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.

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