Exploding GE Color TVs, 1960s
 

Hello, I am new here.
I had my own TV repair shop from 1962 to 1968 and have not worked on TVs since. However I have taken an interest in GE color TVs from the early 1960s because of other reasons not related to the restoration of these sets.
There have been claims that these early GE color sets had tended to explode (implode) magnetic wise. That is, they suddenly became an intense magnetic field that was generated inside the TV set in a split second that caused any near by steel items (including nails in the walls) to be pulled to the GE TV set with great force.
In one instance during 1965 or 1966 one GE color TV set did this in Chicago and claimed the life of a child that was watching the GE color TV. The child was not killed by the TV, but was killed by a metal item from the room that passed through his body on it's way to the GE TV set.

Claims indicate that only GE color TVs (or TVs made by GE sold under other names) of the early 1960s were involved, no other brands of color TVs were known to have this problem.

I am interested in these GE TV sets of this time frame for this reason and any information on these sets would be of great help to my investigation of the cause of these "explosions". Also I would like to aquire a Sams copy on these GE sets for study.

CRTs and yokes are of great interest in this quest.

I know this request seems unusual, but I really could use the information and I do understand analog electronics, so I can keep up to speed during a conversation related to these devices.

Thank you,
Newton

I don't believe any TV could generate a magnetic field powerful enough to pull nails out of walls. This sounds like a myth to me.

Sounds like Urban Legend to me, it would be impossible for any TV to generate enough magnetic force to pull nails out of the wall or even nearby objects.

There was some concern about excess X-Rays from sets at that time and I think GE was one of the biggest offenders, but even that was overblown.

Hello Newton!
 

Wow, the way you describe your story combined with the likelyhood that GE could have and would have kept the media hushed through secret illegal methods bring me to think it could be true.
This is very likely to be the best place to find out for sure. Many extremely well-educated and honest people are often here.

I can hardly wait to get to the bottom of this!
I just hope that the one or two guys that may know are not still being paid or threatened to keep thier mouth shut!

You can search and find many GE color sets here. Some are from your time frame with beautiful pictures on them.

Maybe GE had a handful of very oddly defective color sets with some wild engineering blunder or parts from china... I guess back then japan was more likely to supply.

Could japan have been like china today? Causing us trouble by pretending not to know lead is in thier products? Like lead won't cause multitudes of people to aquire cancers or even worse to cause multitudes to not be able to think very well. Gee... I wonder if that is part of the reason people like me can't keep our thoughts straight half the time?
I saw one product from china recently that had a hole in the package telling you to touch it! Like people need to touch a cell phone cover to like it better?

excessive hi voltage
 

I don't remember which series but Generous Electric did have to sets that the HV would go as high as 40k, could cause you to glow in the dark I suppose.

The GE experiment
 

Come to think of it maybe they used those tv's to help make the Eldridge disappear. The Naval ship involved in the so-called Philadelphia experiment.

That still sounds like an Urban Legend to me...

I can believe abnormally high X ray emission, and possible radiation poisoning. I can believe a defect in the picture tube causing it to implode during operation, sending flying glass everywhere, but a magnetic field strong enough to pull nails out of the wall? No. I'd bet money that's a myth.

Some calculations might be in order here to determine how much magnetic force would be needed to pull the nails from the walls as you describe. I'll bet there isn't one thousandth of the copper needed to do that in ANY television set ever made. There is also the problem of a power supply. Only so much current is available through that teeny cord. Calculations of the electromagnet needed to do this will show you how much current would be needed. If the current did not come from the wall, an electrical charge would have to be stored inside the set. I think you'll find that enough capacitance to do this would have been cost-prohibitive in the early 60's, and probably also would not fit inside the cabinet.

John

Hey! I wonder if I could duct-tape an old GE color TV to the front of my truck and use it to make those people who drive slow in the left lane move over.

Seriously, no.

Newton is a lawyer, chumming for a class-action suit, maybe? If one TV expert here would just say, "yeah, that might happen", then there's a chance to establish "reasonable doubt".

Maybe the one case mentioned, if not completely urban legend, there was a spinning cyclotron in the next room... Or maybe it happened in Almogordo.

Brach,
Thank you for the reply. Yes I agree the whole thing sounds strange, but this happened not just once, but several times with GE color sets of the 1960s. All the "exploding" (actually imploding) GE TVs were turned on at the time this intense magnetic event occured.

