No slugs, now
 

...or your set will be repo'd

That's awesome!

"21 to 24 tubes... not 16-17...but 21-24!"

And "Transformers, not Selenium rectifiers", that must have been a big selling point to Motel operators who could lose a weeks rent if a Selenium went south in a room!

Awe, but slugs'n 'em 's the only way to get them to work right after a few years of hard use. :D :lmao:

I also like the variable tube and if count......I guess they just put in as many as they felt like on a given day slugged the side of the cabinet to check if it worked, and kicked it out the door.

This might have been the model Jack Benny owned :) Looks like a lot of commonplace features they were bragging about; I guess Bendix wasn't far from being out of the TV business by then.

I have a console version of one of those Bendix sets. They are excellent performers...

Of course they are, they have 21 to 24 tubes!

Don't Muntz TVs have 21 to 24 as well, depending on whether Madman himself got to the chassis yet? :)

I think that Earl Muntz story is an urban tale. All he was, was a used car huckster and had no technical background. It's obvious that the 10" model was really a Bendix design. Reflex horizontal osc and output, damperless sweep etc. If you look at the Riders for Bendix, you'll see that they're pretty basic designs. Bendix was a small player in the business. They built a lot of private label sets. So it was no surprise that they sold some of their designs to Muntz and others.

My uncle worked on televisions back in the 50s and 60s. He called Muntz televisions "The Gutless Wonder"...

Little story: sometime around '50-52 (I'll have to ask my Dad) my grandfather had a particularly good harvest and decided to splurge and buy a TV. He did it while the kids were in school so to surprise them. At the time the nearest place to buy them was the Ford dealer (!) which carried Motorola and Bendix. My grandfather said the Motorola was noticeably better so he got it. The deal was that it had to installed, including antenna, before the school bus arrived that afternoon, and they succeeded. Interesting to think that this couldn't have been too many years after they got electric. May have still had an outhouse then? Okay-back to your regularly scheduled programming...