Agreed. I just discovered it yesterday. Excellent presenter, good topics, and it is made for our modern limited attention span! I've started spreading the word.
History Guy, I’ve been a Television engineer for over 40 years and my mentors were some of the earlier post-WWII pioneers. It’s a topic with a rich and complicated history. You nailed it my friend. Your chronology was spot-on and you also included multiple threads beyond terrestrial TV into cable, satellite and internet TV services. Nice job.
Oh, I sure do remember those days! I was a child in those days. To me, when the TV went off the air, it was like the end of the world! Now TV is broadcast 24/7
Schools seem compelled to leave the "fun juice" out of most books and lessons, though good teachers can add some back in. But THG is free to go his own way. Thankfully so much of what I disliked in school is enjoyable with the spices of interesting tastes. .
@@markmarkofkane8167 I stumbled across the "Half As Interesting" channel. Let's just say, that channels name is a stretch. Too much goofy content and not enough history. (They could cut their videos in half and they'd still be too long for what they include). THG is interesting and informative without being silly, and he makes me want to learn more. And, I'm in my mid-50s and never thought I'd find history so fun.
The Irony is that the quality of information transmitted by TV has been declining for some time. That in turn causes the discerning viewer to seek internet channels like The History Guy.
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TV isn't the only game in town anymore. At least 90% is unwatchable hot garbage. Of course , the internet is full of idiocy also...
@@roberthurley3941, point of clarification: the average public library. Academic, research, and special libraries still overwhelmingly carry nonfiction over fiction with one exception: Libraries dedicated to fiction writers, as you might expect, have a large section of the writers' work. But they also carry research material about the writer timself and tis life.
Enjoyed this history. As an 8 year old boy in 1955 Amsterdam, we had Saturday and Wednesday afternoon off from school. I can clearly remember going to the house of a rich school friend whose dad ran a shoe store. We,were all invited to watch cartoons..it was magic at the time!
So you had school on Sundays too? I know when we lived in Germany for a year they had school on Saturdays, but only mornings, not a full day. Sunday was off. But if you were in grade school, you didn't have Saturday morning school like when you went to the Gymnasium. Back in the U.S. we had both Saturdays and Sundays off, and summer break was three months long.
Early on in 1948 I remember one family having a commercial sold magnifying glass in the front of a TV and also does anyone remember Hotpoint TV's with a light area around the TV to make the picture look larger?
When, some decade or two from now, we look back and judge the "screen time" bloat of today, I believe that time spent with The History Guy will deserve to be remembered as time spent well. Thank you!
TV from the MOON! A highlight of my career as a photojournalist was meeting Mike Collins, Command Module Pilot of Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing. I met Collins because he was taking part in honoring local resident Stan Labar, who developed the TV camera that allowed the world to watch live as Neil Armstrong took his first step on the lunar surface. I was 12 in 1969, and I still vividly remember watching those ghostly images of Armstrong, on my family’s first color television we’d gotten just a year before as Apollo 8 first orbited the moon. As for rasterization…the Associated Press sent photos to news outlets around the world using rasterization well into the 1980s. How much time did I spend listening to the machine creating line after line…
My husband was a high school paperboy, and used all his hard-earned savings to purchase a color TV to watch the Apollo 11 moon landing. Was he disappointed when the transmission from the moon was in black and white! (All subsequent ones were in color, however.)
I remember taking a bus ride with my dad in 1963 to buy our first TV. It was a big day in our house. He went all out and got the rabbit ears tv top antenna to. I think it was a 14" B&W. The first big thing I remember watching was a Mercury space launch. Romper room was one of the first kids shows I ever saw. When that lady said my name looking through the magic looking Glass, I lost my mind. Later that year I watched the funeral procession of JFK on that TV. When people ask,"where were you when that happened, I remember that TV, the bus ride to get it and my dad.
When my great-grandfather passed away in the 1950's, my grandmother inherited his tv. My Mom remembers being only apartment in her neighborhood to have two tv sets in their home - a rarity for the late 1950's.
I got rid of my cable box abt 4-5 yrs ago and went with a FireStick. Truth be told, while I do have a Philo subscription and Sling before that for real time TV, I seldom watch it. Most of my content is You Tube videos where I have so many choices like your channel, the many channels of Simon Whistler, various genealogy programs, etc, Amazon offerings and an occasional Netflix movei I "borrow" from my sister. It is all so much more interesting than the 3 channels I remember from my youth. Keep up the good work.
When I was a kid in the '70's, out TV was a huge piece of furniture with real walnut trim and a remote with actual mechanical buttons that physically made the channel knob turn with this heavy clunk-clunk-clunk noise. If I watched TV after my parents went to bed, I couldn't use the remote lol. Now, I watch everything on a laptop the size of one of those business-size padded shipping envelopes, and everything I watch is on a streaming service or here on YT.
Yeah i still remember my family's TV when i was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s. It was literally a fancy piece of wooden furniture with a TV built into the middle and no remote. That thing had to weigh a ton. I remember most families had something similar and when they got a new TV they just set it on top of the old one lol!
They had a remote control in the 50s that was essentially a flashlight with a momentary switch that was pointed towards one of the corners of the screen depending on what you wanted it to do. I have wanted a working version for years.
No remote but I remember turning the channel knob quietly late at night or early Saturday morning instead of fast, that machine gun jundt jundt jundt sound to go half way around from 6 to 13!
Thanks so much for this. While there have been countless news, retrospectives, and documentaries about the history of televised content, I don't know of many shows on television about the invention and development OF television itself. This is arguably the most important invention of the 20th, or at least in the top 3, in that it irreversibly changed the way we all perceive history and culture. We commonly mention Farnsworth as the inventor of TV, leaving out that certain complex inventions like it merge a lot of different interdependent technologies.
I can remember the excitement in my family when we actually brought home our first TV. Yep; black and white on a glorious 15” screen. I also remember going to neighbors house to watch Alan Shepard’s 61’ trip into space in color. Hate to say it but I got a 60” Plasma TV with 200 channels sitting fallow with nothing of value being broadcast today. My TV’s highest function today is reserved for my Xbox game play. Pew Pew.
One of the best channels is right here at THG TV. I too, remember the big three channels (ABC, NBC, CBS) along with about 3 or 4 local stations on our "rabbit ears" antenna TV. I also remember going onto the roof with my dad to install the rooftop antenna to replace the positionally sensitive rabbit ears. With the rooftop antenna, the wind would often knock it out of position and I would have to scurry up the roof to get it repositioned. Often that meant yelling from someone below who would run back and forth into the house to report when the picture was right 😂
I get a blank stare from my son when I told him there were only 4 televisions stations to watch when I grew up! When cable first came to town there was suddenly 12 stations to watch! Great history! I enjoy your channel a lot!
