History (General)
How big was the first tv and how much was it. From:CoryS.
Hi Cory, I found a good web site about this called "Television History - the First 75 Years" athttp://www.tvhistory.tv/ It has a section called "Pre-1935" that shows pictures of many early television sets. According to the web site, the first public demonstration of a t.v. was in 1926, when the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird showed the machine he had created to about 40 people. The components of the machine covered a tabletop and produced images of human faces. By 1927 similar machines were demonstrated in the United States. The first t.v. sets you could buy seem to have appeared about 1928. They were large cabinets, like furniture, but only produced an image about half the size of a business card. The TV History web site has a list of prices for television sets from 1930 onwards athttp://www.tvhistory.tv/tv-prices.htm, with links to the original newspaper ads for them. You could buy a complete set in 1931 for $150 -- in today's dollars that would be well over $1,000! - Shelly INSTAAR Information Center