The Rise and Fall of Magnavox

Published Nov 1, 2021, 9:45 PM

We learn about how Magnavox saw a surge in consumer popularity after World War II, including how Magnavox started manufacturing televisions. We also learn about the first video game console. And we find out what happened to Magnavox the company.

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Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and a love of all things tech. And in our last episode, we looked at how co founders Edwin Priddham and Peter Jensen, not only kept their young company alive by creating a moving coil loudspeaker, but they also came up with the name of the company and is Magnavox, after first calling the loudspeaker that name, so originally Magnavox was the name for a type of technology, a loud speaker. We also learned about how the two engineers created noise canceling microphones for use in aircraft during World War One, as well as how the company tried to get into the consumer electronics business and the young business of radio once the war was over. We also learned that in nineteen twenty five, after having disagreements with leadership, Peter Jensen, one of the co founders, left the company and he would go on to found his own companies and later on pass away in nineteen sixty one. But back to Magnavox and the mid to late nineteen twenties, the company was actually too pretty unsteady ground in nive. It wasn't just because Jensen had left. Magnavox had overestimated the demand for radio sets in the early days and had overproduced radios, so it expanded operations. It had opened up a warehouse and distribution center in New York, But by the end of nineteen twenty five, with the costs of operation so high in the radio business so cut throat, Magnavox chose to close those New York offices because those offices weren't really serving a purpose. Because the company was finding it hard to sell consumer radios. There's just too many on the market and there wasn't enough you know, demand there yet, and the business owns began to consider alternatives to having a base of operations in California as well. There was no denying that California was a huge market, a lot of people live there, but shipping components like copper wire, which largely came out of the Midwestern states in America, and and shipping them all the way across the states to California and or the manufacture stuff that was really expensive. Now the company also hit a stumbling block when it started to produce its own vacuum tubes. The company was trying to get off the dependence of other manufacturing companies and to become more self sufficient and thus produce all the different components that would go into things like a radio. The earliest Magnavox tubes had a tendency to short out, which is not good. Like some of them wouldn't even last longer than a few hours of operation. Later tubes continued to have some reliability issues, and this gave Magnavox a bad reputation among distributors and independent radio manufacturers. They realized that if they built their radios and they used Magnavox tubes as amplifiers, that they would frequently stop functioning not long after they were first print in use. That's not that's not good. And this was bad enough that by mid ninety seven, the board of directors from Magnavox ordered the two production facilities to shut down. They also shut down consumer radio production, so for the next decade or so, Magnavox didn't make consumer radios. Instead, it would make components for independent radio companies, and they just sold those directly to manufacturers. Now, the reason for that shutdown was that Magnavox still had more radios produced than it could sell. They were literally taking up space and warehouses in the company had built radio sets that had five tubes in them for the purposes of tuning, you know, receiving tuning and amplifying signals. And despite the fact that analysts had predicted that people would want six tube radio sets that had gray or functionality by nine, Magnifux said, we're going to stick with the five tube design. The reason they did that was that they were worried that if they moved to a six tube design for the new models, no one would ever buy the old sets that were sitting around in warehouses, and so you know, Magnifux would be stuck with all these obsolete radios. But then no one bought the new five tube sets that Magnavox produced, so it was an even bigger loss. Right, Instead of a warehouse filled with old five tube sets while the six tube sets were selling, there were warehouses full full filled with even more five tube sets. And all told, Magnifox lost around a million dollars due to the issues with tube reliability and performance of their radio sales. UH. And remember we're talking about the nineteen twenties here. A million dollars is a lot of money, don't get me wrong, but when you factor in inflation, it's an astronomical amount of money. Uh So, not only wasn't an expensive blow, but also tarnished Magnavox's reputation, so it would make it harder for Magnuvox to win back the confidence of distributors and manufacturers in the future. Magnavox also tried to branch out and diversify beyond loudspeakers and radios. In nineteen twenty four of the company introduced an electric heater. Electric heaters work on a pretty simple principle, which is that of electrical resistance. So every conductor, every material that is electrically conductive under normal conditions, has some amount of electrical resistance, and that's kind of like friction in the world of electricity. Electrical resistance depends on a few factors, first and foremost the material itself. So, for example, copper is a really good electrical conductor, and as a fairly low resistance, silver is an even better electrical conductor. In