I remember when the cable system was still relatively new, they didn't have nearly enough channels to fill everything in. So several channels were those information channels with scrolling text, some were satellite delivered with images, and news snippets adjacent to them. Then a few years later when the cable system was maxed out to about 35 channels, they would share some channels. I think one channels was a CNBC type of business channel (FNN??) that would mostly follow the markets during the day, then after the markets closed, around 3 or 4pm local time (central time zone) they would switch the channel over to Nickelodeon channel or maybe it was the USA Network. So some channels on the cable system were shared depending on the time of day. I also remember when Nickelodeon channel was commercial free, no ads. Imagine that, a kids channel that didn't have ads aimed at getting your kid to want some cereal or toy. But that didn't last long sadly. Just too tempting a target. I also remember when our cable system first got the History Channel, the channel actually had shows about history. Not the crème puff reality stuff they show now and claim some fragment of history because some guy is trying to sell an old gun to a pawn shop owner.. Or when TLC actually had shows teaching you about stuff, I remember a great UK show they had with a professor sort of guy explaining everyday home items and how they worked. Something gadgets? Uhg, glad I dropped cable years ago. The channels I loved on cable just all became reality shit shows.
This is content about my entire lifetime... I was born in 1941, and it is now 2020. What a time it has been, too! More junk has gone past my nose than popcorn kernels in a busy theater. Unbelievable, too. And I MEAN, "unbelievable," also! The pure tripe is rampant! It only gets worse as the quality gets better.
My Grandfather was born in 1898. No Radio back then! And he first flew in an Aeroplane about 1916. It was a demonstration at a State Fair! Scared him so badly that he NEVER FLEW AGAIN! And he lived until 1994!
At school I was taught it was Baird vs electronic tv and Lord Reith of the BBC. Watson Watt (RADAR) figured in the history and development there somewhere. Baird broadcast from Crystal Palace which suspiciously burnt down on in 1936 ( 30 Nov ). Proir to that there had been trials of Baird's system on 220 lines vs electronic 405 line tv ( Marconi?) on a basis of 2 week sessions of each over a period of time, turn about, to evaluate the better system. Baird continued to work on tv till his death in 1946. He had been doing some high definition colour stuff. I remember his widow on tv describing how vivid it was. A friend built a Baird's televisor. The Baird Co. even had a book on how to build one, although it was very cryptic on part of it and specifically gave you the old design which was being replaced by something 'secret'. If memory serves, I have a synchroniser in mind, the mechanical version of which was being replaced by an electronic version. The UK is now entirely digital. The first area to go entirely digital was Hawick in the Borders of Scotland.
Thank goodness someone has at last given Logie Baird credit for his pioneering work in television. The BBC first broadcast in 1936 as you say. But remember that this is an American documentary and they have invented everything and that the rest of the world doesnt exist. We bought our first tv in England in 1949. It was an HMV table model with a ten inch screen.
I too was always aware of John Logie Baird.. but then I guess with my name and growing up in Scotland I would be. First thing I saw on colour tv was horse racing I remember the green green grass and the 'colours' of all the jockeys.
i enjoy learning about history and many different topics i may not know anything about or even that topic existing. and being told about an event or development of something like this makes it easier to remember info. and i love how he talks and his cadence. i love listening to people talk about a topic they thoroughly enjoy. so i wont be going anywhere but to the next video. thank you for learning and loving history and sharing it back with the rest of us. you are a good man, Charlie Brown!
I keep a 19"Sony crt around to play my vintage video game consoles on. Nintendo, Sega, Atari. Lol I would have never guessed my nes would ever be "vintage".
I've got a 36 inch Trinitron that I still use for games and movies. I have an outdoor antenna and I can pick up WAMS-LP which is a NTSC CBS translator station still but I do have a converter just for standard broadcast television
Remember as a kid in the `50's sitting and watching the test page with the Indian Head waiting for programs to start. Us boomers are the 1st TV generation.
now you have those that will demand accountability, centuries later. boy are we advancing as a peoples. the whole time the present accountability is nonexitant.
You had three television stations? Were you lucky. We only had two black-and-white TV stations and receive the signal from the rabbit ears on top of the TV. On Saturday mornings we would watch the test pattern until noon when our Saturday morning television programs would be on the air. It was my 13th birthday when we got our third television station. I ran home from school, poured a glass of milk, grabbed a couple of cookies and turned on the TV set to channel 7. The first program I watched on this new station was Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. My life has changed.
"The Wasteland?" The change from black & white to color, from mono to stereo, from broadcast to cable and to satellite. It has come a long way. Growing up we were able to get 7 channels with the rabbit ears (2,4,5,7,9,11&13). No channel One thought and we children of that the time were the remotes for our parents. Did you know that in East Germany during the Cold War that the people could be arrested if their tv antennas were turned the wrong way and could pickup the West Germany stations? I remember a Bugs Bunny cartoon were smell-o-vision was to replace television in the future.
Channel one was too good for us, it would go too far and thus be subject to interference. That's what happened to it. Hams got some of it. Smell-o-vision, whew! Imagine pet food commercials, or the real stink coming out of FOX News. Elephant farts, donkey doodah and Washington swamp gas.
The Farnsworth Museum in Rigby, Idaho, is one of the finest small town museums I have ever visited. Went back a second time recently when I visited Yellowstone- Rigby is just down the road from the West Yellowstone, Montana entrance.
I remember my father getting our first color TV... he bought it from his fathers estate in 1973 and it was small... I think 20". You had to sit close to see clearly. I was 15 years old then.
We got ours in '71. Someone made a console tv that had touch sensitive buttons in a verticle row and a plastic strip that you could take out to put the channel number in front of a bulb... Star Trek looked so much damned better!! 😆
I was rather more fortunate in my early youth. While you needed a rooftop antenna to get 3 channels and my Grandaddy at that same time got his 3 channels with a roof antenna and a rotor, my immediate family got 6 stations clearly with a lowly set of rabbit ears and loop antenna atop our tv set. As early as I can remember...about 1971 or 72, we could get NBC on WAVE channel 3, CBS on WHAS channel 11, PBS on WKPC channel 15, ABC on WLKY channel 32, and an independent station on WDRB channel 41 and yet another PBS station of WKMJ channel 68 all in good old Louisville, Kentucky :)
Wonderful discussion, an intriguing side note about color TV broadcast of the early 50s the rotating disc, again synced to the studio. At 1,800 rpm it was a (thankfully) brief return of mechanical TV that CBS invested heavily and would be undone by RCA abound 1954 in time for the $1,200 model CT-100.
