Television

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Now that Christmas is approaching, there is a great profusion of advertisement urging us to buy all manner of things. I am struck by the televisions that are now available. Gone are the old CRT boxes. We now have a confusing array of flat screen technology all purporting the best in high definition displays. Some of the flat screen TV imagery I have seen in stores is simply stunning.

I seem to remember our family getting our first TV when I was around 11 years old, which would have been around 1958. I had seen TVs one or two years before that at other people's houses but they were a very rare thing in the mid 1950s communities that I lived in. I pretty much assumed that TVs were not commercially available before that.

I was surprised when I was looking through a National Geographic Magazine published in April 1947 (the month I was born) and found this Du Mont Laboratories advertisement.

(click on the image below to see it in full size)

That advertisement is now almost 62 years old. You can imaging what programing was available back then not to mention the image quality. Notice that it says the cabinet also has a radio and an "automatic" phonograph. I guess in 1947 this was a state of the art entertainment center.

We have come a long way . . . and yet . . .

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