page_title: History of television
section_title: Television sets
hierarchical_section_title: History of television / Television sets
caption_attribution_description: English: RCA Model 630-TS television set seen in a museum. Its caption indicates it was the first mass produced TV set and was sold in 1946 and 1947.
context_page_description: The concept of television was the work of many individuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots initially starting from back even in the 18th century. The first practical transmissions of moving images over a radio system used mechanical rotating perforated disks to scan a scene into a time-varying signal that could be reconstructed at a receiver back into an approximation of the original image. Development of television was interrupted by the Second World War. After the end of the war, all-electronic methods of scanning and displaying images became standard. Several different standards for addition of color to transmitted images were developed, with different regions using technically incompatible signal standards.
  Television broadcasting expanded rapidly after World War II, becoming an important mass medium for advertising, propaganda, and entertainment.
  Television broadcasts can be distributed over the air by VHF and UHF radio signals from terrestrial transmitting stations, by microwave signals from Earth orbiting satellites, or by wired transmission to individual consumers by cable TV.
context_section_description: A television set, also called a television receiver, television, TV set, TV, or telly, is a device that combines a tuner, display, and speakers for the purpose of viewing television. Introduced in the late 1920s in mechanical form, television sets became a popular consumer product after World War II in electronic form, using cathode ray tubes. The addition of color to broadcast television after 1953 further increased the popularity of television sets in the 1960s, and an outdoor antenna became a common feature of suburban homes. The ubiquitous television set became the display device for the first recorded media in the 1970s, such as VHS and later DVD. In the late 2000s flat panel television incorporating liquid-crystal displays largely replaced cathode ray tubes. Modern flat panel TVs are typically capable of high-definition display (720p, 1080p or 2160p) and can also play content from a USB device.
  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 called Televisors 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) with a spiral of apertures first mass-produced television set, 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 the United States (1938). The cheapest model with a 12-inch (30 cm) screen was $445 (equivalent to $8,083 in 2019). 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 western world skyrocketed after World War II with the lifting of the manufacturing freeze, war-related technological advances, 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. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, color television had come into wide use. In Britain, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV were regularly broadcasting in color by 1969.
  By the late 2000s, CRT display technology was largely supplanted worldwide by flat-panel displays such as LCD. Flat-panel television, especially LCD, has become the dominant form of television since the early 2010s.
caption: RCA 630-TS, the first mass-produced television set, which sold in 1946–1947
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