I work at TH-cam in our San Bruno HQ. You are my favorite creator and I tell my fellow TH-camrs about your channel. BTW, the engineers here that make these videos work are called transcoding engineers (encoding as you talked about here). TH-cam has the most advanced transcoding technology, hence why we can transmit this much video data so well and so quickly.
A small voice? A SMALL VOICE? You, sir, are the loudest voice in the area of easily accessible and understandable history content. Please continue your crusade to remind future generations of the most important knowledge, our past.
For some reason this made me remember my dad trying to watch two college football games at the same time by putting a small tv on top of the large living room tv. Different time for sure.
I love this channel !! So much history to be learned. Thanks so much for your programs as I fear my brain will be damaged if I watch any of the junk on broadcast tv today.
I am old enough to remember when I was the remote control for my Dad. Lol. My first set was a 13 inch black and white and I thought that was so cool. Oh how far we have come..
In the Los Angeles area in the 50's, we had 7 stations. KNXT 2; KNBC 4, KTLA 5, KABC 7, KHJ 9, KTTV 11 (Los Angeles Times), KCOP 13 (Copley TV). When public television came around, KCET 28 was added.
The first TV I remember us having was a 13 inch black and white RCA. Dad was frugal but he splurged on technology. We were the first on our street to have a color TV and it could get UHF without a converter. We could get channel 50 which showed the cool shows like The Three Stooges and The Little Rascals, PBS (channel 56) and channel 62 which ran a lot of old RKO B-Movies and lesser reruns. Then he got his pride and joy, the rotating antenna for the roof. I got being frugal from Dad but I guess I got his tech gene as well because I spoiled myself with loaded cable packages in the 80s and 90s and I was out in front when flat screens came out. Funny thing about Dad, he bought a flat screen but I couldn't get him to upgrade to HD. That frugality gene was still dominating. When I think of TV I always think of the day Dad put that rotating antenna on the roof. He was quite proud. RIP Pops. .
My parents had one of those fancy console color tvs that they used in their living room from 1979 to 1992. Screen was 26", and speaker had a good sound. I am surprised it was able to use basic cable all those years. Zenith was the best brand , which my parents had. I am 63, and even at age 18, 1979, my parents only got 3 channels and a roof antenna. They got basic cable 1980.
Between 1956-59 my dad bought the first tv in our part of the neighborhood- it was a Zenith 19" black&white tv in a cabinet with 4 legs- it had a remote control that wasn't much more then a tuning fork in a box lol- and ONE channel lmao - i remember watching the Texaco hour at night time and mom watching soap operas and Queen for a day in the daytime
You may not see this, since this episode is over a year old, but my parents had the first tv in our community. Mom said the living room would be full with neighbors coming to watch tv. If I’m not mistaken, I believe they had the first color tv too. We had four channels. The good old days.
i want to thank you for your programming, i learn a lot watching your programs, again thanks on this program i think you forgot to mention who developed the color tv
I'm 65. I'd like to see a Collection and History of Test Patterns. Yeah, and Sign Offs, too! To quote Monty Python, todays youth would be Highly Skeptical to hear that any form of TV ever Signed Off and put up Test Patterns, eh?! Lux-shur-ee!
We used to have to watch television from the bottom of a mine shaft and burned the coal to make electricity for power, But you tell young people that today and they won't believe you.
In the 1920's my grandfather left a series of hard-scrabble jobs in the middle America to relocate to what was to become my little Pacific Northwest hometown of Anacortes near the Canadian border. Longshoreman jobs were plentiful there. But he soon realized what the folks wanted were radios. So he learned that trade and then opened his own "Jack's Radio. They sold like hotcakes. Years later he added "refrigerators" to his shop; also sold well but were admittedly pricier than elegant floor & tabletop radios cabinetted in varnished wood and bakelite. When my Dad finished highschool circa 1947, he attended Edison Tech in Seattle to learn the technology of the newest consumer item, television. He returned home and joined Grandpa's shop which was re-christened "Video Electronics." That shop grew to a full store. When color TV appeared, the store absolutely flourished right through to the late 1960's. Then Japan got into the act -- and with the emergence of large shopping centers and malls, hometown small-businesses like Grandpa's and Dad's popular radio & TV & refrigerator & MICROWAVE stores shriveled up and died.
I'll give you another reason for the decline of Cable TV. It was probably about two Presidents ago that I last saw content on Cable TV that was up to par with the quality of this channel that I have available to watch literally any time and place I so desire.
I'm old enough to remember NO television set in our home in rural coastal South Carolina. My grandparents were the first buy a TV, mainly to watch farm reports, bluegrass & country music and religious programming. Whenever Rev. Billy Graham televised a Crusade, our entire extended family came to the farm for a potluck supper, then we'd pack into the tiny den to sing hymns with George Beverly Shea and then watch Rev. Graham make his incredibly logical arguments for the existence and love of God. The same was happening in every other farmhouse on Highway 701. That tiny black & white TV brought us together as a family, as a community of faith and as good citizens. It's not that way now. I mourn the fact that TV is now primarily a source of malice, division and narcissism. There was a time when it wasn't that way.
We used to go to my grandparents house every wkend to watch TV bcz we didn't hv1 til 1969 we watched boxing & Lawrence Welk sometimes cartoons. 1thing that sticks out in memory was grandma saying TV was the DEVIL...
I remember when cable TV came to the Greater Lafayette (Indiana) area in 1964; it was great because we could get not only the local stations but also stations in Indianapolis and Chicago. Today, however, I get my "TV" by antenna or over the internet; you couldn't pay me to go back to cable.
Thank you for acknowledging Farnsworth. I'm familiar with his history and how he is only recently being acknowledged.for his accomplishments. An interesting story would be the story of the Darth Vader of the early electronic communication industry...that evil snake David Sarnoff.
Yes, Indeed! The evil snake Sarnoff; ruthless, conniving, controlling, and a thief. EF McDonald, President of Zenith Radio Corporation, could not stand being in the same room with him. Everything RCA made, Zenith was determined to make it better; and they did.
