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An RCA TRK-9, first introduced at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, appears among the collection of televisions at the Early Television Museum in Hilliard, Ohio. The museum features a large collection of televisions from the 1920s and 1930s. The RCA TRK-9 cost $450 at the time and included an AM radio and shortwave radio. (Steve Wartenberg via AP)
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 hold to watch Lucy, Uncle Miltie and Howdy Doodie.
“Everybody thinks TV started in the ’50s or the late ’40s. Almost nobody knows it existed before World War II and even goes back to the ’20s,” said Steve McVoy, 80, the founder and president of the Early Television Museum in Hilliard, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus.
The museum holds a large collection of televisions from the 1920s and 1930s, and scores of the much-improved, post-World War II, black-and-white sets that changed the entertainment landscape. There are also several of the first-generation color sets developed in the early 1950s.
“The original idea for the museum was to deal with the earliest television technology,” McVoy said. “The sets got pretty boring after 1960, just these big things in plastic cabinets.”
The collection is one of the world’s largest, rivaled in North America only by the MZTV Museum of Toronto. About 180 television sets are on exhibit, arranged in chronological order,