What REALLY happened to DuMont Labs?

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Originally Posted by Smoky Pond

I know that there's more to inflation than what the CPI calculators take into account, but $600 does represent about 10 months worth of mortgage payments for the average American in 1950.

Yes. Your reply was made while I was creating my reply. This is an good metric to use, but we need to discount for the faster runup in housing which dramatically outpaced the increase in labor and commodity costs.

That is a HUGE sum of money. Today, at roughly $3,500 for a mortgage payment FOR THE SAME HOUSE! we'd have $35,000.

That's because housing has risen roughly 3x faster than the other commodities. Scaling that back we end up with about $12,000 for a TV which pretty much what I'd previously cited.

Just to go back to my point that DuMont didn't fail because DuMont (the man) didn't understand oscilloscope pricing, we can see that my numbers were correct. And I still believe that the oral history from Tek may not be accurate or fully reflect the entire story.