Where did you grow up with just 3 stations? Yes, here in metro Detroit ch 2 was CBS ch 4 was NBC and ch 7 was ABC. I'm guessing that you refer to those national broadcasters.. I know a lot of people who grew up in rural areas that only got 1 or 2 channels thus had a different childhood as far as TV went. My ex-wife and her siblings missed out on Alf. She thought I was pulling her leg when I first described it. Being a major metropolitan area, we also had a PBS station on ch 56. So that came in only after the FCC expansion with UHF. It was there before I was born, but the earliest TV set I remember in our house was older and only had the VHF tuner. So I saw that for the first time when my dad bought a new antenna and added a UHF tuner box on top of the TV. It was never clear. In 1967 when dad had a good year and we got a new TV that had UHF built in and a newer better antenna and those channels were finally clearer. We also had a local only TV station ch 50, WKBD. Now, though it was bought by CW. But in my childhood, it played a lot of old movies and reruns of popular TV shows. Just a couple years later ch 20 was added. It was more reruns and old movies, but they were trying to do more local programming, so it had a semi PBS vibe. When I was a teenager, ch 62 was added as another local TV station. With similar programing, but it was owned by black businessmen and featured shows that appealed to blacks. I did not really notice that until I knew some black people in high school. (Which rather sadly states how little programming there was that appealed to 20% of the US population. Too bad that no longer exists as an entity as more is available now.) But the best thing, TV wise, growing up in Detroit was ch 9. Windsor, Ontario, Canada's CBC station. I got to see curling! Later, when I lived in another state, so I don't know how it happened, but Fox took over ch 2 and CBS got bumped down to ch 62. Seems like it would have made sense for Fox to buy the local independent, but somehow that is what we got. Not that I watch broadcast TV anymore. When I see it on other places, I can't imagine spending 1/3 of my viewing time on commercials. So I read a book.
When I was a kid, I wondered why there was no one name for the inventor of the television. Rightly or wrongly, there was usually a person associated with an invention. Alexander Graham Bell for the telephone, Eli Whitney for the cotton gin, the Wright Brothers for the airplane, Henry Ford for the automobile *burp*. This video shows that television was a layering of multiple inventions.
My grandad had the first color TV on the block, cable too. When I went there all the local kids come over to see the color set. I was popular due to the set lol.
Back in the mid 50s that TV tube AGC270 would go out quite often on our 17 inch Capehart. Dad bought several so he wouldn't have to drive to the super market to test them.
What I'd like to see is a detailed history of how television was introduced to the public, how it was advertised and hyped, and how it eventually made its way into customers' homes in Europe, Canada and the United States. Particularly electronic TV, and who were the ones who first bought a TV set, and what did they watch then. I am guessing TV used to be the prized treasure of the very few and the envy of the many for decades.
You know this but some of your younger viewers may not. The NBC Peacock fanning his tail out was originally played just before a TV show to show it was "in living color." When most shows became color and the peacock was unnecessary instead of firing him, they promoted the proud bird to be their official corporate logo. They even named their streaming channel after him. I'm glad they kept this historic figure.
Unbelievably the history guy did not mention that the Nazi Olympics of 1936 were broadcast on television in Germany only presumably and obviously on very few sets since they must have been super-expensive!
....and let's not forget the TV remote control, developed by Zenith Radio Corporation in 1950. The remote, called "Lazy Bones, was connected to the television by a wire. A wireless remote control, the "Flashmatic," was developed in 1955 by Eugene Polley.
Philo Farnsworth's patent priority establishment via a chalkboard discussion with his high school science teacher in Rexburg is worth remembering in its own right.
(Going back a bit:) I'm glad that our Utah/Idaho man, Philo, is credited as THE (or the main) inventor of electronic TV. But I'm dumbfounded about how he could have figured out any of that stuff at just 14 and 21! Anyway, I wish I could've met him.
Paying for TV is against my principles, and while everyone else in my apartment building has cable or FIOS, I hooked up my TV to an antenna. I get over 50 stations, and 7 of them are PBS stations, which I watch the most.
I will say it again: This is simply one of the finest channels on TH-cam.
Agreed. I just discovered it yesterday. Excellent presenter, good topics, and it is made for our modern limited attention span! I've started spreading the word.
I really like how he just states facts and doesn’t interject opinions or politics. Its rare to see the anymore.
AMEN!!!
*I couldn't agree more.*
Not "one of the finest History channels" but one of the finest channels ... period.
Sure is.
History Guy, I’ve been a Television engineer for over 40 years and my mentors were some of the earlier post-WWII pioneers. It’s a topic with a rich and complicated history. You nailed it my friend. Your chronology was spot-on and you also included multiple threads beyond terrestrial TV into cable, satellite and internet TV services. Nice job.
That's some high praise!
He layered everything very well.
Does anyone remember the broadcasters playing the national anthem and the flag waving...before going to white noise at midnight?
And that poem about “slipping the surly bonds of earth”.
Yep
Of course!!
we had the goodnight kiwi that climbed up to the top of the tv station and went to sleep
Oh, I sure do remember those days! I was a child in those days. To me, when the TV went off the air, it was like the end of the world! Now TV is broadcast 24/7
History was my least favorite subject in school. Now I can't get enough of your videos.
Long live the "History Dude"
You're still not learning history. This is propaganda.
Schools seem compelled to leave the "fun juice" out of most books and lessons, though good teachers can add some back in. But THG is free to go his own way. Thankfully so much of what I disliked in school is enjoyable with the spices of interesting tastes. .
It does help if the person teaching is interesting and not boring. This guy is interesting and not at all boring.
@@markmarkofkane8167 I stumbled across the "Half As Interesting" channel. Let's just say, that channels name is a stretch. Too much goofy content and not enough history. (They could cut their videos in half and they'd still be too long for what they include).
THG is interesting and informative without being silly, and he makes me want to learn more. And, I'm in my mid-50s and never thought I'd find history so fun.
School had away of destroying any interesting subject or topic
The Irony is that the quality of information transmitted by TV has been declining for some time. That in turn causes the discerning viewer to seek internet channels like The History Guy.
TV isn't the only game in town anymore. At least 90% is unwatchable hot garbage. Of course , the internet is full of idiocy also...
It’s not just TV it’s all knowledge. 100 years ago the average library had a larger non-fiction section than fiction. Not so today.
Irony is what water tastes like if you get new pipes in your house.
@@roberthurley3941, point of clarification: the average public library. Academic, research, and special libraries still overwhelmingly carry nonfiction over fiction with one exception: Libraries dedicated to fiction writers, as you might expect, have a large section of the writers' work. But they also carry research material about the writer timself and tis life.
@@roberthurley3941 so true. Nowadays, nonfiction is also fiction.
Enjoyed this history. As an 8 year old boy in 1955 Amsterdam, we had Saturday and Wednesday afternoon off from school. I can clearly remember going to the house of a rich school friend whose dad ran a shoe store. We,were all invited to watch cartoons..it was magic at the time!
