Today is the 10th Anniversary of this Blog

As the title indicates, I've been blogging about industrial history for 10 years now. I've written 4,008 posts in this blog and 3,418 posts in my other major blog, Towns and Nature. I retired May 2, 2014, learned about blogspot from a daughter, bought a DSLR camera kit at a Mother's Day sale at JCPenney and published my first post on May 15, 2014.

[I'm not acknowledging the website because, according to my security software, it has a threat.]

The most viewed post is "Boiler Explosion of C&O T-1 #3020 on May 1948" with 33.5k views. That was not a big surprise, but the second most viewed post, "BNSF Color Schemes (Liveries) and Railfanning" at 12.6k views is a surprise. Coming in third with 10.1k views is "1967 Big Muskie (Bucyrus-Erie 4250-W) Dragline Crane."

I normally don't pay attention to the stats because the blog is not monetized and because they don't make sense. As an example, here is the post summary:

And here is the information for the top post. Note that the above list gives a figure of 33.5k but below we see 40.5k.

I belong to several Facebook groups, and they have proven to be a significant source of material. So significant that I spend hours each day, seven days a week, working on the blog, but I can't keep up. You don't see most of my work because with over 7000 posts, most of the photos are being added to existing posts. And I work on fixing problems that I find when I add a photo to an existing post. The problems range from errors to duplicate posts to opportunities for more cross links to formatting issues.

I could write a lot about new versions of software being significantly worse than their previous versions, spam comments, trying to understand the terms of usage for websites, outages of Federal government run websites, many inappropriate Facebook suggestions, the loss of the Bridge Hunter site, a firmware bug in my new desktop computer, etc.; but I'll spare both of us some time and not write anymore about the aniversary.

MRL/NP Twin Bridge over Yellowstone River Collapsed

(Satellite)

Jun 24, 2023, 6:45am local time. No one was injured.

Dat Boi, Jun 2023

"Three cars with hot asphalt and four cars with molten sulfur fell into the river....Two cars were carrying sodium hydro sulfate, but neither had entered the water or been breached." [nytimes]

There is no expected hazmat impact because both the molten sulfur and hot asphalt solidify rapidly when they cool off. "Montana Rail Link said that two cars which contained sodium hydrogen sulfate, an acid salt, did not enter the water, and that initial air and water tests did not find any evidence that they had leaked." [cbsnews]

The yellow on the water surface was probably a molten sulfur leak.

1:31 video @ 0:23 in abcnews

This  view is rather redundant with Dat Boi's view above, but I include it to confirm that the near pier is tilted. Did the wreck cause the activation of the emergency braking system and the resulting longitudinal forces shoved the top of the pier sideways? Or did the high water cause the pier to tilt, and that is the cause of the accident? Below, I note that the piers are rather new. So, I hope the train braking is what moved the pier.

abcnews, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks - Region 5

All of the older photos I have seen show the river was drier than it was in Jun 2023.

The road bridge was removed in 2021 after erosion made it a risk to the public. [abc7chicago] At first, I didn't think I had the correct bridge because none of the accident photos included the road bridge.

Street View, Jul 2013

This Aug 2022 photo shows that new piers have been installed since the above 2013 view.

Lourdes Rivero, Aug 2022

The bridge carried a major fiber-optic cable through Montana. So high-speed internet was impacted for many of the customers of Global Net. [abc7chicago]

CSX/L&N Bridge over Otter Creek south of Hanson, KY

Bridge: (Satellite)

Tower: (Satellite)

The reason for saving this photo was the crane. Then I noticed the communication tower on the horizon. 

Jim Pearson Photography posted
CSX M512 approaches the bridge replacement area, just south of Hanson, Kentucky as it heads north on the Henderson Subdivision under stormy skies on August 2nd, 2022. Fortunately, we here in Western Kentucky have not seen the massive flood waters like they have in the eastern part of the state.
Tech Info: DJI Mavic Air 2S Drone, RAW, 22mm, f/2.8, 1/2000, ISO 100.
Jim Pearson Photography: https://fineartamerica.com/.../csx-m512-approaches-the...
[Some comments explain that the loads on the train are truck frames. I presume they are headed to the Ford truck plant in Louisville.]

The bridge is rather small. Even if they are lifting a prebuilt replacement into position, I don't know why it would need such a large crane. The crane appears to be close to the bridge's location, so the crane doesn't need a big radius. On this side of the white crane is a little red crane. The little crane was probably needed to build the big crane.

