This Ohio Museum Proves TV Is Older Than You Think

The history of television began long ago when millions of people gathered in front of their black and white sets to watch Lucy, Uncle Milty and Howdy Doody, fiddling with the antenna and horizontal grips.

Steve McAvoy, 80, founder and president of the Early Television Museum, said, “Everyone thinks TV started in the late ’50s or ’40s. Almost nobody knows it was before World War II.” existed and even existed in the ’20s.” Hilliard, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus.

The museum has a large collection of televisions from the 1920s and 1930s, and many of the better-known, black-and-white sets from the post-World War II era that changed the entertainment landscape. There are also several first generation color sets developed in the early 1950s.

“The basic idea of ​​the museum was to deal with the oldest television technology,” McVoy said. “After 1960 the sets got pretty boring, just these big things in plastic cabinets.”

The collection is one of the largest in the world, rivaled only by Toronto’s MZTV Museum in North America. About 180 television sets are on display, arranged in chronological order, with another 50 in storage.

“It was incredible to see so many of the sets in their original form,” said Doron Galili, Research Fellow in Media Studies at Stockholm University and author of “Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878–1939” (Duke University Press). ,

He visited in 2016, and said that the museum gives visitors “a better understanding of not only the technical aspects of television history, but also popular culture, and its place within modern design and material culture.”

background

McAvoy’s personal history with television also dates back several years. He was attracted to his first family set when he was 10 and living in Gainesville, Florida. He said, “I tampered with it, much to the dismay of my parents.”

He pulled a little red wagon around the neighborhood advertising free television repairs.

McAvoy said, “Nobody took up my offer.” He also said that it was not possible that he would have been able to repair a set if anyone had asked.

A few years later, he started working in a television repair shop and learned these skills. He opened his own shop, Freedom TV, in the mid-1960s, repairing sets and installing antennas atop apartment buildings and motels. Shortly thereafter, he formed his first cable-television business, Mikanopi Cable TV, followed by Coaxial Communications and Telecinema. McAvoy sold his cable holdings in 1999 and, looking for something to do, decided to start collecting old television sets.

“I’ve never collected anything before,” he said.

The first set he bought on eBay was an RCA TRK 12, which had been introduced at the 1939 World’s Fair and cost $600, a lot at the time.

McAvoy said, “I think I paid about a thousand bucks for it.” It is in a dilapidated condition and several parts are missing, he said. “A complete set will cost five or six thousand; pre-war sets are very valuable.”

He refurbished the TRK 12, began collecting more vintage sets and met other collectors who shared his growing passion.

“All of his collections were in his basements and attics,” McAvoy said. In addition, his wife’s annoyance with the old sets lying in disarray in his living room led him to the idea of ​​starting a museum.

The Museum of Early Television opened in 2002 as a non-profit organization. It is located in a large former warehouse. Each room has an audio guide narrated by McAvoy. Press another button on some sets and some of the older shows pop up.

Until a few years ago, McAvoy himself helped restore many of the museum’s televisions. “My eyesight and the steadiness of my hands make it difficult now,” he said.

how did tv start

The idea of ​​transmitting images dates back to the 1880s. “The problem of television … is not yet solved,” reported the New York Times on November 24, 1907.

The first crude mechanical televisions were developed in the mid-1920s by John Logie Baird in England and Charles Jenkins in the United States, and relied on rotating discs to transmit pictures. According to the museum, by 1930, “television was being broadcast from more than a dozen stations across America, not only in major cities such as New York and Boston, but also from Iowa and Kansas. Many manufacturers were selling sets and kits.”

The screens were small and the picture quality was extremely poor, with many being “faded and ghostly”. Programming was limited.

Television made what McAvoy calls its “official debut” on April 30, 1939, at the New York World’s Fair. President Roosevelt’s speech at the opening of the fair was broadcast live, as the NBC mobile unit sent signals to a transmitter atop the Empire State Building. From there, the signal “went to visual receivers within a fifty-mile radius in the metropolitan area,” the New York Daily News reported.

RCA and General Electric introduced television models at the World’s Fair. According to the museum, a total of about 7,000 sets were made in the United States in 1939 and 1940, and only 350 still exist.

World War II halted the production of TV sets in the United States. Engineers who learned about radar and aircraft communications applied that knowledge to TV technology after the war, when sales and programming began to boom.

According to McAvoy’s research, there were approximately 200,000 sets in the US in 1947, and 18 million sets by the end of 1953. Viewers loved “I Love Lucy” (which began airing in 1951) and “The Honeymooners” (which debuted in 1955).

The color revolution came in 1954. Sales were initially slow due to the cost. It was not until the early 1970s that color sets sold more than black-and-white sets.

“We have (an example) of almost every set available,” McAvoy said.

looking for philo farnsworth

At the top of her wish list? A set built by electronic-television pioneer Philo Farnsworth in the late 1920s or early 1930s.

“As far as we know, only three have survived and they are all already in other museums,” McVoy said. “If a fourth one comes along, we will go to our donors and be able to get it.”

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