[Don Lindsly]

I did not know Bert Soltoff. Great historical information on that site.

I would suspect that more than 500 TV123s were manufactured. I worked on at least a couple dozen. There were loads of them throughout the Philadelphia area. Maybe it seemed like more because I saw them so often.

When Philco finally came out with the modification kit mentioned earlier, reliability improved considerably. The service dealer was paid $20 to install it as I recall. That was ample for the time. It was easy to obtain the kit, but the dealer didn't get paid until the paperwork was in. I installed a lot of them, but most TV123s I hear of today do not have the kit.

The manufacturer's OEM codes were on tubes and parts, usually preceeding the date code. Sylvania was 312, RCA was 274, GE was 188, Philco was 260, Automatic Coil was 119 and so on. You may see an IF coil with Philco and a part number stamped on it, but you will also see something like 119735 meaning Automatic Coil, 1957, 35th week. As the years have passed it is possible to be off by a decade so it requires some guess work. Many parts went to four number date codes to avoid confusion and warranty fraud.

The marking color also indicated whether the tube was OEM or replacement. White, yellow and later blue were OEM. Red was replacement. If you see a Philco TV with a bunch of red tubes, they're replacements, not originals.

Don