Lee High School - Huntsville Alabama Alumni

Fifties TV Techonlogy

In Huntsville

by Tommy Towery

Class of '64

Last week’s Lee-Bay item, the antenna rotator controller, inspired me to write an article on the technology of our pre-Lee and Lee days in the area of home entertainment, specifically television.

Now it is no big surprise to anyone, to remind you that the Baby Boomer generation was pre-color TV and in our early years, almost pre-TV as well. Without going into topics of television programming, shows and stars, and our own watching habits, it is still interesting to explore the early technology progress of the first few years in which we started watching television.

The first TV set that I remember my family owning was in the later Fifties and was a monstrously big black and white set. I don’t know if it was Sylvania, Emerson, Motorola, Admiral, Philco, General Electric, Zenith, or RCA. There were many brands in the market those days and all of them were made in the good old USA. At that time in our history, anything made in Japan was junk, or at least that was what our parents told us it was. I think the first set I remember my family owning was a 19” model, and I know it was big and heavy, and almost a perfect cube in shape. This cube was usually placed on a roll around metal stand with what seemed to be held up by way-too-skinny legs to hold the weight. There were rods that could slide out from the sides of the stand to adjust it to the correct width for the TV. Because of that weight, many of the TV sets were built into wooden cabinets, giving them a look of fine furniture and requiring two men and a truck to move them. Some cabinets had doors on them, some had skinny modern-looking wooden legs, while others were accompanied in their cabinets by radios and turntables and almost all of them has visible cloth in front of the speakers, giving them a designer look. A TV of those days had a power cord in the back along with a place with two screws where you attached the flat (300 ohm) cable that came from the antenna.

On the front of the early sets were a group of knobs instead of today’s buttons. The primary knob was the on/off switch and the volume control which were combined. Knobs came in many shapes and colors and were located in many places on the early sets. Many were hidden behind trap doors and sometimes seemingly secret panels. I think the logic was that the harder it was to get to the knob, the more the TV people didn’t want you messing with it. One obvious knob was the channel changing knob that had numbers on it that went from two to 13 indicating the Very High Frequency (VHF) range of channels . Later another position was added to that knob, a “U” which stood for Ultra High Frequency (UHF.) During those late Fifties days, we didn’t have any UHF stations in Huntsville, so it was usually ignored, since it also required a different UHF antenna attached to the TV mast. On the outside of the channel changing knob was a larger diameter knob that was used to fine tune a station. Once you selected the channel you wanted, you could almost always improve the picture by fine tuning – needed perhaps because of the lack of stabilized signals in either the transmitter or the receiver. It didn’t matter what made it that way, it usually needed to be fine tuned and usually required the “How’s it look now?” routine as well. There were knobs for vertical hold, horizontal hold, and brightness. Invariably once you got a set tuned, it would de-tune itself as you walked back to the sofa, since it seemed that your own body was a better antenna than the one high on the mast outside. Rolling pictures on a TV set were as common as colds or low scores on my spelling tests. On the back were a lot of other knobs and it would be many years before those knobs disappeared from the consumers’ reach. Some required a screw driver to use, because they were only accessible by sticking a small screw driver in a hole on the back of the set. Some others required a special TV tuning screw driver-looking-thing that had a hex head on it and was made of plastic so that the metal would not conduct electricity or signals. No good home television repairman would consider working on a set without a mirror that he could hold in one hand to watch how the adjustments he made in the back of the set with the other hand affected the picture. Often the channel changing knob would get worn, so you had to magically get it to wedge on the channel you wanted, or you would spin it around several times with a loud click-click-clicking noise in an attempt to either fix it by magic or by scratching off the corrosion on the contacts.