fact, silver would be a great conductor if it weren't for the fact that one it's pretty scarce and to will think it's pretty so they want to turn it into jewelry and stuff. But you know, the material is not just the only factor that you know ends up affecting resistance. The gauge or thickness of a wire also matters. Thin wires, which somewhat paradoxically on on casual glance, have a higher gauge, they have greater electrical resistance than thicker wires or wires that have a low gauge. And again that might seem counterintuitive in the gauge factor, right, like a sixteen gauge wire is actually thinner than a twelve gauge wire. Anyway, the thicker the wire or cable, the lower the electrical resistance. Other things, by the way, can also change electrical resistance. For example, if you were too super cool a good conductor like copper. In other words, if you were to reduce the temperature of the copper too close to absolute zero, you can reduce or even eliminate electrical resistance entirely. This is what facilities like the large hadron collider do. It's kind of like a playground slide if you want to think of it. That way, So the surface of a slide resists stuff sliding down it to some degree, right, Like you might slide a slide and you go like it's kind of stop and start. On a hot day, you might just stick to it um so you can slide down, but you feel the friction between you and the slide. But let's say you were to coat that slide in I don't know, baby oil, you would drastically reduce the friction and kids on that playground would just zoom right off that slide. By the way, don't do that, you'll hurt people. Don't hurt people. But anyway, even with the baby oil, you'd still have some friction, but it would be much much less than normal, and you would slide much faster. Kind Of similar when we're talking about electrical resistance. But let's get back to electric heaters, all right. So electric current runs through a conductive material, which again has some amount of electrical resistance. Well, that resistance means that some of that electrical energy converts into heat. Now, typically we think of this as waste. The electronics heat up and the heat gets released into the environment, and we don't typically do anything with that extra heat. In fact, electronics like computers and such typically have fans in them to help disperse the heat that's generated through electrical resistance, because if electrical components overheat, they typically fail. An electric heater, however, makes heat through electrical resistance on purpose. The electric circuits in electric heater have resistors built into them specifically so that they heat up and convert more of the electric current into heat. The resistors are made of materials that can with stand high temperatures for a long time, so they don't break down due to this heating process. The same is true for the elements that are in an electric toaster or in an electric oven, and that's how electric heaters work in a nutshell, all right. Back to some of the other products that Magnavox was making around this time. There was also an on demand water heater, which you would mount directly onto a faucet, heating the water just before it came out of the pipes and through the faucet itself. This, by the way, it works in a very similar way to an electric heater. You have pipes that are surrounded by electric or sometimes gas powered heating elements, and so when you want hot water, these elements turn on and they get really hot, and the water passing through the pipes picks up some of that thermal energy and heats up, so that eventually the water comes out hot. The company also created a laying cage for chickens and apparently also created an automatic egg cooker. These designs never really went into full production, so they were in very limited runs as far as I can tell, and I wasn't able to find much information on them before I went to record this episode. So I wish I could tell you more about an automatic egg cooker from Magnifux, but I don't have that info. One item that did come out that was success full was the Magna Lux adjustable lamp, which was a death lamp that was on an articulated arm, and it looks a lot like common desk lamps of today, you know, like the lamps that have the hinged arm in them so that you can position them in different ways. Magnavox made one of those that was pretty successful, but the bread and Butter from Magnavox remained. The loud speaker. The company continued to sell cone based loud speakers. This was the backbone of their business. Speakers were what the company really uh you know, made their name on literally and still were the most important product they were creating. They weren't generally meant for the average consumer. They weren't selling these two customers directly. They were selling them to other companies like They became the component of choice for several independent radio manufacturing companies. So you might buy a radio set that has a different brand on it, but it had Magnavox speakers in it. They did, however, try to create a retail market for consumer speakers. By the time of nineteen twenty nine to nineteen thirty, the leaders of Magnifux realized that they needed to change operations. Their main customers were now independent radio manufacturers who were purchasing Magnafux speakers to go into their radio sets, and they were mostly located in the Midwest of the United States. And as I mentioned earlier, copper cable also primarily was coming out of the Midwest. So in nineteen twenty nine, Magnavox opened up an assembly plant in Chicago, Illinois, with the goal of shifting operations to the Midwest. Then the stock market crashed. Now this had a massive effect across nearly every industry, not just in the United States, but in the