Digitally Zoomed

I spent more time than I'm willing to admit looking at a satellite map for the communication tower in Jim's photo. I finally found it using Google Map's street view on US-41 and then on a side street.

Street View

I found another tall tower on the south side of town, but it doesn't have near as many antennas. (Antennae is the plural if we are talking about the heads of insects instead of  "electrical instruments." )

Street View

Judging by the antennas, they are cell towers instead of microwave towers. But they are very tall for being cell phone towers. I presume the height is because the land is hilly in this area.

1969 Hanson Quad @ 24,000

Western Electric's Montgomery Shops and Manufacturing Solvents

(Satellite, more location details below)

I was well aware of WE's Hawthorn Works. The following taught me that WE had a plant in Montgomery, IL.

Lost Illinois Manufacturing posted
In 1969 comes this photo from the Western Electric plant in Montgomery, Illinois. Courtesy of their employee Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/groups/55128958916/
Joe Murray Some of that western electric equipment is still in place inside the central offices. It’s all ‘retired in place’ until the engineers decide they need the bays.
Dennis DeBruler I worked for Bell Labs back when both BL and WE were part of Ma Bell (AT&T before it was broke up). I was aware of the Hawthorne Works. I was not aware of a Montgomery Works. The caption reminds me that the existance of integrated circuits was "cutting edge" at the beginning of the 1970s.

The plant was occupied in 1955. The principal products in 1964 were Data-Phone data sets; Wire spring Relays; Test sets. [TheBellSystem, pdf page 46] This document also explains on page 44 the difference between Works, Shops and Plant:

An understanding of the organization of the Manufacturing Division requires a brief digression into intra-company terminology. It’s a question of semantics, really. Words like “Plant," “Works," and "Shops," when capitalized have specific meanings at WE, though the reasons may not always be clear and the distinctions do not necessarily apply elsewhere in the Bell System. To take one example, Webster’s defines "plant" as “… the machinery, apparatus, fixtures, etc., sometimes the real estate employed in carrying on a trade or mechanical or other industrial business." In Western Electric usage, "Plant” has a more limited meaning. Strictly speaking, there are only two WE Plants - with a capital P. One is at Buffalo, New York; the other in Laureldale, Pennsylvania. Specifically, "Plant” refers to a separate, medium-sized manufacturing facility, encompassing several “Shops." “Shop" is used to describe a manufacturing unit under the direction of a superintendent, that produces one particular product family, like crossbar equipment or cable. Major manufacturing facilities, which comprise many Shops, are designated Works. There are 11 WE Works and they are responsible for the great bulk of the company’s manufacturing output. Five of these Works operate satellite Shops with large manufacturing facilities employing sizable numbers of people and located physically apart from the Works to which each reports. The Burlington Shops, for example, where the Speakerphone and ground radar and missile guidance equipment for the armed forces are made, covers well over 700,000 square feet of manufacturing space. 

The 469,000 sq. ft. plant was demolished in 1987. [GeoCache]  The building is too new for the copyright free historic aerials and too old for Google Earth. I found the building in 1973 and 1952 historic aerials. But they are copyrighted.

1954

So I worked on learning how to find the online USGS topo maps. The cross-hatched area is the footprint of the plant. If you compare a contemporary satellite image with the historic aerials you can see that the existing concrete triangle on the northeast part of the property was a parking lot. The big asphalt part on the south part of the property did not exist in 1952, but it was in the 1973 image.

Satellite

Even though WE did not occupy the plant until 1955, it existed in 1953 because United Wallpaper built it in 1943 to help make flares and bombs. This became one of several plants that United Wallpaper had built or converted to bomb production. "Most town people were aware that the factory produced flares that would light up airfields and battlefields throughout the world, but few were aware of the great danger in that process. Three workers had been burned to death on the third shift at a United Wallpaper Factory in Clearing, IL, while loading the first fire charge in the M-50 bombs. Clearing is on the south side of Chicago where many large industries are located. The probable cause was friction. At this location many fires, explosions, and accidents were reported. All in all, 2,289,492 bombs were loaded at United Wallpaper Factories. Accidents and fires were common." After the war, the plant did convert to wallpaper production. "After the wallpaper plant closed down, the site was sold to Western Electric and then to Lucent Technologies. When these factories closed the buildings were torn down and site remediation began. Heavy trucks trekked up and down River Street hauling the soil away to be treated, and bring it back again. The site is still [2012] being monitored regularly and occasionally workmen can be seen using long probes to test the soil at the lower depths. Once all contamination is gone, it will become a beautiful riverfront property once again." [hidden-danger-in-our-midst]

I found it interesting that before United Wallpaper bought the land, it was a yard for the CA&E. But I could find no trace of this yard or the track that went south across the CB&Q branch and followed IL-31 in a 1939 aerial photo.