In the cities that had their own television stations, all that people needed to watch TV was a set of “rabbit ears” setting atop and attached to the set. Reception was adjusted by moving the two antenna rods up and down, left and right, in and out, etc. often accompanied with remarks such as “How’s it look now?” If you needed a better signal, you mearly attached sheets of aluminum foil folded in strategic shapes and attached in strategic places learned as secrets shared only by magic circles of early tech wizards. In those early TV days in Huntsville, you were required to have an outside antenna, since there were no local TV stations and the closest ones around were in Nashville and on channels 6 and 13 from Birmingham. Our house on East Clinton was two stories high, so we had a very tall antenna mast that was anchored in the ground beside the house and rose to clear the rooftop, held by braces strategically placed to support it. If one were to look up the definition of “lightning rod” in a dictionary of that age, its description would probably also fit a TV antenna. Many sets were victims to late afternoon summer thunderstorms. Atop the mast was an array of long skinny aluminum rods that formed a “V” with short ones in front and progressively getting longer until you reached the longest ones in back. In reality it was a yagi array antenna system, but no one ever knew that. I remember when you bought a new antenna, it was folded flat in a box and you had to pull the rods down, much like opening an umbrella, a folding chair, or some other items that shared that technology structure. I didn’t find out until later in my life when I went to electronic school in the Air Force, that each of those skinny rods were actually designed and cut to a specific length, each length scientifically measured to receive a specific frequency of the TV spectrum, and not just placed together to look neat. The front of the “V” was aimed as best as it could be toward the city that had the stations that you wanted to watch. If for some reason we wanted to watch a different city’s TV we would have to go outside and manually twist the mast that held the antenna to point toward the desired direction. That was best done with a helper inside watching the progress as the picture on the screen went from snow to an image, and answering the same question, “How’s it look now?” about the usually still distorted, picture that was the best that could be obtained. Since the mast was accustomed to being turned, windstorms often changed its direction like the sails on a ship and there was always more snow on the screen than on the ground.

It was because of this problem, that the television rotor technology came to be. This add-on product was a motor that was attached to the TV mast near the top of it and could be controlled from a control box usually placed on top of the TV. The controller indicated the direction the antenna was pointing with a compass rose dial, and you would turn the knob to point the antenna in the direction the station you wanted to watch was located. These motors got a lot of use, and often would burn out, but seemed to be left attached to the masts, working or not. Did I ask, “How’s it look now?”?

Finally, on August 1, 1959, Huntsville joined the rest of the nation as Channel 31 began broadcasting and gave the “Rocket City” its first very own TV station. On November 28, 1963 another station, Channel 19 joined the airways. It would be 1968 before Channel 48 settled in location and joined the other two current stations to fight for the viewers’ loyalty. Back then you only needed three channels, since you only had CBS, ABC, and NBC networks to watch. The PBS idea had not blossomed yet. One problem presented to Huntsvillians was that all three of these stations were in the UHF range (channels 14-83) and many older TV sets did not receive UHF. This challenge was conquered with the addition of a small UHF converter box that was placed on top of the old TV. This box gave the user the additional channels that were not on the knob of the older TV sets. Eventually the box was made redundant by the inclusion of UHF capabilities built into all new sets, but many viewers got the maximum use from their old sets with this converter technology.

The technology that gave this whole television system life was powered by cathode ray tubes, and many of them at that. Many of us reminisce how we or our fathers would be our own simple repairmen and take tubes out of the non-functional TV set to carry to the local drug or grocery stores and test them to see if they were operating properly. The tube testers were fantastic futuristic looking consoles that would be the subject of many lawsuits if there were still available today. If people can sue you for selling them a hot cup of coffee today what could today’s lawyers have done back then with a piece of high voltage electrical gear left open for novices to turn on at their unsupervised leisure? It was simple to use in many ways. You took a tube out of your brown paper sack, rubbed the dust off the numbers and found the same numbered tube on a chart of secretly coded numbers attached to the machine. Each tube fit a special socket and you would find the right socket in the tester and plug it into it. Sometimes the process required that you connect an anode to the top of the tube before starting the test. Then you also needed to set a few dials or switches on the tester to match a set of numbers indicated by the instructions. Once in place you only had to turn on the power and press the test button. If the tube was not completely bad, it would slowly grow an erie orange glow and you could watch a needle on a meter that went from a red marking that said “bad” to a green marking that said “good.” Sometimes there was a center marking of “weak”, which did not prove anything to you. Some of the tube testers provided “tube testing kits” that had a sheet of sticky numbers on them to make home television repair easier. To avoid the confusion of getting all the tubes mixed up, you would take one number sticker and place it on the tube socket in the TV from which you had removed the tube and put a similar number on the TV tube itself. You usually took a bagfull at a time to test, since most of us did not have enough TV repair knowledge to know a horizontal hold tube from a high voltage power supply tube. So you’d take tube #1 out of the socket and place a #1 sticker on the tube and the socket. Go to the drug store and test it, and if it was good, go home and replace the #1 tube back into the #1 socket. I remember the tubes to cost from $3 to $10 each, and very rarely did you really find out that it was a bad tube that needed replacing if memory serves me well. As many learned, if you left the tube on too long during the testing, you could get a nasty burn when you tried to remove it.

