Nothing to do with Austin Sevens - but...

[Tony Griffiths]

Nothing to do with Austin Sevens - but, as it's from the late 1930s with an interesting picture (no commercial TV in the UK then) and a SWMBO in action, this might fill a few minutes of the lockdown. OK, I nearly cheated and changed it to an Austin, but thought better of it. No? Oh, go on then, picture No.2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_television

[David Cochrane]

Early cathode ray tubes which displayed the TV picture weren't able to 'bend' the spot which scanned the picture onto the viewing screen very much, so as the screen got bigger, the tube got longer. In order not to have a massively deep cabinet, the tube was mounted vertically and reflected the picture in a surface mirror mounted in the lid of the TV - this is what you can see in the advert above. The tube had to display a reversed picture so that it came out the right way round when viewed in the mirror.

[John Mason]

I am in my mid 70s and can just remember watching Tv (just the one Channel) as a child on a 9” screen that was purple in colour when switched off. That was when it was 425 lines.

John Mason

[David Stepney]

I watched the Queen's coronation at my great-uncle's house on a television with a mirrored lid. I was quite small at the time!

[mhacche]

We had a b&w tv on 425 lines until the mid seventies, my mother sent the b&w tv back in the late sixties because she saw the ‘crazy world of Arthur Brown on top of the pops and said it was devil worship??

[Ian M]

Remarkably, the HMV 900 mirror-in-lid TV in the picture had already been superseded by the second generation of receivers by the time of this publication.

[Hobbo]

Can remember running home from school at about the age of twelve or thirteen, because a new tv had been delivered, this would be about 1953 or 1954. Only one channel which closed I think about 11 o'clock with the national anthem, and if I was occasionally allowed to stay up for switch off a great delight was to see how long you could see the dot for in the middle of the screen. Later we were told a new channel was on it's way and they would stop the programme half way through so you could brew a quick cuppa, never how could they do that, the wonders of this new technology. Tiny screen with later a water filled magnifier, how modern could we get.

[Paul Cooper]

I may well be mistaken ( correct me please ) but weren’t the early 9 inch screens, curtains drawn to view, only 205 lines and this was then upgraded to 425 lines. A converter sitting on top of the set being necessary to continue using the old 205 sets?
I’m sure the first tv my parents bought to view the Coronation was the early type. It broke down the day before the Coronation so we all had to bundle into a neighbours house and peer at their tiny screen along with lots of others. Orange squash and sweets all round for we kids.

[John Cornforth]

Pedant Alert !  In the UK (if we ignore the later Baird mechanical system of 240 lines trialled in the late 1930's), TV started on 405 lines.  The unusual number was to allow synchronism of line and frame rates by using a cascade of electronic dividers each dividing by 3 or 5. Cutting edge stuff back then.

I still have a 9" screen B&W TV made by PYE in 1949 which can be made to display a good picture by means of a 625 to 405 line standards converter.  When the BBC had standards converters in the overlap years of the late 1960's they filled two six-foot equipment racks. Today they are smaller than a paperback book !

That mirror lid TV would have been eye-wateringly expensive in its day.  A very few survive which are nowadays worth thousands of pounds.

[jansens]

Here is one in The Secret Life of Machines:



Even though it's tremendously dated that is still one of the best TV series I have seen. I still watch it over and over. I like the episode on Fax machines where him and his mate Rex set up their lathes as a very basic fax by optically scanning a picture wrapped around a tube on one lathe then converting it into sound and sending it acoustically over the analogue phone lines down to the other lathe which is set up with home made thermal paper to reproduce the picture.

Rex was Rex Garrod who also built the radio controlled Brum model (at 10:25 if the linking isn't working):



They don't really make programmes like that these days. Everything is so dumbed down and it all has to be repeated every 5 minutes to catch the channel surfers. Usually with a lot of fake drama adding in. That programme has a ton of information packed into a very short space of time presented in a very clever and engaging way. It's all available on YouTube now.

Simon