Post WWII – Television Is Coming To Your Home

In late Summer 1945, with total victory secured, manufacturers could soon begin producing consumer products rather than armaments. With the transition would come amazing technological advances.

In the August 25,1945 issue of The New Yorker Magazine there are two advertisements featuring television. However, there were less than 10,000 television sets in the United States in 1945.

The first ad seen above is particularly prescient: “arm-chair shopping,” forecasting developments like the HSN and QVC shopping networks.

The idea that you as a shopper could remotely request to see items in stores live through a TV hookup in your own home is quite advanced.

The illustration showing the woman ordering and a maid receiving an item through some sort of delivery system through a hole in the wall is obviously fictitious.

Homes in the Grand Central Zone were never equipped with the video technology as described.

Color TV on the other hand was in development as early as 1940.

This ad for Capeheart / Farnsworth televisions and radios promises that soon you will be able to watch television.

To illustrate the ad four New York Yankees are shown in action. They are top, (l-r)  Mike Garbark, and George “Snuffy”  Stirnweiss; Bottom, (l-r) Hank Borowy and Nick Etten.

Experimental color television broadcasts did not begin until 1951 with about two dozen color sets in use among the 12 million in the United States.

CBS broadcast the first baseball game in color on August 11, 1951 between the Boston Braves and the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field. The Braves won 8-4.

But it would be nine years after this ad appeared, before color TV became more widely available. In 1954 RCA began manufacturing color sets.The cost was about $900.

Even as prices came down the steep expense would prohibit many people from buying a color set for many years.