Friday, Aug. 12, 2011 — Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been enjoying leafing through some 1955 issues of Radio & Television News that I picked up on eBay sometime back.
The magazine’s target audience are radio and TV shops, shop owners and service personnel. The magazines are full of ads for replacement parts, as well as plenty of ads promoting then then growing audiophile market.
Apparently, a lot of service guys’ hobbies often included ham radio as well as “hi-fi audio” systems. The magazine even covers record reviews of classical music (why no rock ‘n’ roll or contemporary music appears in the reviews is beyond me … perhaps those who could afford a powerful audio system were those who pursued ear-bustingly loud classical music?). Home recording, using wire recorders and reel-to-reel machines was a hot item at the time.
But the magazines are also a fascinating look at the broadcasting industries (TV and radio) in that time (circa 1955).
For example, in one of the issues, there’s a multi-page spread about color TV, highlighting a $3 million investment CBS made in its brand-new color broadcasting studio (and this was 1955!). The article looked at the technical challenges of broadcasting color, as well as the challenges of affording a color set for reception.
There are lots of ads for test equipment, including many pages of ads from Heathkit for test gear as well as its ham gear too. The Heathkit AT-1 (shown at right) was their first Novice transmitter (and it sold for $29.50 in 1955) that covered six Amateur bands; it was introduced in 1954, followed the next year by a VFO. At $19.95, the VFO was a steal!
One of my favorite ads is a complete section by tube maker General Electric. It’s a four-page insert on heavy card stock, three pages of which are devoted to promoting GE’s new consumer finance program for tube replacement and repairs by its dealers (the emphasis here was on TV picture tube replacements). Consumers were accustomed to the need to replace vacuum tubes in radios on a regular basis, but the cost to consumers to replace a TV picture tube was substantial; GE saw a market there in offering financing for repairs that involved a big-ticket item like a picture tube. The customer financed the entire repair bill, which GE financed — and the shop owner got paid by GE once the deal was done.
In other 1955 ads for CBS-Hytron tubes, the company promotes the fact that Arthur Godfrey promotes the tubes on his TV and radio show (one ad shows a young woman in a dress sitting on the floor paying close attention to a magazine photo of Godfrey in its pages). After all, Godfrey promotes the tubes to women, and the ad points out that women are the ones most often who deal with the TV/radio serviceman.
CBS-Hytron tubes — the ad notes — carry the Good Housekeeping Seal, which guaranteed the tubes for two-years with repair/replacement warranty.
On page four of the card-stock insert, CBS advertises its line of products to “freshen up” the appearance of your aging first TV set (this was 1955!) — a full line of vinyl panels you can apply to the sides of your TV set. The idea is that you’re going to buy a new TV set, right? So why not keep the old one, move it to the den or bedroom? And you can update the look of that old TV with these new stick-on panels! The patterns include several natural wood finishes, and the damned plaids you’ve ever seen. The phrase “freakin’ hideous” came to mind when I saw it.
The 1955 issues have quite a bit of advertising and content related to service color seats; I didn’t know they were on the market at this point. I guess metropolitan areas were the first to adopt color transmission.
An interesting news story — the broadcast industry was gearing up opposition to the idea of “pay TV” in Washington. The idea would be to require people to “pay” in order for the TV set to work. Insert a quarter and, well, you get the picture (pun intended, hi!).
The broadcast industry argued that you couldn’t have pay TV next to free broadcast TV; there was no way really to separate the two services. Pay TV finally did surface again, and this time as cable TV.
There’s plenty more to talk about, but I’m tired and I’m going to bed.
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