Is Your TV Set Ready for the new UHF Channels ?
This Mallory Converter will equip it to receive all Channels… old and new

That’s right! As new UHF channels go on the air in your area, you will receive them all . . . with no sacrifice of existing channels . . . with no internal changes in your set. The Mallory Converter can be connected to any set in a few minutes, right in your home.

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Television Will Carry the Mails

By DAVID SARNOFF
PRESIDENT, RADIO CORPORATION OF AMERICA

A twinkling beam of light records a picture thousands of miles away. It is facsimile transmission- an interesting feature of this authoritative article on the future developments of radio and television.

IN HIS struggle for new information, man has been reaching farther and farther into mysteries beyond his accustomed sphere; farther with the runner through the forest . . . farther with camel caravans across trackless plains . . . farther with ships into uncharted oceans . . . seeking speed, and relishing the advantages of new contacts. From the start, mankind has struggled for better communication.

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Juke Box Gets New Look

A nickel in the slot will buy you one televised prize-fight round if the neighborhood tavern is hep to the latest thing in juke boxes. This is a chrome-and-mirror-bedecked coin phonograph, made by the Videograph Corp., of New York, with a 12-inch television screen added. You can choose your own records in the usual way, but the manager decides whether your five cents will buy a three-minute glimpse of television. And since he operates the controls, he also picks the program. If jive, wrestling, and boxing fans are gathered in one place, he’d better be a Solomon.

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When a man-size spider walks a giant web, when scissors draw the villain’s blood or a lobster spits in the waiter’s eye, put it down to

TV TRICKERY

SEATED AT A SIDEWALK TABLE in a Paris cafe, a customer watched in fascination a huge, freshly cooked lobster placed in front of him by the waiter. Each time he reached for the lobster the huge shellfish swiftly moved its large claws protectingly over its head. Reaching for a hammer, the would-be diner attempted to hit the lobster but each time the claws parried the blow. The man finally called the waiter to see what he could do with the reluctant lobster. As the waiter bent over to inspect the lobster and its strange actions more closely a stream of water hit him in the eye.

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CREATING A NEW WORLD WITH ELECTRONICS
How far away is the pocket-size TV camera?
Samples were used at the last political conventions.
Production models—built around subminiaturized circuits requiring semiconductors—can be expected any day. The proved reliability of Hughes diodes, even under severe shock or weather conditions, makes these tiny, compact semiconductors a logical choice for such circuits.

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What does now taste like? Sweeter or more bitter than then?
What sound does purple make?
What does 12 smell like?

At Bell Labs, we’re working on all these questions and more!
Bell Labs, for all your existential research needs.

Also, I love the fact that they didn’t spring for a color ad.

WHAT TIME IS GREEN?
In color television, the colors on the screen are determined in a special way. A reference signal is sent and then the color signals are matched against it. For example, when the second signal is out of step by 50-billionths of a second, the color is green; 130-billionths means blue.

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I’m not sure this was real. It seems like if it really worked, we’d all have them. This is a Cnet article from 2004 about brand new flat CRTs and they are 16″ deep…

Update: This was real. It looks like it got abandoned more because of licensing and a standards battle than anything else. Here is a really interesting interview (pdf) done with the inventor from 1996.

AIKEN: “They finally agreed to a license. But, at the last minute, I guess at a Board of Directors’ Meeting for the final approval, somebody on the Board of Directors’ of RCA said, “Wait a minute, we’ve forgotten something. How are we going to explain to our stockholders that we wasted millions of dollars on the wrong tube?” And there was silence. And that did it. They said, “No, we will not take a license.”