1944 ed of 1925 map

20170725 0572

I now realize that I parked right next to the land at the end of River Street when I took the trail that goes under the US-30 bridge. The land on the right that I walked past to get from my parked van to here was the Montgomery Shops property. Around 2000, Lucent Technologies pad $10m to clean up not only their oil and solvent mess but United Wallpaper's mess. "In June 1998, Lucent completed an effort to remove solvents, among them a possible carcinogenic, from the northern end of the site using the largest mobile machine ever assembled in the state to remove contaminants from dirt. The EPA has since determined that the effort was successful....Contaminated soil beneath the former AT&T Montgomery Works plant had leached into the groundwater." [ChicagoTribune] Since then, Lucent Technologies became Alcatel-Lucent. It is now Nokia. The satellite image indicates that the land has yet to be repurposed.

I've retired from Bell Labs. Back in the 20th Century, we used to receive a weekly Bell Labs News newspaper. I remember an article talking about how they invented a solvent based upon a chemical found in oranges for cleaning printed circuit boards. The article made a big deal about the new solvent being "environmentally friendly." After a little research, I learned: "Many industrial cleaning processes have relied heavily on the use of chlorinated solvents, specifically 1,1,1- trichloroethane (TCA) and 1,1,2-trichloro-1,2,2-trifluoroethane (CFC-113). They are regulated as hazardous wastes. These chlorinated solvents also have been identified as ozone-depleting chemicals and are being phased out under the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990" [epa-oh] So now I understand why the new "orange-based" solvent was considered such a breakthrough. Not only would it reduce cancer rates and protect the ozone layer, it would avoid millions of dollars of cleanup costs. We keep a bottle of Goo Gone to clean off adhesive after removing tape. The front label has photos of it removing paint & varnish, gum, grease & tar, and glue as well. It also has an image of an orange with a face and two strong arms with the words "Citrus Solvent    No Bad Oder!". The epa-oh article was written in 1992 and states "At this time, there is no common or simple substitute for the wide variety of solvent uses." I assume Bell Labs solved at least the PCB (printed-circuit board) cleaning problem. Solvents for spring-wire manufacturing are no longer needed because logic and switching relays were replaced by electronics by 1990. As an alternative to better solvents, "Some AT&T plants are using a low-solids flux for wave soldering in an inert atmosphere which eliminates the need for PCB cleaning altogether. For this no-clean approach AT&T Bell Labs has developed a low-solids fluxer (LSF) that can apply fluxes on PCBs reliably and so accurately that little residue is left." [p2InfoHouse] The LSF solution is a high-capital manufacturing machine. But in the 1990s, Western Electric was still making enough PCBs that expensive machines that removed the no-value-added cleaning step was obviously cost effective.

TV (Television), Radio Dials ("Don't touch that dial") and Vacuum Tubes

I subscribe to the daily Chicago Tribune and on October 3 the bag included a copy of the Sun-Times as an advertisement. So I had a chance to read the Garfield comic that had three frames. The first frame shows Garfield watching a flat-screen TV. The TV had the narration of DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL. The second frame had Garfield thinking OKAY, I WON'T. The third frame had Garfield breaking the fourth wall and thinking AND WHAT'S A DIAL?

I have already discussed a dial phone. Garfield's comic reminded me that a tuning dial is history for both radios and TVs.

TV Tuning Dial

My first TVs, including my first color TV --- a 19-in RCA XL100 --- had dials for selecting the channel.

Photo by Bmuscotty88, CC BY-SA

I had to hunt on the web for a while to find a photo of a TV that was old enough to have a dial and with enough resolution that you could see the numbers on the dial.

Digitally zoomed

And then about 10 years later, I came across this photo.

