Antique TV Sets by Gary Rinsem Dec 2020
According to the internet, the 1928 Baird television was the first ever commercially available TV. Those two circles on the front are the speaker and the screen. I'm sure there's far more to the story, but it's not important enough to me to research any more than I have.
As a kid the bug man liked me because I asked questions about his bug spraying career. One month he brought me an old TV like the brown metal TV in the pictures. Mine was blue, a different model year. I've often remembered the bug man and his gift. Over the years I have searched the internet for it a few times, but found nothing without brand and model number. Today I found it by pure chance. YIPEE! I know I had it in my bedroom for about eight years, but only remember watching it two times, about five weeks apart. Those two memories are so special to me that the TV has stuck in my mind since 1975.
The most special girl in the world lay in bed with me to eat popcorn and watch an old movie. It's one of my very important memories of us together. The other memory is from the night we met. I had been laying in bed watching that old TV and got frustrated with the difficulty of keeping it fine tuned. I lost interest in the TV show and went to the dance at school. That's where Tami and I met.
Not that it's important, nothing here is, but the TV was a 1956 GENERAL ELECTRIC 14T009. The 14 is for 14 inch screen. I found a TV nut web page where he claimed it's really only a 12" screen. GE was doing creative measuring.
Below are six pics of a 1939 RCA Television. It's just one of a great many I found in a quick search for antique televisions.
The difference between 1928 and 1939 is far greater than you'd expect by looking at the pictures. The Baird is not really Television while the RCA is. The Baird used a completely different technology. We still used the same broadcast technology as the RCA until the recent digital conversion.
