History

Main article: History of television British Murphy black and white 405-line Television receiver 1951. Braun HF 1, Germany, 1959 The RCA Dimensia and RCA Lyceum TV sets of the 1980s were early models to feature a wide variety of input/output terminals

Mechanical televisions were commercially sold from 1928 to 1934 in the United Kingdom, United States, and Soviet Union. The earliest commercially made televisions sold by Baird in the UK in 1928 were radios with the addition of a television device consisting of a neon tube behind a mechanically spinning disk (patented by German engineer Paul Nipkow in 1884, see Nipkow disk) with a spiral of apertures that produced a red postage-stamp size image, enlarged to twice that size by a magnifying glass. The Baird "Televisor" was also available without the radio. The Televisor sold in 1930–1933 is considered the first mass-produced television, selling about a thousand units.

The first commercially made electronic televisions with cathode ray tubes were manufactured by Telefunken in Germany in 1934, followed by other makers in France (1936), Britain (1936), and America (1938). The cheapest of the pre–World War II factory-made American sets, a 1938 image-only model with a 3-inch (8 cm) screen, cost US$125, the equivalent of US$1,863 in 2007. The cheapest model with a 12-inch (30 cm) screen was $445 ($6,633).

An estimated 19,000 electronic televisions were manufactured in Britain, and about 1,600 in Germany, before World War II. About 7,000–8,000 electronic sets were made in the U.S. before the War Production Board halted manufacture in April 1942, production resuming in August 1945.

Television usage in the United States skyrocketed after World War II with the lifting of the manufacturing freeze, war-related technological advances, the gradual expansion of the television networks westward, the drop in television prices caused by mass production, increased leisure time, and additional disposable income. While only 0.5% of U.S. households had a television in 1946, 55.7% had one in 1954, and 90% by 1962. In Britain, there were 15,000 television households in 1947, 1.4 million in 1952, and 15.1 million by 1968.

Sorry, your browser either has JavaScript disabled or does not have any supported player. You can download the clip or download a player to play the clip in your browser. This video shows the operation of a typical CRT television of '80

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, color television had come into wide use. In Britain, BBC1 and iTV were regularly broadcasting in colour by 1969.

By the later 2000s, CRT display technology was largely supplanted in the home electronics market by flat screen displays such as LCD and plasma.