Thin Tube Foretells Wall TV and Sky View for Air Pilot

BECAUSE OF NEW TECHNIQUES in the field of electronics, airplane instrument panels and home television sets may soon have something in common—a rectangular picture tube less than three inches thick. The thin cathode-ray tube was invented by William Ross Aiken and developed in the Kaiser Aircraft and Electronics Corporation laboratories. Military uses for the new TV tube were developed for the Douglas Aircraft Company. For the aircraft pilot, the thin TV tube will serve as an electronic windshield, showing an artificial picture of the terrain and sky conditions about him. For the TV viewer at home, the new picture tube may result in new designs for sets, with screens mounted in any wall or hung like picture frames. The picture tube, only 2-5/8 inches thick, is made of two rectangular pieces of plate glass with about an inch of space between them. The edges are sealed with powdered-glass solder to hold the vacuum. The surface of the thin tube is the equivalent of a 21-inch conventional screen. In the thin tube, the electron beam is injected at the bottom of one side. Deflection plates along the bottom edge bend the beam upward between the front and back glass walls. The inside of the front wall is coated with a new transparent phosphor which is said to improve the contrast. The thin TV tube also is reported to have sharper focusing properties. A new method of printing electrode elements on the inside surfaces of the glass eliminates the need for assembled metal parts. Printed circuits are used in the tube controls. The thin tube will replace many of the instruments needed for blind flying of an airplane and can be operated by a small electronic computer. A similar control system was developed by Allen B. Dumont Laboratories, Inc., for Bell Helicopter Corp.

The last sentence is the kicker: “Some experts are predicting—for less than the cost of the family car— a complete home communications terminal with access to computer libraries, two-way video, and hundreds of input channels. Cable TV could make it all come true. ”

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Once just a way to get signals to distant places, cable TV is now growing fast even in big cities. Here’s why

CATV Is Coming to Your Town

One of these days soon, a salesman will ring your doorbell and offer a special service called cable TV. “Why bother?” you may ask. “I’m perfectly satisfied with the reception I’m getting now on my five [if you're average] channels.” True, you may be getting good TV reception. But CATV (Community Antenna TV) will offer you better reception, and more. Added up, here is what you will get:

• The five channels you would usually pull in with your antenna— but much sharper and clearer.

• Three, maybe four, other stations from other cities. Two or three of them will probably duplicate much of the network programing you’re already getting. But one or two may be independents that you have no way of seeing, short of moving to the next town. That’s a total of nine channels off the air.

• Three local channels—continuously broadcasting time/weather, news/stock ticker, and local live broadcasts—from town meetings to high-school ball games. That’s 12 channels so far.

• There’s more coming: pay TV on the cable. This is the most exciting home-entertainment prospect of all. Pay cable channels will cost extra.

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‘Seeing Things’ with Electrocular
YOU can look two ways at once with this 30-oz. electro-optical viewing device. The Electrocular uses a miniature cathode ray tube 7 in. long, a deflecting mirror, a focusing lens, and a dichroic filter viewing eyepiece to present a TV-type image without distracting from the work in front of you.
The developer, Hughes Aircraft Co., Fuller-ton, Calif., says the unit will let a repairman work on the rear of a digital analog panel (Fig. 1) while closed-circuit TV camera (outlined) pipes the results to him from the screen in front. Or a pilot (Fig. 2) can see a TV picture of air traffic information and ground conditions while he’s still in flight.

Compact Television Unit Demonstrated
DEVELOPED by a well known radio firm, a new portable television transmitter unit stands only five feet high and about two and one-half feet wide. In a recent demonstration, the transmitter was sighted on a golfer teeing off (right) and the images were picked up by a television receiver housed in a small tent erected at a point about 150 feet away from the site where the transmitter was being operated.

Far Cry from the “Cuckoo” Clock
Germany’s Black Forest was once famed for its cuckoo clocks. Bringing its technology up to date, the Saba-Works of the Black Forest has come out with a handsome large-screen projection TV set (left) that can be remotely controlled. An image of high optical density is formed on a small-faced cathode-ray tube in back of the set and projected on the screen through a lens system.

Long-Distance Microwave Pipe Carries Many Television Programs

Tens of thousands of cross-country telephone calls along with hundreds of television programs may someday be carried in a single two-inch metal tube. The longdistance wave guide, developed by Bell, could be buried underground and would funnel extremely short microwaves up hill, down dale and around corners. It is constructed of thin copper wire, tightly
coiled like a spring under pressure and wrapped inside a flexible outer coating which holds the wire in place. In laboratory tests, microwaves have been carried for 40 miles in a metal tube with the same loss of strength encountered when the waves travel 12 miles in a coaxial cable. The system uses microwaves shorter than any previously used in communications.