Originally designed in the early 1950s, a small number of tubes were built in 1958 for military use in a collaboration with Kaiser Industries.
An extended patent battle followed with a similar technology developed in the United Kingdom, and planned commercial production for the home market never started.
He got a job at the Kaiser Shipyards plant number 2 in Richmond, California, and was promoted to head of the electrical department.
[2] When the war ended Aiken was drafted, but declared 4-F due to asthma, and was instead sent to work in industry in a variety of jobs.
[3] Aiken was not the first to consider the possibility of a compact CRT with a thin display screen, but no-one had been successful in developing one at that point.
[4] Having sketched out the idea, he went to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, his employer at the time, but they didn't find the concept interesting.
He rented space in the basement of a post office, and developed a working tube that could draw and move a dot around the screen.
[7] By this time the United States Naval Research Laboratory had heard about his work and were very interested in developing it as an interactive plotting table for displaying the data from sonobuoys in anti-submarine helicopters.
[10] While development continued, Kaiser started looking for partners in the consumer electronics space that might be able to help fund the effort of taking the tube into commercial production.
The patents describe a number of different systems for constructing the deflection plates, including both electrostatic and electromagnetic circuits.
At the top of the screen was a single wire charged to very high voltages, which bent the beam through 180 degrees back towards the bottom of the display.