world, Magnavox was forced to go through a company reorganization to stay afloat the leaders decided to shut down the California operations and they moved everything to Chicago. Forty five employees would actually make that move, although almost all of them would end up leaving the company over the following couple of years and Magnafux would end up hiring all new people to work the company. Magnafux would relocate again, however, not long after relocating to Chicago. This time they moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana. That's where the company set up a new manufacturing facility, and it wouldn't produce consumer products for several more years. Instead, it focused on tech that would go into products coming out of other manufacturers. In nine Magnavox founded the Magnavux Company Limited. You might wonder why it did that. This has to do with the fact that the earlier incorporation of Magnavox was out of the state of Arizona. So even though the company headquarters were located in California, the leaders chose to incorporate in Arizona. Well. The business leaders now wanted to switch this to Delaware, and you might wonder why that's so. I mean, if you were to just look at a list of Fortune companies in the United States, you would see that more than half of them are incorporated in Delaware. Delaware is not a big state and it has less than a million people living in it, so you might wonder what the heck is going on here. Well, the big reason is that Delaware leads the US when it comes to laws that define what corporations can and cannot do. Plus, Delaware has a special court called the Court of Chancery that only focuses on cases involving corporate law. So cases appear before a judge. There's no jury trial, it's just a judge, and they get fast tracked into that system. So that means there's fewer delays compared to other court systems. If you were in a different state and you had to bring a matter to court, you would be put on a waiting list along with every other case that was being tried by those courts. But because Delaware has the specific court for corporate law matters, things are much faster. So being incorporated in Delaware, even if the company's headquarters are in some other state, has legal advantages. Anyway, the Magnafucx Come and He Limited became a holding company. It purchased all the stock from the Magnavox Company that was incorporated in Arizona, so effectively it shifted the incorporation to Delaware. So this was an example of jumping through some legal hoops to change the incorporation status of the company. Uh, Magnavox Company Limited didn't really do anything. It was just a holding company for the Magna Magnafux Company Incorporated, that was the company that was actually doing the manufacturing. Around this time, Magnavox also acquired part of the AMRAD Corporation. AMRAD stands for Amateur Radio Research and Development. It previously merged with the Crosley Radio Corporation, which is a fastening company in its own right. Crosley Radio made home radio sets, including some budget models, but by the late nineteen twenties, the am RED division had very little to do, and this kind of gets back into that oversaturation problem in the radio industry. And after the stock work crashed, the am RED division effectively shut down. So Magnavox purchased part of the am RED division and brought it into the fold of Magnavox am Red mostly created components for radios, including tubes that would be used like gas tubes that would be used rectifiers in radio. So Magnavox supplement its own capabilities with this acquisition. In Magnavox purchased a stake of ownership in a company called Electro Acoustics Products located out of New York. The company created stuff like the Illustra vox, and you might wonder what the heck that was. Well, the Illustra vox was a combination phonograph that's the vox or voice and film strip projector presumably the Illustra part. It looked a lot like a film projector that had a record turntable smacked on top of it, so you would load a film into the projector, which would indicate where you were when you were to put the needle down on the accompanying phonograph that had the soundtrack for the film strip, and then you would play the audio back along with the projected film. Now, obviously getting it just right was kind of an art in itself, so that the sound and images would match up, and they were used for a lot of stuff like training films and that kind of thing. The acquisition of this company would mean that Magnavox was poised to return to the consumer market. By nineteen thirty six, seven Electroacoustics Products would initially be a subsidiary of Magnavox, and in nineteen thirty seven, Magnavox introduced a tabletop radio unit designated as high Fidelity. We'll talk about what that means after this quick break. All right, it's time to talk high fidelity. And by that I don't mean the Nick Hornby novel or the movie adaptation of that novel starring John Cusack, or the Broadway musical adaptation or the TV series adaptation. Now we're talking the concept of high fidelity. So usually, though not always, when you record a sound, what you want the recorded version of the sound to sound like is to be as close to the original sound as you can possibly make it. You are recreating the original sound through playback, but there are a lot of things that can interfere with the reproduced sound and it can make it fall short. The recording itself could be faulty that would be a big problem, or there could be issues with the playback devices wiring, or the speakers might not be capable of playing back the sound without introducing distortion. Now, the word fidelity describes how pure a reproduced sound is. That is, a high fidelity experience is one in which there is little or no