So you had school on Sundays too? I know when we lived in Germany for a year they had school on Saturdays, but only mornings, not a full day. Sunday was off. But if you were in grade school, you didn't have Saturday morning school like when you went to the Gymnasium. Back in the U.S. we had both Saturdays and Sundays off, and summer break was three months long.
@@marcusdamberger no. Sundays were for dressing up to go to church and have coffee and cakes with family after
I remember the TV repairman coming to the house every few months to replace tubes and realign the channel dial with the station numbers!
I remember our old TV set in the 70s- it's cabinet was all wood and looked like a piece of some elegant furniture!
Early on in 1948 I remember one family having a commercial sold magnifying glass in the front of a TV and also does anyone remember Hotpoint TV's with a light area around the TV to make the picture look larger?
@@joerogers4227 , YUP. SURE DO!!!!!!, I" started" working on T.V. sets of that era
I do too...I DXed TV on one of those... used to get.. San Diego and Mexico from L A...
My father and grandfather built wooden TV cabinets for RCA in Monticello Indiana. They were furniture grade I order to merit higher sales price.
Yup!
When, some decade or two from now, we look back and judge the "screen time" bloat of today, I believe that time spent with The History Guy will deserve to be remembered as time spent well.
Thank you!
TV from the MOON! A highlight of my career as a photojournalist was meeting Mike Collins, Command Module Pilot of Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing. I met Collins because he was taking part in honoring local resident Stan Labar, who developed the TV camera that allowed the world to watch live as Neil Armstrong took his first step on the lunar surface. I was 12 in 1969, and I still vividly remember watching those ghostly images of Armstrong, on my family’s first color television we’d gotten just a year before as Apollo 8 first orbited the moon.
As for rasterization…the Associated Press sent photos to news outlets around the world using rasterization well into the 1980s. How much time did I spend listening to the machine creating line after line…
My husband was a high school paperboy, and used all his hard-earned savings to purchase a color TV to watch the Apollo 11 moon landing. Was he disappointed when the transmission from the moon was in black and white! (All subsequent ones were in color, however.)
I remember taking a bus ride with my dad in 1963 to buy our first TV. It was a big day in our house. He went all out and got the rabbit ears tv top antenna to. I think it was a 14" B&W. The first big thing I remember watching was a Mercury space launch. Romper room was one of the first kids shows I ever saw. When that lady said my name looking through the magic looking Glass, I lost my mind. Later that year I watched the funeral procession of JFK on that TV. When people ask,"where were you when that happened, I remember that TV, the bus ride to get it and my dad.
One of the outstanding channels, THG, is so appreciated! Thank you, THG!!
When I started junior high. In 1990 I went into the tv servicing field when school was out for summer and learned a lot
When my great-grandfather passed away in the 1950's, my grandmother inherited his tv. My Mom remembers being only apartment in her neighborhood to have two tv sets in their home - a rarity for the late 1950's.
Honey, he's teasing you. Nobody has two television sets.
@@4jp If one is rich enough, one can.
@@4jp .....nice reference to "Back to the Future".......
@@4jp "what's a rerun?" 😉
I got rid of my cable box abt 4-5 yrs ago and went with a FireStick. Truth be told, while I do have a Philo subscription and Sling before that for real time TV, I seldom watch it. Most of my content is You Tube videos where I have so many choices like your channel, the many channels of Simon Whistler, various genealogy programs, etc, Amazon offerings and an occasional Netflix movei I "borrow" from my sister. It is all so much more interesting than the 3 channels I remember from my youth. Keep up the good work.
Well here's 6.1 million thankyous to one of my absolute favourite TH-cam channels. 😀👌🏼
When I was a kid in the '70's, out TV was a huge piece of furniture with real walnut trim and a remote with actual mechanical buttons that physically made the channel knob turn with this heavy clunk-clunk-clunk noise. If I watched TV after my parents went to bed, I couldn't use the remote lol.
Now, I watch everything on a laptop the size of one of those business-size padded shipping envelopes, and everything I watch is on a streaming service or here on YT.
Yeah i still remember my family's TV when i was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s. It was literally a fancy piece of wooden furniture with a TV built into the middle and no remote. That thing had to weigh a ton. I remember most families had something similar and when they got a new TV they just set it on top of the old one lol!
They had a remote control in the 50s that was essentially a flashlight with a momentary switch that was pointed towards one of the corners of the screen depending on what you wanted it to do. I have wanted a working version for years.
Hey Glenn.HDMI it to a 40" screen , no brainer
No remote but I remember turning the channel knob quietly late at night or early Saturday morning instead of fast, that machine gun jundt jundt jundt sound to go half way around from 6 to 13!
Thanks so much for this. While there have been countless news, retrospectives, and documentaries about the history of televised content, I don't know of many shows on television about the invention and development OF television itself. This is arguably the most important invention of the 20th, or at least in the top 3, in that it irreversibly changed the way we all perceive history and culture.
We commonly mention Farnsworth as the inventor of TV, leaving out that certain complex inventions like it merge a lot of different interdependent technologies.
I went to school just to see how T.V, works. this blows my mind.
I can remember the excitement in my family when we actually brought home our first TV. Yep; black and white on a glorious 15” screen. I also remember going to neighbors house to watch Alan Shepard’s 61’ trip into space in color. Hate to say it but I got a 60” Plasma TV with 200 channels sitting fallow with nothing of value being broadcast today. My TV’s highest function today is reserved for my Xbox game play. Pew Pew.
Can you not put in a Chromecast or something? Much more useful.
You can get the wire needed from Amazon, plug it into a PC, and you can enjoy the world.
One of the best channels is right here at THG TV. I too, remember the big three channels (ABC, NBC, CBS) along with about 3 or 4 local stations on our "rabbit ears" antenna TV.
I also remember going onto the roof with my dad to install the rooftop antenna to replace the positionally sensitive rabbit ears.
With the rooftop antenna, the wind would often knock it out of position and I would have to scurry up the roof to get it repositioned. Often that meant yelling from someone below who would run back and forth into the house to report when the picture was right 😂
I love this guy. Great stories and presentation. Keep going.
Damn, TH-cam is sharing my data!? My 6.1 million hours of History Guy viewing was assumed confidential!
I get a blank stare from my son when I told him there were only 4 televisions stations to watch when I grew up! When cable first came to town there was suddenly 12 stations to watch! Great history! I enjoy your channel a lot!
I remember when the cable system was still relatively new, they didn't have nearly enough channels to fill everything in. So several channels were those information channels with scrolling text, some were satellite delivered with images, and news snippets adjacent to them. Then a few years later when the cable system was maxed out to about 35 channels, they would share some channels. I think one channels was a CNBC type of business channel (FNN??) that would mostly follow the markets during the day, then after the markets closed, around 3 or 4pm local time (central time zone) they would switch the channel over to Nickelodeon channel or maybe it was the USA Network. So some channels on the cable system were shared depending on the time of day.
