A vanished world. How RCA-Victor made color TV sets and audio tubes in 1959, great little movie.

Last longer than my Samsung.

 

Thanks for posting this! I love these old videos. I'm guessing that this was a form of training short?

 

We had that exact TV on the far left at 1:02. Worked good for years until the tuner started getting funky, we had to jam a spoon under the dial to make it work.

 

Not really. Color CRT and tube chassied sets usually needed bi-annual service calls and CRT replacement on average every three years. Don't believe me? Pull out a forty year old yellow pages and see how many TV repair businesses there were.

 

Never had a CRT replaced, never heard of such a thing.

 

Neither have I.

 

Thanks Steve.
They cryo treated their tubes, cool. No wonder everyone loves NOS RCA black plates .
I am just sucked in by these old videos and the time flys by.
Why is modern video production so convinced we want / like sensory overload and hyper speed fast cut editing?

 

Those shops were for the Philco and Emerson sets.

 

Just replaced a 7 year old Samsung TV last month that died.

 

How can it be a vanished world ?

My monitors are CRT and amps are mostly tubed. I may not be as young as I once was but I'm still here too.

 

My great uncle was a TV technician. It always amazed me that he knew what he was doing with what always seemed to be a rats nest of wires and that he would want to work on the things in his leisure in his basement. I should have raided his basement for tubes when I had the chance. I just didn't know back then.

10:20 "To produce the best, you must begin with the best." Great quote!

 

"RCA... the most trusted name in electronics!"

I seem to recall several of the RCA tube-manufacturing plants of the late 1970s/early 1980s were boarded up and the contents were sold to the Russians, who disassembled the entire manufacturing lines and shipped them back to the motherland. As far as I know, they're still making tubes there... some according to the original RCA specs.

I'm not a fan of CRTs today, and all I can remember in many years of using $20,000, $30,000, and $40,000 pro CRT monitors is all the problems they caused and flaws they exhibited. I'd much rather use a stable solid-state screen that's not going to change as much over time.

 

I love how the steps of assembly was in one location and the next step went to another location hundreds of miles away. It appears RCA was really good for the US economy.

The circuit board soldering was eye opening to me. I didn't know it was done that way.

 

It's a shame, a real shame.

 

...we used to make a lot of things in this country...

 

For professional work of course that makes sense to use a SS screen. I just don't like the color hues on them but I am giving up other things to get that subjective benefit.

 

Of course that is true. But at least what they produced is valued and appreciated by some of us after they have gone. That's as much as anyone can hope for. Their disappearance is part of a larger, mostly unhappy story. Most are.

 

I hesitate to flog my own YT page here too much, but this "How It's Made" video is the perfect example of the art of tube making. I believe it was shot in Latvia but I'm not sure if they were using the old RCA gear.

 

I know the tvs were pretty expensive when figured in today's dollars but after watching the clip,it's hard to see how they made a profit at all.Talk about labor intensive.Always loved the RCA we had and it's beautiful wood console.
Cool vid,Steve.

 

Our old Zenith was used daily and had one CRT replaced in 17 years. The older longer "jugs" were generally longer lived than the later wide deflection shorter units but certainly many lasted twenty or thirty thousand hours even in the last generation of CRT televisions and monitors. Bars and pizza parlors all over rural America still sport millions of arcade games with CRTs with 40-50K + hours, the displays are not what they used to be at all, but still good enough to get people to put quarters in the slots to play them. The last time I visited a casino there were still a few CRT slot machines on the floor.

Still, TV repair was a profitable business from the inception of TV until the Japanese manufacturers began to make TVs where all the parts lasted as long as all the others as often as not and also where they would restrict sales and distribution of repair documentation and parts to where only authorized service centers could reliably get them. The Japanese figured out very carefully how to make something consistently last a given time, whereas the bell curve of failure rate on US and European consumer goods tended to be a much broader spread. This was some time after solid state (except the CRT) was universal and well before flat screens (LCD, LED or plasma) were offered for public sale in TV sets. (Simple monochrome plasma displays were common in military equipment and computer terminals, e.g., the famous PLATO, in the seventies.) The Panasonic or Sony TV lasted long enough, barring warranty infant mortality, that the consumer had decided that when it goes bad it goes out, often enough; the TV repairmen were starved out.

VCRs and camcorders were a late-in-the-business-life windfall to the shops and techs who could work on them, but when digital replaced the moving tape drive that too was ended.

I have to note too that for every really honest and competent TV/VCR tech and shop out there there was at least one charlatan. People with real legitimate electronics skills could make more money in electronic manufacturing facilities and doing commercial equipment repair than in the TV business, and the TV business was promoted as a get rich quick field by correspondence course and test equipment vendors (primarily Sencore). TV repair attracted crooks, crazies, people with criminal records, and all other sorts of otherwise marginally employable people. This caused people to be more inclined to junk rather than have repaired equipment, and created a self-reinforcing phenomenon where people refused to pay more for a more repairable product and to replace a failed unit with a new junker than fix the old one.

 

TV sets then were made to be repaired and aligned, not thrown away. And this is when RCA invented things, built things, and supported things. Something your RCA today does not do either of. And when things were rarely thrown out either. A TV then was a major purchase, it was expected to last, and they needed servicing throughout their lifespan.

 

The margins were pretty good by those pre-MBA-mentality days: they had cutting costs to a fine art well before the TV manufacturing era.

The wood was veneer, although it was pretty durable compared to much of the furniture sold today. Usually they had a huge number of models that were built using a cafeteria style system: one or two basic chassis would be used with one of three or four sizes of CRT, with one of three tuner setups and with or without a second UHF tuner in detent or non-detent model, (the UHF tuner could be added later in many sets), in one of three or four style cabinets, e.g., French Provincial, contemporary, Liberace Rococo, etc.) so you could have 2x3x3x2x4 models just like that. Plus, large retailers would order unique model numbers to limit price shopping and price cotrol efforts, where the change might be one has the volume on the left of the tuner and the other on the right, plus institutional, hospital, and educational models. Service manuals would be broken out by chassis type and number and there wouild be separate ones for tuners, audio strips, etc.

Stereo or pre stereo "hi fi" consoles were built on the same pattern. While these came in several price points, even the cheapest cost more than a basic "component" <sic> stereo
system and even the more expensive common ones cost more than a fine Mcintosh or Marantz system with Klipsch or JBL speakers.

 

I was watching a great old film the other night - Rhubarb (the best movie about a rambunctious cat I've ever seen) and in a few scenes, there is an old (RCA?) crt.
The picture would frequently scroll - "horizontal hold" was what I think they used to call it.
It reminded me of our first tv set from the 60's. Was this a crt? Was the problem endemic to crt's or the antenna?
Man that used to bug me.

As a kid I was told to never sit too close to the tv - supposedly the tube could cause cancer of the testes. Any truth to this?