Light Up An Old Vacuum Tube

Do you want to make a neat nostalgic project? How about having the warm glow of vacuum tubes?

This doesn't require a high voltage, and is very simple. All you need is an old vacuum tube, and a compatable socket (or you can solder the connections to the tube pins... but you need to make sure you don't heat the pin up too hot, or the solder that connects the pins to the tube innards may heat up, and you will have a bad connection.

You can use AC or DC voltage to power the filament of a vacuum tube. The filament will glow when powered up which is what you are referring to as "lighting up". So a battery is fine. The voltage required by a particular tube is given by the initial digits in the part number. Thus your 12dt8 requires 12 volts to light up the filament. Most tubes that were used in radio and television sets used either 6 or 12 volts although many other voltages were used. You will need to determine which pins are connected to the filament. A tube manual or a web search should provide this information. Since you don't intend to actual use the tube in a circuit, you could just try different combinations of the pins until the filament glows.