HILLIARD – The history of television began long before millions of people gathered in front of their black-and-white sets and fiddled with the antenna and horizontal hold to watch Lucy and Howdy Doodie.
That’s clear from a visit to the Early Television Museum in Hilliard.
It has sets going back a century, to the 1920s. It also has scores of the much-improved, post-World War II, black-and-white sets that changed entertainment. There are several first-generation color sets from the early 1950s.
Collector Steve McVoy, now 80 years old, started the museum in 2002.
He rescued many old sets from people’s basements and attics.
“The original idea for the museum was to deal with the earliest television technology,” McVoy said. “The sets got pretty boring after 1960, just these big things in plastic cabinets.”
The collection is one of the world’s largest, rivaled in North America only by the MZTV Museum of Toronto. About 180 television sets are on exhibit, arranged in chronological order, with another 50 in storage.
The Early Television Museum opened in 2002 as a non-profit foundation. It’s housed in a large former warehouse. Each room features an audio guide, narrated by McVoy. Press another button on some of the sets and a few old shows appear.
The idea for transmitting pictures goes back to the 1880s and the first crude mechanical televisions were developed in the mid 1920s. Television made what McVoy calls its “formal debut” on April 30, 1939, at that World’s Fair in New York.
Engineers who learned about radar and aircraft communications during World War II then applied that knowledge to TV technology after the war, when a boom in sales and programming began.
There were about 200,000 sets in the U.S. in 1947, and 18 million by the end of 1953, according to McVoy’s research. Audiences loved “I Love Lucy” (which began airing in 1951) and “The Honeymooners” (began 1955).
The color revolution came in 1954. Sales were initially slow, due in part to cost. It wasn’t until the early 1970s that color sets outsold black-and-white ones.