According to the claims, the GE design engineers were at a loss about the whole thing and were unable to come up with an reason why or how this would happen. But it was just GE color sets, no other brand.
GE may have tried to push the whole thing under the rug at the time. Not sure.

Since this happened in 65 or 66, I would guess that the sets would have to be made before that date. The Chicago incident stood out because of the death of the child watching the GE color TV in the living room. His mother was in the kitchen and escaped injury. The GE color TV set was the exact center of the "explosion" (implosion).

The child was killed, not by the TV, but by a metal object in the room that passed through his body on the way to the TV. The nails in the wall were pulled out with enough force to twist them. The TV was destroyed, but no damage to the apartment, other than the displaced metal (iron steel) objects.

It appears that for a split second, "something" caused the TV to create a very intense magnetic field that caused the "explosion" (implosion).

Of course, we all know a CRT can implode, but this was "something else" very different.

My next step is to scan the Chicago news papers 65 66 to see if I can find any thing, but this could be a long process as there was no fire, justs a exploding TV set and a death.

I am investigating the "something else" part.

Newton

Impossible. The only device I have ever encountered that has a danger of attracting metal objects at a distance is the superconducting magnet used in the bubble chamber at Fermilab. There they have a line painted on the floor to indicate the limit at which tools that are dropped are likely to be pulled in towards the magnet.

It never happened. I can't see how a TV could store the power to do it. Is there any newspaper record to back up the story? I would think so if it really happened.

How about a "shorted" thermistor in the degaussing coil circuit? Seems to me that might be a possible cause, although I doubt the "pull" would be very strong, but I don't know, either. I can't remember seeing a "shorted" thermistor in a degaussing coil circuit. They usually crumble and open.
Kevin

If I remember my Zenith with the degaussing coil and thermistor, the thermistor was parallel to the coil, as it heats up the resistance in the thermistor decreases and less current flows through the coil and more through the thermistor, so if it shorted the coil would never be in use at all, even when the tv powers up. I think.

All the thermistors that I saw crumbled and fell apart except for one that was smoking in a mid '70's Sylvania solid state hospital set. Often, the internal coil is not strong enough to degauss the tube and a stronger, hand held coil has to be used. I've never had a problem with any degaussing coil pulling metal objects.

comon guys if you believe this i have some great land for sale it is kinda under water but floats better than this story. if a set were to have that kind of magenetic power wouldnt you think it would be making a HELL OF A NOISE.
steve

Since most of the early GEs were RCA clones, I wonder why this only happened to GE sets. Very interesting......:scratch2:

Good, let's begin with a point we can agree on. Where and when did you first hear these "claims"? Did you hear of this phenomenon on multiple occasions or from just one person who told you it had happened multiple times? The amount of detail you recall about the "Chicago incident" suggests you read about or were told about it at the time it happened...which begs the question why, if you know with any certainty that this tragic incident is a matter of fact, you would still lead with the phrase "There have been claims..."

WHOSE claims? Is there any point in asking you to cite a single source for any of this?



Practical jokes are supposed to be funny. This falls more into the realm of (frequently pointless) performance art.

thats a hard one to believe. ge didnt make their own crts. i have had an rca implode and nothing of that magnitude. wish that would have happened when they kicked in my roundie!

This is a true story, it has to be, Santa Claus told me so... :yes:

Sal

When I first responded to this I misunderstood that it was about nails being drawn to the TV. I mistook it to be TV's blowing up.(see what I mean about my small lead-smoked brain)
I hope Mr. Newton isn't entertaining himself at our expense. I would not be surprised if he is but he comes across kinda genuine. I hope he gets the article because I got too many other old news stories to look up first.(really, I'm not kidding).
If there is an article on it one could look up relatives of victem, etc. I would look if I had the time because I think stranger things happen and... oh yeah... I wanna know!
If it's true I think it was something to do with a space ships magnetic fields gone awry. Perhaps the aliens don't like GE. Maybe RCA and Zenith were in on it. I think even stranger things than that have and will continue to happen.

I'm nut's? I just saw Egypt's carvings showing, in one spot together, sideveiws of a helicopter, a speedboat, and a plane. In the past I saw other carvings showing Jetson like spaceships. The source could not be making these or we would hear somebody proving it to be fake. How could people in ancient times imagine such to carve such acurate designs of modern stuff in one area together?
I know most don't have time to find out themselves and therefore won't believe it but I am just keeping an open mind!