distortion introduced into the experience of the sound, so that you get a more pure playback experience. If you listen to a cordings of old gramophone or phonograph playback devices, you've probably heard teny warbly sounds that are interesting, but they're clearly you know, they're not the identical to the original performance. You know, it's you're getting some components in there that were not intended necessarily. By the late nineteen thirties, companies were refining the components and playback devices and recording devices, and they were ferreting out the things that were introduced distortion. This led to the marketing concept of high fidelity. And to be clear, it's not just a marketing concept, but high fidelity or hi fi became a way to say, this audio device makes sound real good. In seven Magnifux filed to reorganize with the federal government under the Bankruptcy Act, and the reorganization allowed the Magnifux Company Incorporated, which remember that's the subsidiary of the man Magnafux Company Limited. Magnifus Company incorporates the company that actually makes stuff. Well, they were then able to absorb Electroacoustics Products Company and merge it directly with Magnavox Company Incorporated. So what this means is the version of Magnavox what actually made stuff, absorbed the subsidiary and gobbled it on up, while the holding company that doesn't make stuff remain the same. This was also when Frank Freeman would become a vice president of Magnavox. Now, Freeman had founded Electroacoustics Products years earlier. He was the head of that company when Magnavox acquired it as a subsidiary. So he joined Magnavox in the process of the merger, and he would become a vice president of Magnavox, and he'll be a very important part of our story a little bit later on too. Now, the corporate structure became a little bit simpler a few years later, in nineteen forty two, that's when Magnavox Company Limited, that is the holding company what doesn't make anything, changed its name to the Magnavox Company. Meanwhile, the Magnavox Company Incorporated. As in the part of the company what made things dissolved, So now there was just the Magnavox Company. It was no longer a holding company. Now that was everything. It was an electronics and components manufacturing company. So we've simplified things dramatically at this point from a corporate structure point of view. In Magnavox introduced the first of its FM tuners, which had the name of cright, because these model names, they're great, really easy to remember. Now, keep in mind, AM radio uses a carrier wave of a specific frequency somewhere between five forty to sixty killer hurts and uh. You encode information on this carrier wave by varying or modulating the amplitude of that wave. So if you were to visualize a wave plotted on a chart, this would mean that you are changing the height of the peaks and the depth of the troughs. And by doing this you can encode information on top of a carrier wave. And by demodulating it, by essentially taking the carrier wave out of it, you're left with the modulation part that that represents the original information. In this case audio like you know radio waves, So FM radio that is frequency modulation. That means we take a carrier wave, this time in the eight mega hurts range, and we vary or modulate the frequency of the wave to encode information on those waves. FM radio had better audio quality or fidelity, and it first had emerged in the nineteen thirties, but took a while for companies to start creating consumer radios that had FM tuning capability to them. This was also around the time that the United States got involved in World War Two, and again, like with the First World War, companies in America began shifting focus to create products and components to support the war effort. Magnavox was no different and in fact received the first Navy E Award that was given to an electronics manufacturer That happened in ninety two. What was Magnavox producing well, largely kept on making the stuff it was known for, loud speakers and the components needed to drive them, and those were incredibly useful in military vehicles like large ships and submarines and aircraft. At the end of the war, Magnavox refocused on the consumer market and the post World War two era would really be the golden years for Magnavox. In general, the post war economy in America was really really strong. You had all these returning soldiers who were able to take advantage of government programs to establish a new life for themselves state side. Uh And just to clarify, the returning white soldiers were really able to take advantage of those programs. Other soldiers, while technically being eligible for that same sort of aid, found themselves effectively excluded from taking advantage of the programs due to various policies that were you know, when you get down to it racist, but that's a subject for another podcast. It just feel we have to acknowledge it, because if you don't acknowledge it, you are just denying something that was a very important and painful part of history. Anyway, for Magnavox, the company, this meant that a return to consumer electronics came right as the demand was on the rise for them. In fact, demand was high enough that the company decided to make another important acquisition, and this time it wasn't an electronics company now. Instead, Magnavox opened up a new subsidiary to build out the cabinets that would house radios. Now, remember, in these days, pre transistor radios were pretty big. Even the tabletop models were hefty, and a lot of home models were effectively full pieces of furniture, like almost you know, a full set of drawers or a hutch or something. They were enormous. So your average radio consisted of electronic components that the