A Brief History
On July 1, 1966, Canada had its first ever color television broadcast in Toronto, Ontario. Back when color TV hit the airwaves in the US, 1950 and 1951, no normal people had color TVs anyway. 1950s color TVs were horrible, with round screens that cut off a lot of the picture and garish colors like a bad cartoon.
Digging Deeper
TVs from the 1950s and early 1960s did not come with remotes, and they took forever to warm up, starting with a little dot of light in the middle that grew into a picture.
Using CRTs and powered by vacuum tubes, digital electronic TV was still in the future. Those tubes would burn out to be replaced regularly, and the TV repairman would have to come and clean the tuners for you.
No cable, of course, and broadcast TV was plagued by “ghost” images that made watching difficult, presuming you lived within range of the three available stations!
Note: Sometime during the 1990s, this author had a conversation with baseball pitching great Bob Feller at a baseball card show. The grand old man opined that the biggest problem with American kids “nowadays” was watching too much television, and that most TV programming was junk!
Back in the “old” days, the nightly news was only 15 minutes of local and 15 minutes of national! The 30-minute format debuted in 1963.
TV shows back in the 1950s and 1960s were terrible! The acting was usually bad, and sets were cardboard looking cheap things with no real special effects. Outdoor scenes in the many westerns on TV were usually filmed indoors on a set. There was virtually no ethnic or cultural diversity, everyone wore their shoes indoors, and gender roles were stereotypes. Sporting events did not have instant replay or slow motion, and blackouts of home games forced fans to either pay the ticket price or listen on the radio.
A really annoying factor about TV prior to the late 1960s or 1970s was the programming ended around 12:30 AM (after the Tonight Show ended in our house.) Sometimes you would get the National Anthem played with a waving American flag on the screen, followed by a “test pattern” with an annoying noise that rudely woke you up if you had fallen asleep during Johnny Carson.
Question for students (and subscribers) to ponder: What is your favorite TV show?
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Abramson, Albert. The History of Television, 1942 to 2000. McFarland, 2007.
Kisseloff, Jeff. The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961. CreateSpace, 2013.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by HumanisticRationale at English Wikipedia of a CT-100 at the SPARK Museum of Electrical Invention playing a 1940s Superman cartoon, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
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