Before 1960, probably in the 1957-59 timeframe, Huntsvillians were led from the darkness to the light with the introduction of a Community Antenna System that was commonly called “cable.” This system was vastly different from what the cable system has grown to be today. My understanding of the cable as a kid was that some company put a big antenna up on Monte Sano and received the TV signals from Nashville and Birmingham. Those signals were fed into a big box and were piped to homes via a coaxial cable from atop a telephone pole. We were required to get a small adapter for the back of the TV set that took the 75 ohm cable signal and converted it to the 300 ohm signal required by the TV receiver. It was a little lipstick tube size device that was just screwed between the line in and the TV and required no user intervention. We did not get all the shopping channels, the public TV channels, or HBO or sports or movie channels. In our homes we only got the Nashville and Birmingham channels. But we got all of them and whenever we wanted to change channels we no longer had to rely on rotor motors or outside TV mast mounted antennas.

If I remember right, it cost about $10 a month to get this service, but there were no lack of people lining up to have it installed. One of the men to whom we rented a sleeping room during that timeframe worked for the company, and as a result, he installed cable on our TV set for free. I always thought we were cheating someone, but now in my adult life, I think that perhaps he was allowed to do that because he lived in that house. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. This was before computer controlled things so I feel sure that there was no one in a central office that could monitor who was connected or when. A couple of times we were disconnected, probably when a line runner came out and installed it on a neighbor’s house and saw that we were connected without a contract. When that happened, our roomer would just reconnect us and we’d loose less time having service restored back then than people do today when the cable goes out. The disconnect process was simply unscrewing the cable from where it went into the house. Later I guess they got a little smarter and started disconnecting it from the top of the pole, but it was all still mechanical with no computer logic, and all that had to be done to reconnect was screw the fittings back together.

We were still years before the idea of the “couch potato”, remote control, or color TV technology was available or affordable. In the meantime several “high tech” ideas fed our need for enhanced living room entertainment. For a few dollars one could buy a plastic or vinyl sheet that attached to the front of the TV picture tube to simulate color. It had a wide blue band at the top and a green band at the bottom and worked fine for black and white cowboy movies when the camera panned the open plains and you saw a black and white cowboy on a black and white horse riding with blue sky above and green grass below. When there was a newscast on, the reporter had a blue forehead and a green shirt and tie and looked very ill. It resembled the early color TV sets when they started going bad and the color was off kilter. A search shows an early remote channel changer that was produced by Zenith and called the “Lazy Bones”. It was a box replacing the knob on the channel changer, which had a solenoid type motor in it and a long wire that ran to the viewer’s sofa. When you pressed one button, the solenoid would engage and move the channel one notch higher. Press the other button and the motor would switch to a channel lower. For obvious reasons these never really caught on and did not last long.

