The History of the (Really) Big TV

Our infatuation with big televisions can be traced back to the tube magnifiers of the 50s. Here's a look at the evolution of the big TV.

To a kid whose life revolved around weekly episodes of “The Lone Ranger” and “Superman,” the lure was simply too great to ignore. Every time I saw a Saturday-morning TV commercial or came across a comic book ad hawking a TV picture tube magnifier, I knew I had to have one.

It was the stuff of childhood dreams: A piece of plexiglass that would magnify the picture when placed in front of a TV. The magnifiers were available in several forms: Some affixed directly to the front of a television set, others were attached to brackets that suspended them several inches in front of the CRT. As crazy and low-tech as it sounds, the magnifiers worked. I can vouch for that because I bought one.

I can’t recall how many weeks of “allowance” it cost me, but the price was definitely more than my other major expenditures of the time, comic books and Twinkies. But it was worth it. My magnifier transformed the 9-inch picture tube of a hand-me-down 1956 General Electric (GE) tabletop television into a big-screen TV! Of course in this case, big-screen meant a distorted picture of around 16 or 17 inches. 

Even by TV standards of the era, that wasn’t particularly big. By the mid-1950s, most TV manufacturers had figured out how to mold glass and manipulate cathode light rays well enough to deliver 21-inch picture tubes at relatively affordable prices. That was nearly twice the size of the largest television sets available in 1940, when 12 inches was the max. And it was gargantuan compared to America’s first commercially available television, a 1928 GE model with a 3-inch screen.

Almost from that time forward, manufacturers have been engaged in what seems like an eternal quest to prove that size does indeed matter when it comes to direct view television screens. For proof of that, you need look no further than the annual Consumer Electronics Show. Every year, it seems, one of the top stories is the announcement of the world’s biggest TV.

In 2006, for example, Panasonic announced a 103-inch plasma model that went on sale later that year for around $70,000. Sharp, a champion of LCD flat-panels, trumped that at CES 2007 when it announced a 108-inch set, proudly proclaiming larger than any plasma. And the war of words and screen sizes escalated again at this year’s CES when Panasonic showed off a 150-inch plasma that is expected to be available next year.

A screen that large may have been beyond the reach of television pioneers Philo T. Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin, who are generally credited with independently inventing the technology we think of as television. But it certainly wasn’t beyond the imagination of the hundreds of companies that got into the television manufacturing business beginning around the same time as the first American public television broadcasts in 1939.

Companies like Andrea, DuMont, GE, and RCA, limited by technology of the era, made sets ranging in size from 5 to 12 inches, measured diagonally, that year and for the next several. They were measured diagonally, by the way, because the earliest CRT picture tubes were round – and virtually all picture tubes had rounded sides and/or corners right into the 1950s.

The growth of picture tubes – and television as a whole – was stunted by World War II. But the post-war economy saw a boom in both, and by 1950 there were over 100 manufacturers producing sets that topped out at around 19 inches. By the mid-1950s, the picture tube of the typical console television found in family living rooms measured around 21 inches. By the end of the decade, 24-inch sets were on the scene and being seen in more and more in homes.

Screen size growth slowed a bit in the 1960s as consumers and manufacturers focused on color and portability. Although color television debuted in 1954, it was during the 1960s it entered the mainstream. As the decade began, 21-inch color TVs with nearly oval CRTs were the norm, but by 1969, 23-inch rectangular tubes were vying with tiny battery-capable portables for headlines.

By the 1970s and ’80s, flagship sets had grown to 25- or 26-inch screens. But the most game-changing moment in screen growth was the introduction in 1973 of rear projection televisions, which used three large CRT tubes (one red, one green, one blue) and mirrors to project up to a 45-inch image on an internal screen were becoming popular. By the end of the 1980s, RPTV’s had grown to 55 inches and were becoming very popular.

But because conventional CRTs had much better picture quality, tubes continued to grow into the 1990s, with some 43-inch behemoths actually reaching consumers’ homes. But for the most part, 36 inches seemed to be the practical limit for conventional picture tubes, and 31 inches became the sweet spot of the price/value/size equation.

The introduction of flat panel technologies as the new millennium arrived marked the end of CRT size increases – and signaled the beginning of the end for the technology itself. Today, even RPTVs have been dropped by most manufacturers. But based on the annual CES size battles, there is no end in sight to how big TV screen sizes might grow in the future.

Check out these other historical perspectives from our special section, ”The Evolution of TV”:
-Where Did TV Come From?
-TV Enters The Living Room
-The Ways We Watch
-The Rise of the Flat Panel
-Flat Panel Battles: Plasma vs LCD
-The Dawn of HDTV