Cathodeon

Cathodeon

Top Left: Setting the cathode grid spacing (0.2mm) in a precision electron gun of an image storage tube

Top Right: Extremes in the range of Cathodeon Hermetic Glass to Metal Seals. Inset: Close up (approximately life size) of the smallest tube seal (0.062 in outside diameter)

Bottom Left: Hand pressing of Mass Spectrometer Filament Beads

Bottom Right: Sealing off a Hollow Cathode Lamp


Company Introduction

Cathodeon Ltd, an old established subsidiary of the Pye Group, was formed from the vacuum physics laboratory of the former Pye Radio Ltd.

Over the years Cathodeon has developed considerable expertise in glass and quartz manipulation through manufacture of evacuated/gas filled electronic devices such as TV camera tubes, pattern generators, scan convertors and the special light sources used in modern analytical chemistry instrumentation.

The making of hermetic glass to metal seals has always been a necessary part of the Company’s activities and today a wide range of hermetic insulated lead-throughs, in both “compression” and “matched” formats, is offered. Seals are available either as standard products or are specially manufactured to individual customer design and specification. Here a design assistance service is offered to enable customers to realise their requirements in the most practical way.

Product Lines

Hollow Cathode Lamps, Deuterium Lamps, Cuvettes for Spectroscopy, Infra-Red Detectors, Glass to Metal Seals, Filament Beads for Mass Spectrometers

Cathodeon Hollow Cathode Lamps

Hollow Cathode Lamps


An important product line for the Cathodeon company was a range of lamps for use in laboratory analytical instrumentation.

These included deuterium lamps, used as a source of light in UV-Visible Spectrometry. Another important product line was Hollow Cathode Lamps used as a source in Atomic Absorption Spectrometry. This latter product provided a range of over 150 different lamps, covering the majority of the elements of the periodic table in both data coded and multi-element variants.

Importantly Pye Unicam patented the data coding of such lamps and provided use of the patent to its sister company, Cathodeon. Although supplying many different manufacturers variants of the lamps, Cathodeon's largest customer was always Pye Unicam.

Amongst other products Cathodeon manufactured for the laboratory equipment market were Golay cells, used as a detector in Infra-Red Spectrometry.

A patented Data Coded Hollow Cathode Lamp manufactured by Cathodeon for sister company Pye Unicam

Cathodeon Data Coded Hollow Cathode Lamps in situ in an M Series Pye Unicam Atomic Absorption Spectrometer