I also remember when Nickelodeon channel was commercial free, no ads. Imagine that, a kids channel that didn't have ads aimed at getting your kid to want some cereal or toy. But that didn't last long sadly. Just too tempting a target. I also remember when our cable system first got the History Channel, the channel actually had shows about history. Not the crème puff reality stuff they show now and claim some fragment of history because some guy is trying to sell an old gun to a pawn shop owner.. Or when TLC actually had shows teaching you about stuff, I remember a great UK show they had with a professor sort of guy explaining everyday home items and how they worked. Something gadgets? Uhg, glad I dropped cable years ago. The channels I loved on cable just all became reality shit shows.
This is content about my entire lifetime... I was born in 1941, and it is now 2020. What a time it has been, too! More junk has gone past my nose than popcorn kernels in a busy theater. Unbelievable, too. And I MEAN, "unbelievable," also! The pure tripe is rampant! It only gets worse as the quality gets better.
Thank you for this episode.
This is one od the best TH-cam channels!!!! I love that people are loving history!!!!!!
I really love hearing you talk about history, you are a great narrator and a very sweet energy
I have a 1947 Admiral 10 inch console television I bought over a decade ago. Still works too.
My Grandfather was born in 1898. No Radio back then! And he first flew in an Aeroplane about 1916. It was a demonstration at a State Fair! Scared him so badly that he NEVER FLEW AGAIN! And he lived until 1994!
At school I was taught it was Baird vs electronic tv and Lord Reith of the BBC. Watson Watt (RADAR) figured in the history and development there somewhere. Baird broadcast from Crystal Palace which suspiciously burnt down on in 1936 ( 30 Nov ). Proir to that there had been trials of Baird's system on 220 lines vs electronic 405 line tv ( Marconi?) on a basis of 2 week sessions of each over a period of time, turn about, to evaluate the better system.
Baird continued to work on tv till his death in 1946. He had been doing some high definition colour stuff. I remember his widow on tv describing how vivid it was.
A friend built a Baird's televisor. The Baird Co. even had a book on how to build one, although it was very cryptic on part of it and specifically gave you the old design which was being replaced by something 'secret'. If memory serves, I have a synchroniser in mind, the mechanical version of which was being replaced by an electronic version.
The UK is now entirely digital. The first area to go entirely digital was Hawick in the Borders of Scotland.
Thank goodness someone has at last given Logie Baird credit for his pioneering work in television. The BBC first broadcast in 1936 as you say. But remember that this is an American documentary and they have invented everything and that the rest of the world doesnt exist. We bought our first tv in England in 1949. It was an HMV table model with a ten inch screen.
I too was always aware of John Logie Baird.. but then I guess with my name and growing up in Scotland I would be. First thing I saw on colour tv was horse racing I remember the green green grass and the 'colours' of all the jockeys.
i enjoy learning about history and many different topics i may not know anything about or even that topic existing. and being told about an event or development of something like this makes it easier to remember info. and i love how he talks and his cadence. i love listening to people talk about a topic they thoroughly enjoy. so i wont be going anywhere but to the next video. thank you for learning and loving history and sharing it back with the rest of us. you are a good man, Charlie Brown!
I work in retail and I get the occasional senior questioning if the television they’re considering is color.
Do you sell them a set of paints and a paint brush so they can make it color?
I'm so glad I came across your channel. Finally something that is worthwhile.😀
I still have my CRT TV and "bunny ears."
I keep a 19"Sony crt around to play my vintage video game consoles on. Nintendo, Sega, Atari. Lol I would have never guessed my nes would ever be "vintage".
Do you have a converter box to see digital tv?
Oxnate - “Bunny ears” are not the same as “rabbit ears” to me.
@@davidvogel6359 Yes, I have the cheapest converter box I could find.
I've got a 36 inch Trinitron that I still use for games and movies. I have an outdoor antenna and I can pick up WAMS-LP which is a NTSC CBS translator station still but I do have a converter just for standard broadcast television
The History Guy is the only way to go. Big fan from Ontario Canada!! Keep up the EXCELLENT videos!!
Remember as a kid in the `50's sitting and watching the test page with the Indian Head waiting for programs to start. Us boomers are the 1st TV generation.
now you have those that will demand accountability, centuries later. boy are we advancing as a peoples. the whole time the present accountability is nonexitant.
You had three television stations? Were you lucky. We only had two black-and-white TV stations and receive the signal from the rabbit ears on top of the TV. On Saturday mornings we would watch the test pattern until noon when our Saturday morning television programs would be on the air. It was my 13th birthday when we got our third television station. I ran home from school, poured a glass of milk, grabbed a couple of cookies and turned on the TV set to channel 7. The first program I watched on this new station was Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. My life has changed.
"The Wasteland?" The change from black & white to color, from mono to stereo, from broadcast to cable and to satellite. It has come a long way. Growing up we were able to get 7 channels with the rabbit ears (2,4,5,7,9,11&13). No channel One thought and we children of that the time were the remotes for our parents. Did you know that in East Germany during the Cold War that the people could be arrested if their tv antennas were turned the wrong way and could pickup the West Germany stations? I remember a Bugs Bunny cartoon were smell-o-vision was to replace television in the future.
I bet you're from Long Island! Lol. I lived there and on a clear day early in the morning we got channel 8 from CT.
Actually I am from Passaic, New Jersey.
Channel one was too good for us, it would go too far and thus be subject to interference. That's what happened to it. Hams got some of it.
Smell-o-vision, whew! Imagine pet food commercials, or the real stink coming out of FOX News. Elephant farts, donkey doodah and Washington swamp gas.
An excellent synopsis of a complicated subject. Well done!
Farnsworth absolutely detested the tv after he realized what it did to relationships.
Good thing he didn't live to see "smart" phones.
I know I've spent many hours with you. Love your channel. I'm from Lawrence KS. Lot's of history here.
The Farnsworth Museum in Rigby, Idaho, is one of the finest small town museums I have ever visited. Went back a second time recently when I visited Yellowstone- Rigby is just down the road from the West Yellowstone, Montana entrance.
I remember my father getting our first color TV... he bought it from his fathers estate in 1973 and it was small... I think 20". You had to sit close to see clearly. I was 15 years old then.
We got ours in '71. Someone made a console tv that had touch sensitive buttons in a verticle row and a plastic strip that you could take out to put the channel number in front of a bulb... Star Trek looked so much damned better!! 😆
Another wonderful presentation by the History Guy. Thanks
Great video ! Just skipped BERLIN Olympics 1936 , when all games where filmed and transmitted by television. Something what makes the history .
