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Wow, lotsa venting in this thread. My turn...
BTW -- I was lucky enough recently to find tech work in an electronic manufacturing facility. Nice to have probes and a soldering iron in my hands again.
I, too, watched in sadness as the Corning Glass factory that had produced CRT faceplates since the roundie era was shipped off to Red China. Ditto the RCA plants in Ohio and Indiana going to Mexico, the last days at the St.Louis Zenith plant, all seen on the network news. I even saw Union film footage of aging TV manufacturing workers being sent home for good from an unnamed facility somewhere in the rustbelt.
Just a couple of subtle ironies in play here. Zenith's demise, along with (pre-Thomson) RCA and so many others began with simple lack of foresight. By the mid-1960's, an aging Sarnoff's insistance on shadow-mask CRT's and hesitance to embrace solid-state TV technology left RCA and the me-too others at what would prove to be a disadvantage. A decades-long run of labor-management squabbles didn't help, either.
Wall Street wanted its usual short-term profitability, and moving manufacturing plants away from higher-paid northern states along with accountant-freindly cost-cutting operations naturally became more important than developing improved technologies.
Blame is also deseved for lack of a national trade policy and blatant ignorance or even complicity among politicians all the way to the top. As American workers lost their jobs manufacturing cameras in the 1950's and portable radios in the early 1960's, Japan's late-1960's TV dumping in the U.S. and subsequent job losses was tolerated in trade for support of a war they weren't too supportive of previously.
And, for the ultimate sixties irony, the House Un-American Activities Committee didn't bat an eyelash whe Paramount ordered industrially-emaciated Dumont, owner of the Lawrence-designed Chromatron CRT, hand over the (at the time military-use) techchnology to SONY. Imagine one courageous politician (oxymoron) causing all the TV-manufacturing dollars spent at the box-office that had fattened their pockets for 20-odd years be spent defending (in front of TV cameras) a "business decision" which would eventually doom TV-factory families nationwide.
As it came to pass, the Hollywood establishment would soon pat the aforementioned on the back and at the same time spit in the eye of those same TV-factory workers by trumping-up an unwarranted Oscar for SONY's adaptation of the Chromatron.
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