Do you remember the 60s,70s & 80s posted

When I was a kid, our TVs had just the top dial without the U. That is, the TV could receive just the VHF (Very High Frequency) channels 2-13. To change channels, you had to get up off your seat, walk across the room to the TV, and turn the dial to the new number. When you turned the dial, it would "click" (actually, "clunk" is probably more accurate) at each number. And you had to turn it rather strongly to get it to move to the next number. When I took the cover off a TV, I noticed that what is on the backside of that dial was rather complicated. It was several inches deep consisting of several banks of selector switches. It always blew my mind trying to figure out how they were manufactured in the factory. The newer model shown in the photo supports UHF (Ultra High Frequency) channels as well. If my memory is accurate, that dial turned smoothly.

The fact that we did not have a remote and we could not channel surf was not an issue because we had only three channels --- ABC, CBS, and NBC. Since there was just one TV in the house and just three channels to choose from, who was going to watch what was planned out long before the TV was turned on.

Why just three networks for so many decades? Sending video signals across the country was difficult. Fortunately, using underground coax cables across the country was invented about the time that TV was invented. One was laid across my grandfather's farm in northeast Indiana.

• 1936 — AT&T installs experimental coaxial telephone and television cable between New York and Philadelphia, with automatic booster stations every ten miles. Completed in December, it can transmit 240 telephone calls simultaneously.
• 1941 — First commercial use in USA by AT&T, between Minneapolis, Minnesota and Stevens Point, Wisconsin. L1 system with capacity of one TV channel or 480 telephone circuits.
• 1949 — On January 11, eight stations on the US East Coast and seven Midwestern stations are linked via a long-distance coaxial cable.

[Wikipedia]

Microwaves and satellites had to be invented to afford enough channels to make channel surfing a meaningful activity. Then when we were forced to switch to digitial channels, channel surfing became a joke because it took so long for each channel to buffer up and display an image. I notice now that they at least quickly display the name of the channel. With the advent of fiber optic transmission making streaming possible, channel surfing became even more silly. In fact, some would argue that the TV is obsolete.

I had read that the mechanical turner was the weak spot in the XL100 TVs. But that turned out to be OK because soon after I bought my color TV, I bought my first VCR --- a JVC for $800. (The last VCR I bought new was also a JVC, but it cost $30.) So the turner on the TV set on channel 3 because I used the remote of the VCR for channel selection. (Every once and a while I would click it back and forth a few channels to wipe any corrosion of the contacts.) I finally threw that 19" color TV away after a couple of decades, not because it quit working, but because I wanted a bigger TV.

Radio Tuning Dial

Radios had a knob that turned the shaft of a variable capacitor. There would be a cord that wrapped around the shaft of the little tuning knob and then the cord went around a big pulley on the variable capacity. It would take many turns of the knob to go from one end of the dial to the other. And you had to remember the numbers of the AM stations that you liked. (There was no FM radio when I was a kid.) To this day, I remember from the 1960s that WOWO (Fort Wayne, IN) was 1190 and WLS (Chicago) was 890. I think WCFL was 1000.

Pinterest

I don't know what the lower scale in the photo was. When I was looking at pictures of older radios, I noticed that most of them had both scales.

Speaking of WOWO:

Steven A Cutter posted six images with the comment: "Everyone listened to WOWO years ago …"

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;;;

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In the 1960s, my Grandfather listened to WOWO in the mornings for their farm report. I listened to it in the afternoon and evenings for the rock music. I knew that in the evenings they switched their 50,000 watt signal to beam just to the east because there was another radio on 1190 on the West Coast. I learned about the directional beaming when I went to Northwestern University and could no longer receive WOWO. Years later, I was reminded that WOWO's signal went East when I picked it up one time on a car radio in Washington, DC.

Sean Brady posted
Radio station WOWO in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which first went on the air on March 31, 1925…

Lois Tobias-Ushkow posted

Michael Kopcha

Looks like a Zenith Long Distance AM/FM Tube Radio, 1950’s

Lois Tobias-Ushkow shared

Kim Andrus
Metz Portable 45 Record Player and AM Radio... " Beach Party Anyone!"?
Steve Dichter: 1956 Metz. German manufacturer.
[I wonder if that used a bunch of D-cell batteries. They would not have been rechargeable back in the 1950s.]

Photo

A variable capacitor has two banks of metal plates. The lower bank was fastened to the frame and was stationary. The other bank of plates was attached to the shaft. In this case, when you turned the shaft clockwise, you would rotate the plates out of the stator plates, which decreased the adjacent surface area and decreased the capacitance. Likewise, turning the shaft counterclockwise put more area of the rotor plates next to the stator plates and increased the capacitance.