I was rather more fortunate in my early youth. While you needed a rooftop antenna to get 3 channels and my Grandaddy at that same time got his 3 channels with a roof antenna and a rotor, my immediate family got 6 stations clearly with a lowly set of rabbit ears and loop antenna atop our tv set. As early as I can remember...about 1971 or 72, we could get NBC on WAVE channel 3, CBS on WHAS channel 11, PBS on WKPC channel 15, ABC on WLKY channel 32, and an independent station on WDRB channel 41 and yet another PBS station of WKMJ channel 68 all in good old Louisville, Kentucky :)
Wonderful discussion, an intriguing side note about color TV broadcast of the early 50s the rotating disc, again synced to the studio. At 1,800 rpm it was a (thankfully) brief return of mechanical TV that CBS invested heavily and would be undone by RCA abound 1954 in time for the $1,200 model CT-100.
That was pretty expensive, considering that, in 1956, a 21" B&W Admiral Super Cascode cost $250.
The development of NTSC color/B&W compatible signals was true genius, and deserves a much closer look.
I work at TH-cam in our San Bruno HQ. You are my favorite creator and I tell my fellow TH-camrs about your channel. BTW, the engineers here that make these videos work are called transcoding engineers (encoding as you talked about here). TH-cam has the most advanced transcoding technology, hence why we can transmit this much video data so well and so quickly.
Only 6.1 million hours of viewership in 2019? Seems pretty low, since 4 million of those hours are myself only :)
@Tucsoncoyote 2019 Excellent statement!
Where were you when I was in school! Thanks for your work!
I love the History Guy episodes please keep them coming.
A small voice? A SMALL VOICE? You, sir, are the loudest voice in the area of easily accessible and understandable history content. Please continue your crusade to remind future generations of the most important knowledge, our past.
Yep cant get enough of this channel!
For some reason this made me remember my dad trying to watch two college football games at the same time by putting a small tv on top of the large living room tv. Different time for sure.
I love this channel !! So much history to be learned. Thanks so much for your programs as I fear my brain will be damaged if I watch any of the junk on broadcast tv today.
You seriously are one my favorite channels to watch. Great work! Thank you for all you do!
Great video as usual. That first TV station now operates with the call letters WRGB channel 6.
I am old enough to remember when I was the remote control for my Dad. Lol. My first set was a 13 inch black and white and I thought that was so cool. Oh how far we have come..
Kudos, of course, for your well presented History videos; but I was also groovin' on the ultra-fine bow tie & matching pocket kerchief.
LOVE WATCHING THE HISTORY GUY❣️❣️❣️
Thanks for including shot of Ponch & Jon! as a writer on CHiPs...
In the Los Angeles area in the 50's, we had 7 stations. KNXT 2; KNBC 4, KTLA 5, KABC 7, KHJ 9, KTTV 11 (Los Angeles Times), KCOP 13 (Copley TV). When public television came around, KCET 28 was added.
And part of that ability to playback a video on demand of course led to TH-cam and "The History Guy" becoming part of modern media. :)
this guys a cool cat.
one of the best youtube channels for sure.
The first TV I remember us having was a 13 inch black and white RCA. Dad was frugal but he splurged on technology. We were the first on our street to have a color TV and it could get UHF without a converter. We could get channel 50 which showed the cool shows like The Three Stooges and The Little Rascals, PBS (channel 56) and channel 62 which ran a lot of old RKO B-Movies and lesser reruns. Then he got his pride and joy, the rotating antenna for the roof. I got being frugal from Dad but I guess I got his tech gene as well because I spoiled myself with loaded cable packages in the 80s and 90s and I was out in front when flat screens came out. Funny thing about Dad, he bought a flat screen but I couldn't get him to upgrade to HD. That frugality gene was still dominating. When I think of TV I always think of the day Dad put that rotating antenna on the roof. He was quite proud. RIP Pops. .
What a great channel, your presentations are always interesting. Thanks.
GO! History Man!! Yeah you rock and thank you for what you give us!
My parents had one of those fancy console color tvs that they used in their living room from 1979 to 1992. Screen was 26", and speaker had a good sound. I am surprised it was able to use basic cable all those years. Zenith was the best brand , which my parents had. I am 63, and even at age 18, 1979, my parents only got 3 channels and a roof antenna. They got basic cable 1980.
Between 1956-59 my dad bought the first tv in our part of the neighborhood- it was a Zenith 19" black&white tv in a cabinet with 4 legs- it had a remote control that wasn't much more then a tuning fork in a box lol- and ONE channel lmao - i remember watching the Texaco hour at night time and mom watching soap operas and Queen for a day in the daytime
Congrats. I have been watching, and learning, for years. Thanks for NOT being "The History Channel".
You may not see this, since this episode is over a year old, but my parents had the first tv in our community. Mom said the living room would be full with neighbors coming to watch tv. If I’m not mistaken, I believe they had the first color tv too. We had four channels. The good old days.
I received my love of History from my father who was a World War II veteran on a flying fortress B17.
i was a tv engineer from the 60,s to 198o,s,i started with vales, and black and white,,and 1 channel,bbc1,,i went through all the changes,
i want to thank you for your programming, i learn a lot watching your programs, again thanks
on this program i think you forgot to mention who developed the color tv
Never a dull video. Thanks
I'm 65. I'd like to see a Collection and History of Test Patterns. Yeah, and Sign Offs, too! To quote Monty Python, todays youth would be Highly Skeptical to hear that any form of TV ever Signed Off and put up Test Patterns, eh?! Lux-shur-ee!
We used to have to watch television from the bottom of a mine shaft and burned the coal to make electricity for power, But you tell young people that today and they won't believe you.
In the 1920's my grandfather left a series of hard-scrabble jobs in the middle America to relocate to what was to become my little Pacific Northwest hometown of Anacortes near the Canadian border. Longshoreman jobs were plentiful there. But he soon realized what the folks wanted were radios. So he learned that trade and then opened his own "Jack's Radio. They sold like hotcakes. Years later he added "refrigerators" to his shop; also sold well but were admittedly pricier than elegant floor & tabletop radios cabinetted in varnished wood and bakelite. When my Dad finished highschool circa 1947, he attended Edison Tech in Seattle to learn the technology of the newest consumer item, television. He returned home and joined Grandpa's shop which was re-christened "Video Electronics." That shop grew to a full store. When color TV appeared, the store absolutely flourished right through to the late 1960's. Then Japan got into the act -- and with the emergence of large shopping centers and malls, hometown small-businesses like Grandpa's and Dad's popular radio & TV & refrigerator & MICROWAVE stores shriveled up and died.
