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.



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.

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