By the time radios were being installed in cars, the dial had been replaced by a slider.

Nathan Gryszowka

For a slider, the cord between the knob and the capacitor pulley was run across the top of the scale and the needle was attached to the cord.

Vanished Chicagoland posted
Today [Aug 20, 2021] is National Radio Day! Here is a 1960s Zenith Radio.

Robert Moynihan commented
Picks up all kinds of things like the atomic clock on one of the stations. A long thin wire antenna which I string about the room.

Glenn Kadas commented
Zenith wood cabinet. Still works. Takes a while for the tubes to warm up.

Photo from CollectorNet

The first purchase I made with my own money (lawn mowing and babysitting) was a portable transistor radio. I added a blue rectangle on the photo to highlight the "teeth" that stuck out on the side of the radio. These were on the tuning dial. This dial was directly attached to the variable capacitor shaft. There was no cord to "gear down" the number of turns between the knob and the capacitor shaft. It required careful thumb movement to tune in a station.

Update: A Flickr photo of a 1946 Farnsworth vacuum tube radio with a slide dial. 

More Old Electronics

This is a multiple waveband (shortwave, airplanes, police, amateurs, AM) show "Selector" displays only the waveband in use. (Note that wave band was still two words back then.)

Mike Matalis shared
Dennis DeBruler: It just occurred to me that we have generations of people now that have never experienced tuning a radio to the exact frequency because digital tuners do that for us.
[The Magic Eye gives visual feedback of how off-center the tuning is.]

Of course, back then it would be just AM, there is no FM scale. (Note the "Vintage Tech" album.)

Marie Dawson shared

Bob Garrett commented on Marie's share

If I remember correctly, after they played the anthem, they showed a test pattern for a while before they turned off the signal and the set would show static. You would also get static if you set the dial to a channel that was not used. I'm sure they also showed a test pattern before their first show so that you would know you were tuned in to an active channel. But I don't remember that because I was never up that early.

PJ Clarke, Jun 2018 via Dennis DeBruler

RCA posted three images with the comment: "⚡ FLASHBACK ⚡ In 1954, RCA launched the world’s first consumer color televisions, turning a new page in home entertainment. Just one year earlier, RCA’s all-electronic color system became the U.S. broadcast standard—what we now know as NTSC. It was a milestone that brought television to life in a whole new way."

Jason Neill: Wrong. Admiral and Westinghouse color sets were in stores months before RCA's was.

[I didn't know Westinghouse made also TVs.]

Brad Woods: Jason Neill I guess we have to look at the verbiage. RCA "launched" consumer color TV, in that it was their design and Admiral and Westinghouse used their system. But as far as color sets actually being in the stores Westinghouse and then Admiral beat RCA to the punch, albeit paying for the right/licensing

to use RCA's design. But people, erroneously, think RCA color sets were the first to be sold to consumer..which they weren't. I don't think RCA cared they got the money either way, lol. Westinghouse also had the first rectangular color picture tube (CRT) television on the market as well, in the latter fifties. However, it proved problematic, and expensive to produce, so they withdrew it after only a short time on the market. If I recall correctly, RCA had a rectangular color picture tube as well, but I don't think it made it to the marketplace.

Jason Neill: Brad Woods : the NTSC system was not the exclusive development of RCA. It was the result of the work of many manufacturers, and in fact, RCA pissed them off by claiming exclusivity for it's emergence.

Mike Schefter: Brad Woods I remember seeing ads for Motorola's rectangular color CRT sets, apparently claiming they were the first. Perhaps just the first to perfect and successfully them.

Brad Woods: Mike Schefter Yes. Motorola did not lie, they were truly the first to mass market a successful rectangular CRT color set. Westinghouse was in the market for such a short time, we can only say they developed the first rectangular tube.

Brad Woods: Jason Neill RCA did put in most the effort for the triad color system. David Sarnoff worked his employees to exhaustion and put millions into the development. No RCA did not invent every facet of the system, but much of it was designed and/or perfected by them. The triad color tube, was their bab, totally designed by RCA. But yes, TV in general does not have one exclusive inventor, but relied on technology and developments from many. When it comes to color TV development, the only real competitor to RCA was CBS with the color wheel. That was too bulky to be practical in a home living room. Whether we like RCA and the nefarious David Sarnoff, or not, we can thank RCA for getting color TV into our homes in the fifties, albeit rather slowly, lol. The price was a bit too steep for the average consumer, initially, and sales were poor. Lack of color programming by the networks gave little impetus for the expenditure.

