What did the early TVs look like?
They were big and bulky but when it came to image quality, you would see postage stamp-sized images in black and white
Antik loves watching movies on his massive 40 inch 4K television set while lying down on his couch. He often browses the internet and watches different programmes from the streaming websites as well. He even enjoys playing games on his TV connected to his Xbox.
Sounds fun, right? But, how would you feel if you saw a stamp-sized object inside a 36 inch-wide TV? And the image quality isl also not crisp, let alone be able to play games on it! Unimaginable, right?
But this is exactly how early TVs were. They were big and bulky but when it came to image quality, you would see the postage stamp-sized images in black and white!
The Baird "Televisor" is considered the first mass-produced TV set. It was a mechanical television.
The TVs were sold between 1930 to 1933 in the UK. In the three years, about a thousand units were sold.
Mechanical TVs were commercially sold from 1928 to 1934 in the UK, US, and the Soviet Union.
These TV sets were basically a radio with the added incentive of a TV device that consisted of a neon tube behind a mechanically spinning disk with a spiral of apertures that produced a red postage stamp sized image. The image could be enlarged twice with a magnifying glass.
The Baird Televisors were sold for about 26 British Pounds, which, at the time, was a considerable amount of money.
When buying a Televisor, the purchaser signed a contract, which described the programming available. The Televisor was also available in kit form.
Later, in 1926, Kenjiro Takayanagi demonstrated the first TV system that employed a cathode ray tube (CRT) display, at Hamamatsu Industrial High School in Japan.
However, the first commercially made electronic TV with cathode ray tubes was manufactured by Telefunken in Germany in 1934.
Telefunken TVs were massive in size. Later, the US, UK and France made televisions using the same technology. The cheapest model with a 12-inch (30 cm) screen was priced USD445.
An estimated 19,000 electronic televisions were manufactured in Britain, and about 1,600 in Germany, before World War II. After the war, it skyrocketed.
By 1968, almost every household in the western countries had a TV set.
The drastic change in the television industry was actually brought by Sony with the release of Sony TV8-301 in 1960.
The screen was 8-inch wide in size and the TV set was portable. Instead of using analog circuits made of vacuum tubes, it was the first fully transistorised, portable solid-state TV set.
The TV became so popular that it sold about four million units the same year it launched.
With time, our viewing experience has changed drastically. And thank God we do not have to use magnifying glasses anymore to watch our favourite movies!