I'll give you another reason for the decline of Cable TV. It was probably about two Presidents ago that I last saw content on Cable TV that was up to par with the quality of this channel that I have available to watch literally any time and place I so desire.
I remember watching this caliber of programming on Discovery, TLC, The History Channel, and PBS. Now it's all "reality programming".
I'm old enough to remember NO television set in our home in rural coastal South Carolina. My grandparents were the first buy a TV, mainly to watch farm reports, bluegrass & country music and religious programming. Whenever Rev. Billy Graham televised a Crusade, our entire extended family came to the farm for a potluck supper, then we'd pack into the tiny den to sing hymns with George Beverly Shea and then watch Rev. Graham make his incredibly logical arguments for the existence and love of God. The same was happening in every other farmhouse on Highway 701. That tiny black & white TV brought us together as a family, as a community of faith and as good citizens. It's not that way now. I mourn the fact that TV is now primarily a source of malice, division and narcissism. There was a time when it wasn't that way.
My Father was an RCA dealer.......TV is very dear to my heart from the day I was born....into it
I really enjoy your channel. Your work is much appreciated
A very enjoyable and relevant episode.
I thank you.
We used to go to my grandparents house every wkend to watch TV bcz we didn't hv1 til 1969 we watched boxing & Lawrence Welk sometimes cartoons. 1thing that sticks out in memory was grandma saying TV was the DEVIL...
I remember when cable TV came to the Greater Lafayette (Indiana) area in 1964; it was great because we could get not only the local stations but also stations in Indianapolis and Chicago.
Today, however, I get my "TV" by antenna or over the internet; you couldn't pay me to go back to cable.
We kids were dad's remote control. We even worked the horizontal hold.
I just discovered your channel today and I have to day from one history guy to another...you sir rock!
Thank you for acknowledging Farnsworth. I'm familiar with his history and how he is only recently being acknowledged.for his accomplishments. An interesting story would be the story of the Darth Vader of the early electronic communication industry...that evil snake David Sarnoff.
Thank you!
Yes, Indeed! The evil snake Sarnoff; ruthless, conniving, controlling, and a thief. EF McDonald, President of Zenith Radio Corporation, could not stand being in the same room with him. Everything RCA made, Zenith was determined to make it better; and they did.
Where did you grow up with just 3 stations?
Yes, here in metro Detroit ch 2 was CBS ch 4 was NBC and ch 7 was ABC. I'm guessing that you refer to those national broadcasters..
I know a lot of people who grew up in rural areas that only got 1 or 2 channels thus had a different childhood as far as TV went. My ex-wife and her siblings missed out on Alf. She thought I was pulling her leg when I first described it.
Being a major metropolitan area, we also had a PBS station on ch 56. So that came in only after the FCC expansion with UHF. It was there before I was born, but the earliest TV set I remember in our house was older and only had the VHF tuner. So I saw that for the first time when my dad bought a new antenna and added a UHF tuner box on top of the TV. It was never clear. In 1967 when dad had a good year and we got a new TV that had UHF built in and a newer better antenna and those channels were finally clearer.
We also had a local only TV station ch 50, WKBD. Now, though it was bought by CW. But in my childhood, it played a lot of old movies and reruns of popular TV shows.
Just a couple years later ch 20 was added. It was more reruns and old movies, but they were trying to do more local programming, so it had a semi PBS vibe.
When I was a teenager, ch 62 was added as another local TV station. With similar programing, but it was owned by black businessmen and featured shows that appealed to blacks. I did not really notice that until I knew some black people in high school. (Which rather sadly states how little programming there was that appealed to 20% of the US population. Too bad that no longer exists as an entity as more is available now.)
But the best thing, TV wise, growing up in Detroit was ch 9. Windsor, Ontario, Canada's CBC station. I got to see curling!
Later, when I lived in another state, so I don't know how it happened, but Fox took over ch 2 and CBS got bumped down to ch 62. Seems like it would have made sense for Fox to buy the local independent, but somehow that is what we got.
Not that I watch broadcast TV anymore. When I see it on other places, I can't imagine spending 1/3 of my viewing time on commercials. So I read a book.
When I was a kid, I wondered why there was no one name for the inventor of the television. Rightly or wrongly, there was usually a person associated with an invention. Alexander Graham Bell for the telephone, Eli Whitney for the cotton gin, the Wright Brothers for the airplane, Henry Ford for the automobile *burp*. This video shows that television was a layering of multiple inventions.
Informative and very interesting thanks really enjoyed it
My grandad had the first color TV on the block, cable too. When I went there all the local kids come over to see the color set. I was popular due to the set lol.
Back in the mid 50s that TV tube AGC270 would go out quite often on our 17 inch Capehart. Dad bought several so he wouldn't have to drive to the super market to test them.
What I'd like to see is a detailed history of how television was introduced to the public, how it was advertised and hyped, and how it eventually made its way into customers' homes in Europe, Canada and the United States. Particularly electronic TV, and who were the ones who first bought a TV set, and what did they watch then. I am guessing TV used to be the prized treasure of the very few and the envy of the many for decades.
Love history. You have good lilt, and interesting subject matter. Hats off to you sir.
You know this but some of your younger viewers may not. The NBC Peacock fanning his tail out was originally played just before a TV show to show it was "in living color." When most shows became color and the peacock was unnecessary instead of firing him, they promoted the proud bird to be their official corporate logo. They even named their streaming channel after him. I'm glad they kept this historic figure.
"The following program is brought to you in living color... on NBC."
@@jpsned Yup! That was the exact wording.
@@coyoteroadkill 🙂
Unbelievably the history guy did not mention that the Nazi Olympics of 1936 were broadcast on television in Germany only presumably and obviously on very few sets since they must have been super-expensive!
....and let's not forget the TV remote control, developed by Zenith Radio Corporation in 1950. The remote, called "Lazy Bones, was connected to the television by a wire. A wireless remote control, the "Flashmatic," was developed in 1955 by Eugene Polley.
Philo Farnsworth's patent priority establishment via a chalkboard discussion with his high school science teacher in Rexburg is worth remembering in its own right.
(Going back a bit:) I'm glad that our Utah/Idaho man, Philo, is credited as THE (or the main) inventor of electronic TV. But I'm dumbfounded about how he could have figured out any of that stuff at just 14 and 21! Anyway, I wish I could've met him.
Paying for TV is against my principles, and while everyone else in my apartment building has cable or FIOS, I hooked up my TV to an antenna. I get over 50 stations, and 7 of them are PBS stations, which I watch the most.