In those days, TVs were for watching, not for playing games on. I do remember one interactive TV game that was available to us in the late Fifties. Although “Pong” was still years away, we had Winky Dink. My friend Bob Davis was the one that I remember who got the first kit I ever saw or used. His dad was co-owner of the Larkin-Davis Firestone Store, and he seemed to have more money than the rest of my crowd. The Winky Dink kit came in a box and included a screen similar to the faus color one, but this one was clear vinyl. You stuck it to the front of the TV set using the static electricity created by the tube and waited for the Winky Dink show to come start. You had to be ready, because during the show, you sat right in front of the screen, so close that you could touch it – which upset our parents a lot since they were sure that we would have our brains fried by sitting so close. Come to think of it, perhaps we did. Part of the kit included crayons, which you would use to draw on the screen. At times during the show, little while lines would show up on the screen, and you used your crayon to trace this line on the vinly cover. As the tracing continued, you would eventually draw something for Winky Dink to use. I remember one episode where he needed a bridge to cross a canyon, and we sat in front of the TV and drew him one, one plank at a time. I also remember one afternoon when Bob was running late and forgot to attach the screen and ended up drawing right onto the picture tube with the crayons…his mother was not very understanding about the whole thing.

Not all of the technology breakthroughs that came as a result of the invention of television were devices actually attached to the TV set. One early offspring of this technology moved the family from the home cooked evening meal to a new taste sensation served up in a partitioned aluminum tray, covered with aluminum foil and kept ready to cook in the freezer. The TV dinner was a combination of such delights as hard round green peas that never seemed to be cooked, bright orange fibrous carrot pieces and some mystery meat that had it’s name and image featured on the cardboard box in which it was stored. Swanson’s company first enters my mind when thinking about this. Being invented long before the microwave, these epicurean delights were cooked as needed in the oven for 20 or 30 minutes before being served (sometimes still half frozen) to the lucky TV viewer.

Since meals were no longer eaten at the big dinner table, another invention was necessary to accompany the frozen TV dinner – TV trays. Sold normally in sets of four, the Fifties and early Sixties TV trays were balanced on folding legs and usually featured some way-too-flowery designs and colors. Perhaps they were sold in sets of four, because that was the family group that we usually saw on TV in that period – mom, dad, and two kids. The expensive kits had a frame on wheels on which the other four were folded and stored. With daily usage, one tray would usually get one of the connectors broken and then it would start into a death-spiral seeing how long you could continue to use the set of four. Four gave way to three, three to two, and the final tray would end up on the back porch with flower pots sitting atop it.

While there were many other things that resulted from the placement of the TV in the home, one bright spot comes to mind. The bright spot to which I refer, also got it’s name from the television set upon which it sat. An early urban legend was spread that it was bad on your eyesight to watch TV in a dark room. It didn’t matter that we watched movies in dark rooms, but for some reason it was different in the home. To combat that legend, the TV lamp was born. These were some very Fifties-tacky lamps of ceramic or wooden materials that were placed atop the cube TV and had a small wattage bulb that faced the rear of the room, giving indirect illumination. Some even featured full Technicolor moving clouds or waterfalls, getting their movement from the heat of the bulb over which they sat. Memories of black panthers, sailing ships, wooden wagons, and chic flower arrangements that were all made into these indirect lamp fixtures fill my mind. The colors didn’t matter and any panther could end up red, black, green, or yellow, depending, I guess, upon the mood of the creator during any particular day. I often wonder if these small and dim lights were the real brainstorm of some teenager who got tired of his parents walking into a room where he was snuggled up next to his girlfriend on the sofa watching TV in the dark. At least a small light on the opposite side of the room was better than the reading light sitting beside the sofa. But for all its downsides, at least the TV technology gave young couples a reason to sit snuggled up on a sofa in a dark room, even if they did have to share the space with a green panther with a 40-watt light bulb in it’s stomach.

So, in the late Fifties, in the quietness of an un-air conditioned home, a happy couple sat in a semi-dark room, snuggled up on sofa across the room from a modern TV set. They sat there waiting and hoping that someday someone would come up with a device that kept them from having to stop what they were doing and get up every 30 minutes to go see which of the three channels of programming they was broadcasting the show they found the most interesting. They knew that they had to act fast, because before they knew it, the bewitching hour would come. The National Anthem would start playing on the set, shortly followed with the picture changing from the waving American flag to a drawing of an Indian and a test pattern, and the station announcer would “sign off” for the evening leaving nothing but black and white speckled snow on the screen and a loud and irritating hiss coming from the speaker. As the chosen one of them walked across the room to turn off the set there was no way to possibly imagine the technology changes that the next decade would hold.

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