Rectangualish colour telly on a 1957 magazine cover

[Aussie Bloke]

Hi all. I noticed currently on EBAY there's a 1957 colour telly magazine up for auction and one of the tellies looks quite rectangular compared to the others on the front cover looking like what a standard large mid/late 50s B&W telly looks like. Just wondering if this is the so called Philco Apple tube that failed to get the okay for the market?

See image below:

[Carmine]

Oh! Oh! I can be first to answer!

It's a 22" Westinghouse set. The tube is conventional (nothing special like the "apple" or chromatron) but as I hear, it was hard to get convergence set-up right. For whatever reason, it didn't catch on and was gone within a year.

Kinda a "holy grail" among TV collectors I would guess.

[old_tv_nut]

That mag is interesting because they stole Lucy's picture and used it without credit. The Lucy program wasn't even in color!

[bgadow]

Does ANYONE have one of those sets? I bought one of those magazines off eBay, worth having if the price is right. Good snapshot of the industry c.1957.

[Aussie Bloke]

Thanks for the info guys. I've matched the 22" Westinghouse to a picture of the chassis on the Early Television Foundation site:


Which does indeed look rectangularish in shape but with rounded edges. Speaking of convergence problems on rectangular tubes, no much wonder colour tellies were round right up to the early/mid 60s.

Hope there's still some of those 22" Wesinghouse colour tellies in existence as I would love to see a photo of it.

[Steve McVoy]

I know of two surviving Westinghouse sets. We have one of the tubes in our collection:

http://www.earlytelevision.org/crt_collection.html

[Steve D.]

This 1957 "Color Television" special edition was published by Radio & Television News. While a valuable addition to any vintage color tv library, the content is just ok. It doesn't begin to give complete coverage of all the sets pictured on the cover. The 22" Westinghouse just gets a passing nod. Admiral and Hoffman get the lion's share of model pictures and discriptions with RCA a poor third. There is an informative 2 page buyer's guide with 9 companies' model offerings. Interesting ( and top heavy) Sylvania table model with casters pictured on the inside. Most articles are reprints from R & TV News, including a Motorola 19" article long after that set ceased production.

Steve

[old_tv_nut]

In The Zenith Story, Copyright 1955, Zenith Radio Corporation, Zenith claims to be first with a rectangular color tube (in 1954). They showed it to distributors, although they flatly stated it was for research only.