The urban legend:

So in many ways we have early RCA color TV engineers to thank for my discovery of the power generator. I am sure they are all dead now but they did contribute.
Perhaps a story which had impact on me at that time was told to me by my boss way back in 1970 I believe it was.
He told me that around 1965 or 66 there was an explosion in an apartment in Chicago. the authorities had concluded that for some unknown reason, a General Electric color television receiver had been the source of an explosion that killed a young black child in the apartment. My boss went on to relate that he was involved in the investigation because he was in Chicago at the time and he was invaluably experienced with television circuits and etc.
He told us that what they found was, the TV had exploded with some quick furry. The explosion did in fact kill the poor child who was sitting directly in front but sparred his mother who was some distance away in the kitchen.
The explosion was strange because of the absence of expected chemicals necessary to create the explosion. It appeared that the TV was the exact center of the explosion, however no one could find a reason for the explosion occurring. Also consider that there is not really much inside a TV to explode with enough force to kill people and destroy the living room a large apartment. Yes a CRT can explode and kill someone, however this was not the kind of explosion we are talking about. The most interesting part of the story is that according to our boss, metallic objects especially those containing large amounts of iron were dramatically displaced. He mentioned that some nails were actually removed from the walls and pulled toward the TV set. When they found them they were bent and shaped like cork screws! Everything in the room appeared to have moved or was moving toward the TV as it exploded, or imploded as the case may be. The child was apparently killed by way of these metallic objects traveling through his body on their way toward the center of the TV set.
As far as my boss knew, there was never a good explanation for the occurrence. We found out that this was not the only unexplained explosion of TV sets worldwide. However, the fact that all the sets exploded while in operation may bear some light. Also most of the TV sets were made by the GE company or were TV sets made using GE circuits and of similar design.
However, this man who had been my mentor for so many years had his own theory which he never told anyone as far as i know, except me. His theory was that the TV while in operation, somehow managed to become a receiver of more then just television waves and so for a millisecond in time became a receiver and the discharger of a huge amount of electrical and magnetic energy. This discharge of magnetic energy is vary similar to the discharge of magnetic energy during an atomic explosion. . . Now that is something I have thought about a great deal.

There might be a slim chance an imploding CRT could have killed someone but a magnetic field from a TV, no chance in hell, the hardware just isn't there.

-- an interview with Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976
"Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 102
%%
"I have a friend who just got back from the Soviet Union, and told me the people
there are hungry for information about the West. He was asked about many
things, but I will give you two examples that are very revealing about life in
the Soviet Union. The first question he was asked was if we had exploding
television sets. You see, they have a problem with the picture tubes on color
television sets, and many are exploding. They assumed we must be having
problems with them too. The other question he was asked often was why the
CIA had killed Samantha Smith, the little girl who visited the Soviet Union a
few years ago; their propaganda is very effective.
-- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976
"Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 100

Apparently the GE TV accidentally had a reciever that picked up the Earths electromagnetic field instead of the TV station's. Since the Earth's magnetic field is a jillion times stronger that a TV station, it exploded.

There's also a carburetor that gets 1000 MPG and GM is hiding it. And also there are aliens walking around Area 51. And George Bush planned 911.

GE didn't become pure evil until the mid 80's (when they ate RCA). Also, I've heard of skyrocketing high voltage (which could cause the CRT neck to crack) but I don't think the physics of the situation could allow the set to suck nails from walls.

GE didn't become pure evil until the mid 80's

Never had an old GE TV huh?

:yippy:

Well, If nobody else will come out and say it, I will. This is absolute bunk. GE color sets of the early 60's had RCA chassis. They would have been ctc12, ctc15, or ctc16, or clones. These chassis were sold by the millions in RCA and many other brands. They are the most common color roundie on the planet. If there was a problem, It would have been noticed in all these other sets that had the same insides, long before it would have been noticed on the relatively rare GE's.

I hate to be a wet blanket. In life, most things are possible. This isn't. But, welcome to AK. Hope you enjoy it here :)

John

See, I told you so!
 

Maybe there was just one GE set this happened to. Maybe it's a Burmuda Triangle type magnetic thing.

