The Costs of Television Sets, 1946

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  Overall Post 5144

• Q: "What kinds of programs will there be on television?
• A:  "All kinds" ("The commercials will be unlike radio.")

I was initially attracted to this oversized pamphlet for its A-Bomb cover--using this sort of imagery was a thing in advertising in the Cold War years...pervasive, even. It was not uncommon to see this sort of image used to sell bubble gum, kids' toys, motel rooms, laundry cleaners, and just about everything else (plus, of course, firecrackers).  This pamphlet though was a bit different from the others, as I expected that given its contents it would've been published around 1950. Wrong!  This work hit the streets in 1946, about a year after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and very early on in the history of public television. Television (and facsimile transmission) exited around the edges of public awareness for a few decades, but television as a relatively common form of amusement with not-terrible accessibility was very new in 1946.  So I wanted to share a few of the useful bits that I found in this short (24pp) and oversized pamphlet, the primary one being a survey of costs of television sets listed by manufacturer.

 

As you can see, the tv was not a purchase to be taken lightly by the average US citizen in 1946.  There's only a couple of sets listed here under $200,  with the average cost (not including the relatively substantial fee for the aerial and aerial placement) coming in at more than 10% of the average yearly income. (The average income in 1946 was about $2600, or about $39k adjusted for inflation using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator as a base.) The average salary in 2020 was about $56,000, or about $7k in 1946 dollars. That isn't as rosy as it might seem, given that the average person could expect to spend about double their income on a house--a standard that does not carry forward to today. Toss in healthcare and education, and that 7k comes rambling down. Hm. Another way of looking at this relative costliness of a tv set in 1946 is that it was about 10% of the cost of the average new car--given that the new car cost today in 2021 has jumped over the $50,000 mark (?!), 10% of that would buy a boatload of television sets.  

And there you have it--a little peep into the history of the future of television. (I should mention one interesting paragraph in which David Sarnoff reveals the remote-controlled bomber, outfitted with "television eyes" that would only be used in not-peacetime.)