MovieChat Forums > Invasion, U.S.A. (1952) Discussion > Projection TV in the 1950s???

Projection TV in the 1950s???

posted 18 years ago by tinus42
11 replies | jump to latest

Did they already have projection TV in the 1950s?

In the Cocktailbar they were watching the events unfolding on a large flatscreen television screen (which was as large as modern day plasmascreens but obviously that couldn't be the technology used) of the brand Admiral. It had a tuner which was built into the side wall next to the bar.

I Googled for "Admiral television" and it was an actual brand of TV sets in the 1950s. So I wonder, did they have projection television in those days, akin to modern day beamers? It doesn't seem that unfeasible to me, as they had movie projectors for quite some time and it wouldn't have been impossible for them to feed the image of a cathode ray tube to a projector in the same way LCD's are used today in beamers.

[–] gnome-5 16 years ago

Even if it existed, would the picture have been bright enough to compete with the studio lights?

[–] gnome-5 15 years ago

Just dropping by a year later...

A few nights ago I was in the projection booth of the Orpheum Theater in downtown Los Angeles. Apparently back in the 1950s it was the first theater to have a projector system installed for special events. It was only 525 lines of resolution, so the picture wasn't great.

[–] megArnold 13 years ago

Lev Termen, inventor of the theremin, also invented a color projection TV system back in Russia in the 1920s. But the Russians found it too scary and the idea was abandoned.

[–] danzeisen 11 years ago

Its not a projection TV. The controls are removed from the console and the CRT is built into a wall. I looked at a house to purchase some years ago that belonged to an electronics buff and he had a very similar set up. It was a pretty darn cool thing back in those days I'll bet.

[–] andrewwjohnson 9 years ago

Large square flat screen TV sets were common in many fifties sci-fi movies and TV shows during the fifties and sixties because it was easy to edit the image on to it.

TAG LINE: True genius is a beautiful thing, but ignorance is ugly to the bone.

[–] hobnob53 9 years ago

The same question recently came up on the board for another 1952 Red-Scare/sci-fi film, Red Planet Mars. In that film the family is also shown with a wall-mounted flat-screen TV. But there was no such thing at that time, at least not in common use or available in places like homes or bars. It was a bit of futuristic fiction made for these two movies.

[–] churchr-1 8 years ago

Back when TVs were expensive and construction workers inexpensive this was pretty common. I've heard of entire housing developments where having a tv set built into the living room wall was a big selling point.

[–] hobnob53 8 years ago

Are you being serious, churchr-1? I hope not.

[–] davidwile 8 years ago

Hey folks,

I guarantee you the "TV set" built into the wall of the bar was strictly in the imagination of the prop department. This film was probably made in 1951, and all televisions were based on cathode ray tubes (CRT) which were all round at the time - neither square nor rectangular. If a bar had a TV flush with the wall at that time, you can bet there was a big box sticking out the other side of the wall, and the screen size would have been small - very small.

The first TVs I saw from the end of the 1940s and into the early 1950s had round screens less than 12 inches in diameter. I think screens may have grown to 12 inches by 1952, and I think by 1955 we may have had a TV with an 18 inch CRT. Just as today, bars have always done their best to provide the largest TV screen available, but in 1951 and 1952, TVs with 25 inch screens simply did not exist.

As I recall, after the fairly rapid increase in the size of CRTs, the next advance was to go from a round CRT to a square CRT, and I am guessing that was around 1960. The next jump in CRTs was the implementation of color toward the end of the 1960s.

Best wishes,
Dave Wile

[–] hobnob53 8 years ago

Of course you're right about the non-existence of large-screen projection TV in 1952, David.

The movie probably wanted to get some sort of "futuristic" look in a few scenes, so having a really big TV -- so different from the non-existent TVs in Russia! -- was just a throw-in about the superiority of American life.

Color became the network norm in 1966, but of course there was some color television even in the 1950s...though few people had color sets to actually see it.

[–] franzkabuki 8 years ago

Slightly off-topic, but there was another thing I wondered about those TV transmissions - why was the President of the USA always filmed from the back, over his shoulder, whenever he chose to address his people on live TV? Made him seem kind of evasive, as if not daring to face his people when the utmost trouble was afoot. Like some shady character sitting there alone in his office.

"facts are stupid things" Ronald Reagan