Imagine telling someone in the 1950s that we would one day hang flat-screen television sets (color, of course) on the wall. Such an idea would have been totally incomprehensible in an era when televisions were huge console models, built to accommodate picture tubes that were two and a half feet in length. And of course, they were almost all black and white.
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Unlike modern televisions with buttons and digital displays, television sets in the 50s had knobs for everything. Turn a knob and the set clicked and came on. Of course you had to wait for the picture tube to warm up before you could see anything. There was another knob that allowed you to select a channel – from 2 to 13. And you had to turn past several channels for which there were no stations. Before sitting down, you waited for the picture to come on to see if you needed to adjust the vertical or horizontal hold knobs. Nothing was more aggravating than trying to watch a TV whose picture was rolling. Television viewing was a different proposition in those days.
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Unless you had cable, you fiddled with the rabbit ears every time you changed channels, or you had to send someone outside to turn the antenna. It might even require a third person to relay the instructions out the window or door – “… turn it a little bit more. No that's too far.”
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When a television went irreconcilably on the blink, you called a TV repairman who would come to your house and bring a wondrous “tube caddy” full of hundreds of replacement vacuum tubes. He would pull the set away from the wall and take the back off, then patiently try one tube after another until he found the one that needed to be replaced. Bill Wiggins was the man who rescued our television set from time to time. Nowadays, televisions almost never need adjustments, other than the volume, and we are prone to replace a TV if it gives us too much trouble. Not in those days.
Unless you had cable, you fiddled with the rabbit ears every time you changed channels, or you had to send someone outside to turn the antenna. It might even require a third person to relay the instructions out the window or door – “… turn it a little bit more. No that's too far.”
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When a television went irreconcilably on the blink, you called a TV repairman who would come to your house and bring a wondrous “tube caddy” full of hundreds of replacement vacuum tubes. He would pull the set away from the wall and take the back off, then patiently try one tube after another until he found the one that needed to be replaced. Bill Wiggins was the man who rescued our television set from time to time. Nowadays, televisions almost never need adjustments, other than the volume, and we are prone to replace a TV if it gives us too much trouble. Not in those days. .
Stan Byrd told me that his father had one of the original television remote control devices.
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Stan Byrd told me that his father had one of the original television remote control devices.
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“Stan, why don’t we see what’s on Channel 13?”
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We had one of those, too.
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