I think I kinda sorta hinted at that conclusion, but you get points for brevity and directness. :D

Actually, these TV sets have a flawed design that under the right conditions inverts magnetically. Since they are plugged in when this happens, it causes the usual polarity of the wires running through the walls --which, like everything else, is normally aligned with the fundamental electro-harmonic resonance of the Earth's magnetic field, and therefore causes no problems-- to reverse itself. As soon as this polarity reversal occurs, the wires in the walls REPEL the nails, pushing them out of the walls at high speed, like bullets. This requires less energy than pulling them out would, since you are just reversing the direction that the nails were put in, using a reversed polarity. Since the wires are connected to the city's electrical grid, they have plenty of power available to do this; it is not dependent on what is inside of the TV; all that does is initiate the reversal. Then the power of the city's electrical grid provides the rest of the energy needed. Sometimes when this event occurs, the neighbors' electricity supply "stutters" a little. Ever had your lights flicker or your TV set stutter a bit? It was probably due to this happening somewhere nearby in your city. So you see, the nails don't get sucked into the TV, they get pushed out of the walls.

Once any one of them touches the TV, though, it discharges the imbalance and stops the process, much the way a spark from your hand to a doorknob discharges a static buildup. The kid was just unlucky enough to be in the path of one, before the first one hit the television.

At the risk of oversimplifying, perhaps the easiest way to explain this comes out of the movie "Young Frankenstein": You connect the plus to minus, and minus to plus...

:scratch2: I think I have seen to many 1950s sci-fi flicks...

Yes, I've seen this effect in guitar amps too, but only with Electro-Harmonix brand tubes. They seem to have the right electro-harmonic resonance. It was dramatically shown in "Back to the Future" when Marty McFly's guitar amp exploded.


Note the name of one of the posters here:
http://www.overunity.com/index.php/t....msg67793.html

Hello Arkay and kbmuri,

I get the distinct impression you two are giving factual information and I greatly appreciate it. It makes sense to me but I am not as well-educated as I should be so I am often suspicious of "what I think".
I sure wish we could all verify this but I feel like it has been verified by much of what's written here. I am not sensing 3 men pulling our legs.

Thank you very much

This thread is creepy as hell...

I suppose it is possible, but very unlikely.

I know a fair bit about the Philadelphia Experiment though... Not to mention a few other experiments...

I don't own a cell phone, and I never will (and I am young, so its like... very odd to everyone)

How in the world is this creepy?
 

Would it be less creepy to shower Heath Ledger with googoos and awws over how beautiful his acting abilities are?

I am not trying to joke or make others think anything.

I am reading words from at least two very well respected and very well educated men who obviously know alot more about science and electronics than I.

I just hope to find out if the nails came out of the wall and if what these men wrote isn't enough to prove it's possibility I do believe a newspaper article could lead to relatives who could verify it.

We will not be visiting the realatives so somebody here is knowlegeable enough to verify it . I bet this gentleman from HongKong is being serious and I bet he knows what he is talking about.

Don't you care if it happened or not? I would guess not

This is creepy? I sure weould like to know what you think is not creepy.

Goodnight and I love you. (now theres some real creepy for you you sexy hunk...ooh la la!)

http://www.cinecultist.com/archives/heath_ledger5.jpe

"S'matter with you Jack, you don't want a colored TV set, the dang things blow up!"

And your link lead me eventually back here:

http://www.overunity.com/index.php/topic,2383.0.html

...where you can download a PDF about this "TPU device".

http://www.overunity.com/index.php?a....0;attach=9211

Interesting reading......... :D

John

Hahaha
 

I doubt it but I failed to take the time to think of a better example of a typical conversation here at AK that most here apparently think is not creepy.

Heath's thread is in another category but if I took the time to find them I would find plenty in the TV section to support my impression that this talk of nails pushed out a wall to a TV is in no way "creepy" at all especially if compared to much of the "typical" humor here there and everywhere.

So, nails being pushed out a wall electromagnetically is not possible?
I hope to find the truth.

I am an honest man who loves humor of all types except when it's mean in any way towards the less fortunate.

Many of you are far above most men with your knowlege and wisdom. To try and make somebody less fortunate to believe untruths is definately mean and definately CREEPY AS HELL.

The degaussing coil could not suck any metal towards it because it has no core and thus no pull. This one is definitely a myth, however, a 21" CRT imploding could certainly cause problems!

Charles