This Ohio museum shows that TV is older than you might think
The history of television began long before millions of people gathered in front of their black-and-white sets and fiddled with the antenna and horizontal handhold to watch Lucy, Uncle Miltie, and Howdy Doodie.
“Everyone thinks The TV has started in the 1950s or late 1940s. Hardly anyone knows it existed before World War II and even dates back to the 1920s, says Steve McVoy, 80, the founder and president of the Early Television Museum in the Columbus suburb of Hilliard, Ohio.
The museum has a large collection of televisions from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as dozens of the much-improved post-World War II black-and-white sets that changed the entertainment landscape. Several first-generation color sets were also developed in the early 1950s.
“The original idea for the museum was to go with the earliest television technology,” McVoy said. “The sets got pretty boring after 1960, just those big things in plastic cabinets.”
The collection is one of the world’s largest, rivaled in North America only by the MZTV Museum in Toronto. There are about 180 television sets on display, arranged in chronological order, with another 50 in storage.
“So many of the sets were incredible to watch in their original form,” says Doron Galili, a 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 the museum in 2016 and said that the museum gives visitors “a better understanding not only of the technological aspects of television history, but also of its place within popular culture, modern design and material culture.”
THE BACKSTORY
McVoy’s personal history with television also goes back many years. When he was 10 and living in Gainesville, Florida, he was fascinated by his family’s first set. “I tinkered with it, much to my parents’ dismay,” he said.
He pulled a small red cart around the neighborhood with a sign announcing free television repairs.
“No one accepted my offer,” McVoy said, adding that it was unlikely he could have fixed a set if someone had asked.
A few years later, he started working in a television repair shop and learned those skills. In the mid-1960s, he opened his own shop, Freedom TV, repairing sets and installing antennas on top of apartment buildings and motels. Soon after, he founded his first cable television company, Micanopy Cable TV, followed by Coaxial Communications and Telecinema. McVoy sold his cable holdings in 1999 and, looking for something to do, decided to start collecting old television sets.
“I’ve never collected anything,” he said.
The first set he bought on eBay was an RCA TRK 12, which was introduced at the 1939 World’s Fair and retailed for $600, a princely sum at the time.
“I think I paid about a thousand dollars for it,” McVoy said, adding that it was in disrepair and was missing several parts. ‘A complete one would have cost five or six thousand; the pre-war sets are very valuable.”
He refurbished the TRK 12 and started collecting more old sets and visiting other collectors who shared his growing passion.
“All of their collections were in their basements and attics,” McVoy said. This, plus his wife’s annoyance at all the old decor in their living room, gave birth to the idea of starting a museum.
The Early Television Museum opened in 2002 as a nonprofit foundation. It is located in a large former warehouse. Each room features an audio guide narrated by McVoy. Hit a different button on some sets and a few old shows pop up.
Until a few years ago, McVoy himself helped restore many of the museum’s televisions. “My eyesight and the stability of my hands are making it difficult now,” he said.
HOW TV BEGAN
The idea of sending pictures 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 images. According to the museum, “By 1930, television was broadcasting from more than a dozen stations in the US, not only in major cities like New York and Boston, but also from Iowa and Kansas. Several manufacturers sold sets and kits.”
The screens were small and the picture quality extremely poor, with a lot of “blurring and ghosting”. Programming was limited.
Television made what McVoy calls its “formal debut” on April 30, 1939, at the New York World’s Fair. President Roosevelt’s opening speech was broadcast live, as an NBC mobile unit sent signals to a transmitter atop the Empire State Building. From there, “signals went out to visual receivers within fifty miles of the metropolitan area,” reported the New York Daily News.
RCA and General Electric introduced television models at the World’s Fair. A total of some 7,000 sets were made in the United States in 1939 and 1940, and only about 350 remain, according to the museum.
World War II halted 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 boomed.
According to McVoy’s research, there were about 200,000 aircraft in the US in 1947 and 18 million by the end of 1953. Audiences loved “I Love Lucy” (which aired in 1951) and “The Honeymooners” (began in 1955).
The color revolution came in 1954. Sales were slow at first, partly because of cost. It wasn’t until the early 1970s that color sets outnumbered black and white sets.
“We have (a sample of) pretty much every set available,” McVoy said.
LOOKING FOR PHILO FARNSWORTH
At the top of his wish list? A set created by electronic television pioneer Philo Farnsworth in the late 1920s or early 1930s.
“There are only three left as far as we know and they are all already on display in other museums,” McVoy said. “If a fourth ever shows up, we’ll go to our backers and we can get it.”
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