Paul Carlson: I must be getting old.....I remember when TV's were made in America, by Americans, in American factories.

David Bridger: Paul Carlson Not only were there were several television and radio manufacturers in the US, many were located right here in the Midwest! Zenith, Admiral, Motorola and Raytheon in Chicago, Voice of Music in Michigan, and RCA had a huge presence in Indiana, with plants in Marion, Indianapolis and Bloomington.

Tom Almy: Photo on the left does show the 1954 RCA CT100. However the advertisements on the right are both from the 1960s, the lower right even dated 1964 and the upper right with a rectangular CRT even more recent.

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Keep in mind that $468 in the 1960s would be over $5000 today. If I remember correctly, I paid over $800 for my first VCR, and VHS unit. And I paid $30 for the last one I bought. And then you could not buy them new anymore.

George O'Brien posted

 

Michael Matalis shared
[Note the radio dial on the right side of the console.]

Comments on a post

Mike Breski shared
Shopping for a color television in 1965.
Don Kullas: Purchasing a color TV in 65 would cost around $4000 today. It was a major purchase back then.

Did this have "push button" tuning? If so, I wonder how they did it. When did WGN start? That might explain why they had a fourth button in addition to the buttons for NBS, CBS and ABC.

Jimmy Becker posted

I can't figure out how these "briefcase sized" TVs fit the rear of the CRT picture tube into the case. The dials are on the side.

Sean Brady posted
Admiral TV ad - 1965
Alan Carver: That's $905.55..in today's inflation.
Chuck Luciano: adjusted for inflation, that's over $1000. Today $1000 will buy a 75" TV.
[A comment indicates that these TVs were rather light because they were made with transistors instead of tubes. Transistors would help with the battery life as well. Other comments indicate these were made in Chicago.]

The dials are on the top.

Sean Brady posted
1959 - PHILCO
Bob Straub: According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator, $159.95 in August of 1959 had the same buying power as $1,681.81 in August of 2023. Inflation is a sneaky tax.
John Lauter: 62 lb. “portable” because it has a handle on the top!

Sean Brady posted
12/2/1949-Sunbury, PA: These television chassis, show moving down the production lane at the Westinghouse Electric Corporation's plant in Sunbury, are the product os some 1,450 seperate operations. At the end of the war there were only 10,000 television sets in operation in this country. Growing in audience appeal, 185,000 sets were built in 1947; 950,000 sets were built in 1948 and thi year's production, by all manufacturers will be in excess of 2 million sets.
Tim Makins: Circular screens? Then how was a rectangular picture shown? Did the screen show a circular portion of the image, or was part of the screen unused?
Phil Nasadowski: Tim Makins Part of the screen was masked off, usually. Some companies did a round screen. Remember, TV was new, and folks didn’t know what a TV should look like.
David Fleegle: Tim Makins It was a little of both. The screen had a bezel in front that blocked off some of the picture tube.
Greg Carey: David Fleegle The orthicon pickup tubes in the cameras were also round. The electronic scanning however represented a 3x4 rectangle in the center which was reproduced on the round picture tube (CRT). The ability to make glass envelopes with squarish corners to reduce the unused parts of the CRT came years later.
[Note the 1965 Color TVs in Mike Breski's post above had round CRTs but the B&W tubes in the background were rectangular.]
Keith Chrysler: The Germans were 20 years ahead of us in tv. They were doing "patriotic' broadcasts in the early 30s with great clarity.
Patrick Kirtley: To me the amazing thing is that these units, being carefully designed and manufactured, were intended to last decades. But even then, technology was rapidly changing and the cycle of quick obsolescence had begun.
Bud Bennett: It boggles the mind that all those chassis were hand wired by individuals doing point-to-point soldering. Hundreds of components per Television set to make them work. PCB's (Printed Circuit Boards) wouldn't become a thing until the late 50's.

Comments on Sean's post

David Myers commented on Sean's post
I recently restored a 1949 Motorola TV, and thought the CRT was a dud as it gave a very dim image. Turned out the ion trap magnet had gone weak with age. It had a round CRT that was masked top and bottom, as was popular at the time. By the early 1950s, rectangular CRTs began to appear, and over the years, as technology improved, the corners became progressively squarer.

Alan Lehman commented on Sean's post
Early sets did have round displays. By the early 60's, squared corners were the norm.

