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Satchel Carlson was doing modular tube chassis (they called unit-ized) in the late 1940s then they started making TVs.
As I understand it they optimized their factory for small radio chassis during WWII, and found it was cheaper to assemble their TVs from small replaceable modules than retool their plant to handle large chassis. It also worked as a servicing aid and sales tool. Customers liked that the shop could just drop in a new circuit module in 5 minutes and recondition the bad one at the shop.
Philco did something similar with their split chassis keeping the sweep separate from the RF/IF/audio/video and standardizing the interface from the late 40s to the mid 50s so you could replace half the set quickly and recondition the half you replaced back at the shop.
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