TV Tubes? Say what?

I wrote this five years ago on the old TV Guide web site, where you could post your own personal thoughts. I thought I'd share it now on my own blog:

As a Baby Boomer, I get asked questions by those much younger than I that are quite bemusing. For example, where I work we have a few 18- and 19-year-olds around. One day, a group of us were talking about TV shows, and one of the 18-year-olds looked me directly in the eye, and, with all sincerity, asked me if there was TV way back when I was a young lad. Man…that one hurt! I pointed out to the “Whippersnapper” (not surprisingly, he didn’t understand that word) that not only did we have TV but we had the rotary telephone, too.

Now I admit that those early days could be considered the “Dark Ages” of TV viewing. If the reader of this Blog is over 40, the following adventure will be a trip down memory lane. If under 40 or thereabouts, keep in mind that we were the pioneers of this newfangled medium and please enjoy what we had to go through to watch our favorite programs. Also, this was very serious business back then…

There were two controls/knobs that were very important on the old black and white TVs. The first was the “Horizontal Hold.” Every now and then the picture would warp like you were looking at a person doing the hula in one direction through a Fun House Crazy Mirror. Bizarre! The “HH” would straighten it out with a little tweaking. The other knob was the “Vertical Hold.” The nightmare would begin with a solid black bar across the bottom of the screen slowly get fatter until suddenly it would flip up to the top of the screen. Soon it would flip faster and faster. This was known as the picture “rolling.” The “VH” helped stop that.

When neither knob would work, we had one last gasp to fix it before taking it to…“The TV Repairman.” We would have to check the tubes. That’s right…”tubes.” As in transparent glass cylinders of various sizes with weird wiring/plating inside and prongs poking out on the outside. Now tubes were used in TVs and Radios before integrated circuits and all sorts of other high tech electronics were even thought of. Unfortunately, they had this nasty tendency to burn out frequently. So when the TV began to appear as if looking through a Black and White kaleidoscope while peaking on one’s favorite drug, the family’s job was to find the “mysteriously malfunctioning tube.”

Our TV, like a lot of others, was a console as wide as a dresser and about thigh to waist high. To the right of the TV was the phonograph with our Frank Sinatra, Al Martino, Patty Page and Kaye Starr LP albums (large, plastic discs with a hole in the middle that played at 33 1/3 Revolutions per Minute) stored. To the left was the reel-to-reel tape player that had all our heavy (long hair) classical tapes. (A quick trivia question for the old-timers: how many grooves did the average LP have on one side? Answer below…)

So Dad and I lifted one side of the console and pulled it away from the wall. The back of the TV was covered with holed press-board secured by at least 100 screws. The butt of the picture tube protruded in the center.

After unscrewing all 100 screws, we then had access to the tubes seated on the socket board. Of course, the picture tube was also exposed. Now, all of us know thousands of words, but most of them we know not from where we learned them originally. There was one word, however, that every baby boomer first learned re the picture tube…and that word was “implode.” Dad would say, “Don’t mess with the picture tube, Dave, it might IMPLODE!”

“’Implode?’ What’s that?”
“Well, the picture tube has a vacuum…”
“Vacuum?? Isn’t that what Mom does to the fl-“
“Not that kind of vacuum. Oh, never mind. The tube collapses inward if broken or cracked.”
“I’m outta here! Later, Dad.”
“Yeah…right, son…Just don’t break the tube!”
“Oh…OK”
“Also, be especially careful not to touch the any of the wiring as it might electrocute you.”
“But it’s unplugged…do you mean if I –“
“DON’TTOUCHTHATITWILLKILLYOU!!!!!”
“Oh…ok.”

So now we have to pull all the tubes from the multi-socketed socket board (except the Picture Tube). If we were lucky, there was a diagram indicating which tube went to which socket. If not, we had to mark each socket with the number of the tube that went there.

So I had my White Owl cigar box of TV tubes and went to the Rexall’s Drug Store with Dad. Now back in those days you would enter the drug store and there was a counter in which the back wall was a huge multitude of boxes of new Sylvania TV tubes for sale. At the end of the counter was the dreaded “Tube Tester.” It was about chest high and had at least 7,239 different sized sockets on it.

In the back center was this speedometer-like needle with the left side all red and the right side all green. The trick was to look at the chart containing a list of thousands of tubes above the device for the number of the tube you were testing. It would then tell you which socket number to put it in. Once seated, you had to wait while the tube warmed up and then watch the needle s-l-o-w-l-y going from left to right, red to green. If it ended in the green area the tube was good, if it stayed in the red, it was bad. Of course, most of the time the needle landed right in the white in-between area so Dad and I would have endless debates on the tubes being good or bad.

So I put one tube in after another until finally, Murphy’s Law took over and, sure enough, I put the next to the last tube (the one that looked liked it had been tied on the end of a stick at a marshmallow roast) in socket #5,491, and, lo and behold, it didn’t get out of the red. Eureka! Bad, Bad Tube! Tube number S2485U. The clerk pulled the new tube out of the “Great Wall of Tubes” at the back of the counter, we paid for it and merrily went our way home.

We inserted all the tubes back in the socket board, carefully avoiding touching the “dreaded” TV Tube, and put the press-board backing on with only two screws (for quicker removal next burn out). We held our breath…and…Whoopee! “Bonanza” in all its pristine glory!

So I learned two things that day…the definition of “implode,” and electricity somehow leaps from the wall socket to the plug on the floor to electrocute you. Oh, and Little Joe’s mother died…

The trivia answer:

The average number of grooves on one side of an LP record is…..

One!