manufacturer would then mount inside a wooden cabinet. So Magnavox opened up the Greenville Cabinet Company in Greenville, Tennessee in ninety seven to design and build the cabinetry that would house Magnavox radio sets. Not only was there a strong market for radios, there was the temptation to get into another fledgling technology, television. Electronic television's predated World War Two, but the war had pretty much put TV evolution on hold for several years. Magnavux joined in the TV craze after World War two, announcing in nine that the company would begin producing television sets. Now, at this point, Magnavox's reputation was firmly aligned with the concept of audio quality and capability, not with moving pictures. An engineer named and Thank the Right became the chief of television engineering at Magnavox, and his team got to work creating a technology the company called, of course, Magna Scope. Now, interestingly, the first TV that Magnavox produced was called the Modular, which had the model named MV ten, and the company introduced this first in nineteen eight, so just a year after they announced they were going to get into the TV business. Clearly they had already been working on it for a while before then. The Greenville Manufacturing Company provided the cabinet for the device which housed the electronics, which came out of Fort Wayne, Indiana. In in set in the face of this cabinet was the MVY tens screen, which was not huge, little black and white screen and add from the time claims quote it provides the finest picture quality in television and sharper contrast for better visibility end quote. The add by the way, was really for a record player slash radio combination. The one in the photo I'm looking at was called the Cosmopolitan. And these sets, the radio sets that had a phonograph player built into them, ranged in price from a hundred seventy nine dollars and fifty cents all the way up to eight dollars. And remember we're talking like nineteen forties money that that would be truly astronomically expensive today. Uh. On top of that bass price, you could add on what they called a duo matic changer. This was a piece of equipment that could hold up to twelve records, and so you would play a record and when the the tone arm would get all the way to the end of the record, it would automatically lift up, go back to the beginning like the rest position, and set down. Then the machine could drop the next record onto the spindle. The tone arm would come back up, move back over and start playing the next record. So you could hold up to twelve records with this thing, and it would automatic drop in the next record in the sequence. Uh. And this would only cost you a cool two dollars or so. Then to have the television on top of that, that would set you back an additional two and fifty cents all the way up to nine fifty bucks. And keep in mind this is again all in the nineties, so with inflation, these prices would be truly enormous, especially if you wanted to top of the line system. Some thing's never change, right, So the TV receiver was called the modular not because the television itself was made up of modules. It's not like you could take the TV apart. Instead, the TV on its own was a module. And as the ad I alluded to hinted at Magnafucs, the company knew that it was most associated with audio equipment, and so this company was essentially saying, hey, you could also get a television to incorporate into the audio equipment and enhance your audio equipment, rather than, you know, try to create it on all new marketing line dedicated solely to selling televisions. Now, I haven't found a specific source that confirms my suspicion, but I believe the m V ten did not have its own incorporated speaker system, or at least not a very robust speaker system. Instead, you would actually connect the m V ten to your Magnavox Hi Fi audio set, and the sound would play out through the audio set. You had the picture on the TV, but the sound would come through the same speakers that you know, the radio and phonograph were attached to, which honestly would make this one of the first home entertainment all in one setups that I've ever heard about the television market. You know, the whole industry as a whole proved to be a profitable one. It was also a very competitive one. Magnavox would go on to establish new manufacturing facilities in Greenville, Tennessee that primarily focused on TV production, building Facility number two in nineteen fifty two. Remember the first facility was dedicated to building cabinetry for radios. And it was around this time that Frank Freeman, originally the founder of the Electroacoustics Products Company, became president of Magnavox. Freeman head and a reputation as a real high fidelity fanatic, and under his leadership, Magnavox would develop a strategy to make sure that each of the components that produced for its radios worked really well together. Now that seems like a no brainer, but hear me out. Let's say you're making various components, and the components you're making are all necessary to enable something like a radio set to work. Right, So it's all the parts of a radio set. Now you could treat them all as separate individual technologies, So you could make the best tuner, for example, and the best amplifier and the best loud speaker, and on their own, when you hook them up with sensitive instruments, you can of that they all work fantastic, that they are, you know, best of class, They perform well within whatever your specifications are. However, this does not necessarily mean that once you connect them all together in your radio set that they're all going to play nice with each other. Sometimes different components can start to introduce stuff like distortion when they are connected together, and