Thought this was interesting. From a September 1939 "Movie Mirror" Magazine.

Nice advert, lets get Sept issue,I dont know about you, but I plan on winning one of those :D:D:D

Wow...Tell-A-Vision....Th' Marvel of th' Age !...Can't wait t'get me one of them there now things....

That company sell binoculars too I hope?

That is a hell of a cool and classic looking art deco box though... Gotta love the lines..

This is a Philco that I hadn't seen before. It is a 5 inch set, while all the other console models I've seen are 10 inch. They did make a 5 inch TV attachment (needed a radio for audio), and from the knob arrangement it looks like this set is the same model but in a console cabinet, with an audio amplifier added.

Here are the prewar Philco sets: http://www.earlytelevision.org/philco_prewar.html

classicradio, is it OK if I add your article to my site?

"classicradios, is it OK if I add your article to my site?"

Certainly, Always glad to contribute to your site.
Jim

Way cool! I would love to see one of those up and running today.

Man oh man, what a way to cap off an old Philco collection! Someday, if my woodworking skills ever allow it, I'm going to take an orphan prewar radio cabinet and build something like this. That's probably the only way I could get that close to one of my dream sets.

Years ago, I thought it was cool when they could make small television screens... little did I realize, back then, that they had been making them decades earlier! :D

Actually, that was no small prize, since $250 went a long way in those days! Pretty nice looking, too, especially for a free prize! {Yes, I'm understating... :D}

Man oh man, what a way to cap off an old Philco collection! Someday, if my woodworking skills ever allow it, I'm going to take an orphan prewar radio cabinet and build something like this.

Back then the video standard was 441i 30Hz, today's NTSC is 525i 30Hz. You could replicate 441i by using the luma signal (from the S-video connector) from the Channel Master DTV receiver box set to letterbox mode, and taking a B&W CRT monitor that is too big by 20% for the bezel of the cabinet (so the dark areas are never seen) and/OR using a CRT of the correct size for the bezel but adjusting the vertical and horizontal scans to additional overscan by an extra 20% (so the dark letterbox areas are not seen). The active picture you will see is pretty close to being what 441i would have looked like.

The sound carrier back in 1939 was AM instead of today's FM (to the great joy ;-) of RCA's David Sarnoff, meant he would have to pay patent royalties to FM's inventor Edwin Armstrong, but he didn't...). To replicate that, limit the sound's high frequencies a little, and add a little noise by coupling thru a small cap to the B&W baseband luma video signal.