Harry Moore posted three photos with the comment: "The world's largest television October 1973 (TV) tube at its time, a 226-pound, 36-inch cathode ray tube (CRT), intended to be used to train Air Force pilots. Developed by the Air Force Human Resources Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the CRT was to be used in the advanced flight simulator. The tests were underway at Williams AFB, Arizona. Other tried in 1937"

Ned Carlson: DuMont made a 30 incher in 1950. I saw one, and the owner had it rescreened and rebuilt. Rebuilding CRT's with new guns used to be a thing and was a big business at one time.

The old flight simulators used some kind of projector with a 4-65 Eimac as a sweep tube. Not sure how that worked. Hopefully it was better than the driving simulators I used back in the 70's 😉

Philip Crosby: In the late 80s, Sony built a 46" Trinitron CRT for their HDTV monitors. The monitors had threaded sockets, 3 on each side, for rods that a team of six persons could use to transport it.

Kinda like coffin bearers.

Andrew Wilson: Philip Crosby I remember selling Sony's first 27" Trinitron TV. It was the largest CRT TV we sold ever. I eventually bought one for myself. We thought it was huge! That thing weighed a ton. A two-man job to move it safely.

David Breneman: The RCA tube was called a “demountable” Kinescope. The bell was steel and the glass screen clamped to its face. As you might guess, the seal was not 100% leakproof, and there was a vacuum pump in the base that continuously evacuated it while it was running.

James Snyder: The largest CRT TV I ever used was a 60” Sony tube used at the Advanced Television Test Center during Grand Alliance testing in 1995. It took 6 men to lift the thing. I sat in front of that beast for months QCing the decoded video coming out of the proponent encoder/decoder.

[Several comments wondered about the quantity of harmful radiation that these big tubes would generate.]

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Ned Carlson commented on Harry's post
Oh, here's the 1950 DuMont 30 inch "Royal Sovereign" TV.

A vacuum tube tester.

Clarke Walker posted

Variations of these used to be found almost everywhere( and needed to be).

Remember to check the new tube before taking it home too.

Jay Krajcovic shared

Dennis DeBruler: When a family TV or radio quit working, I remember pulling out all of the vacuum tubes (except for the CRT, of course) and taking them to the local drug store to use one of these testers. When I found the bad one, I'd buy the replacement. It never occurred to me to test the new one. They always worked for me. I don't remember how I kept track of where to plug the tubes back in. If you look on the right side of the chart near the top of the tester, you see a knob. You would turn that to scroll the chart to find the model number of the tube you were testing. That would then tell you which socket to plug the tube in and what settings to dial in for the controls.

Jason Bailey posted
Spotted at the local guitar shop.

Jeffry Brooks: For testing the tubes in guitar amps?

Travis Parker: Jeffry Brooks yep. One of the applications where distortion from diving tubes out of spec is useful. You can do the same thing with DSP but tubes are a cheap and easy way to get that sound, assuming the tubes aren’t overpriced now.

Now, putting that same fuzz in reproduction amps vs instrument amps is questionable at best.

Sean Brady posted
Do it yourself tube tester - 1960s

Short Stories posted

Ed White posted

Im buying this tomorrow-

It'll be just like a trip to the hardware store in the 70s

David Xanatos: Ah the memories, the nostalgia. When I was about 7 or 8, I lived in an apartment building just a few houses down from a TV repair shop. They had piles of "dead" TVs out back that they let me take. I learned to recognize the "dead white" tubes, and the tubes with no heaters working. I collected bags of tubes that otherwise looked good and would bring them to Radio Shack and test them all on one of these testers, throw out the bad ones, and bring the good ones home. I started re-populating the "dead" TVs with good tubes and brought a LOT back to life, and I sold them for $5 to people in my apartment and surrounding houses. And thus was born a little electronics geek who now can look back at a 50+ year career in electronics, if you count that as my starting job 😆

Duffy Toler: David Xanatos Ugh, those white tubes. They always had a crack somewhere that let the spiders in and they built spiderwebs inside.

Terry Nieman: Remember. Checking tubes for dad. .when he would work on record changers.tvs.ect for schools..Scrolling thru the paper roll of tube settings..

Waldo Pepper: If that says your tube is GOOD, it’s Very good, as they were designed to sell tubes. 😃

[Some comments have photos of tube testers that were used by the pros.]

Kirk Alan commented on Ed's post
I still have mine, a Seco-1100