is made in-house, and that is the point
The electronics and the assembly are ours. For the parts that need a different hand, we bring in people who do only that.
Yaroslav Misonzhnikov
Industrial designer from St Petersburg. Shaped the Vostok, Saturn-C and Deep Space lines, including the clock that went into the Tretyakov.
Alexander Bakharev
Our marble master, one of very few people working stone at this scale. On the craft: we still admire what was cut in Florence and Rome five hundred years ago, because a human finished it properly.
Dmitry Lamonov
Calligrapher working in Cyrillic type, shown at the calligraphy biennale in the UAE in 2018. Painted the Day and Night pair by hand.
Roman Neofidi
Street art calligrapher. Painted the Calligraphy series and the Mars 2024 Street Culture edition, each clock case a single piece.
Oksana Knyazeva
On our own team. Created the Galaxies resin clock cases, where the pattern forms while the resin cures and cannot be repeated.
Artefactum Gallery
Andrey Zaykin, who sourced and prepared the mammoth bone for the Relics collection. Two clocks will come from that single femur.
Finite glass, lasting clock cases
Tubes are sorted, not bought in bulk
Every tube is Soviet, made between 1969 and 1992, and tested by hand before it goes into a clock case. Production ended more than thirty years ago and will not restart.
The board is ours
Designed and hand-soldered in our own workshop. Automatic tube regeneration and controlled voltage are what turn a thirty year old tube into something that runs for another thirty.
Clock cases outlive the parts
Solid wood, marble, brass, aluminium, mammoth bone. Tubes sit in sockets and are replaced without soldering, so the clock is not finished when a tube is.
Limited means limited. Runs are numbered and never repeated. The Atmosfera stops at 300 pieces, the Capsule at 100, the DC-3 at 60, the Vostok-1 Black Aluminum at 20.