that obviously has a negative impact on the sound produced by the end product. So Freeman's directive was that the engineers had to create a more holistic system that would produce the best overall result when they all work together. And that meant that sometimes maybe the amplifiers not quite as powerful, or the receiver might not be quite as sensitive as you could make it. But the end result for the customer was that you had a radio set that produced great sound. It created a way to provide the best experience on a per dollar basis. And while there were audio files who were seeking out individual components in order to produce their own systems, they would have to spend a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of money to do this and swap out components to find out which combination would actually provide the best experience. Magnavox was looking to create that rail the box, and as a result, the company's reputation for Hi Fi audio grew year over year. Freeman, by the way, he was born in Austria Hungry, Hungary in nineteen or nine, but his family had moved to America when he was just nine years old. In the nineteen twenties. He had studied the young field of radio research, and that's when he founded Electroacoustic Products in nineteen thirty. His tenure as president of Magnavox began in nineteen fifty, and during that time he would see the company reach its height as far as its reputation and revenue were concerned. He would lead Magnavox until his death in uh in the nineteen sixties. He died at the age of sixty three. While he was president, Freeman oversaw Magnufux's explosive growth in sales, so in nineteen fifty the company generated thirty two million dollars in revenue. By nineteen sixty seven, the year before Freeman passed away, annual revenue was up to four hundred fifty million dollars. Now, granted, revenue and profit are two different things. You've got to subtract the cost of business from your revenue before you start getting to profits. So for profit, that went from two million dollars in nineteen fifty to thirty million dollars by nineteen sixty seven. So not only was he making more revenue, he was making a greater profit in in turn, so it's not like the expenses rose at the same rate as revenue did. Rayman saw a big technological advancement, and a couple of them actually while he was in charge of Magnufux. One of those was that he saw the birth of color television. Granted, color TV, actually the development of it had been around for a few years, but it really emerged in the early nineteen fifties. However, rival company r c A would have a pretty effective monopoly on that uh color TV area first, and that was largely because there were a few different ways you could create color television. CBS initially had a lock on creating the standard, but our c A was able to push really hard to have its version adopted as the standard. Um you know, the only reason why CBS is didn't take hold was because the Korean War put everything on standby for a while. But I've covered that story before in my series about r c A, and it's a heck of a story. If you were curious about how our c A and CBS battled it out to try and determine what standard would be used for color television, you should check out those series. It's a heck of a story, has elements of political intrigue as well as technical evolution. But anyway, our CIA eventually one out and other TV manufacturers had to figure out how to make color TVs without violating our c S patents or they would have to, you know, pay a licensing fee to our c A in order to create their own technologies, which of course drives up production costs. So while color TV essentially launched in the US in the early nineteen fifties, Magna Bux didn't really get into the color TV space until the early nineteen sixties. However, another big jump in tech came in the form of the transistor. Just as the vacuum tube had revolutionized electronics decades earlier, the transistor would really shake things up. We'll talk about a little bit more after we take this quick break. So the transistor emerged out of Bell Labs in the late nineteen forties. But early transistors were large and unfit for practical application. They were more of a proof of concept, and they proved that it was possible to create an amplifier or switch using semiconduct your material rather than a vacuum tube. And over time engineers figured out how to reduce the size of the original transistors so that they were small, much much smaller than vacuum tubes, and they would emit less heat as well. Uh And they also weren't quite as delicate as vacuum tubes were. You know, if you were carrying a case of vacuum tubes and they dropped, you might end up shattering all of them. Transistors were a little bit more sturdy than that. So transistors can do the same job as a vacuum tube amplifier. That is, they can take an incoming weak electric signal and then they can boost the strength of that so that it comes out greater than the way it came in. And the way it does this is a little different from a vacuum tube, but the basic principle is the same. So you've got a weak signal going into the transistor, you apply voltage to another part of the transistor, and this induces a stronger output signal. So you are having to put energy into a transistor to make this happen. It's not like you've got a magical switch that just takes a week signal and boosts it into a strong signal without you having to do anything. But you didn't need big, bulky hot vacuum tubes in your giant radio set cabinet in order to amplify a signal so that it could drive loudspeakers. So it was possible for transistors to do that job, which meant you can miniaturize the design of the overall product without compromising on the end user experience. So Magnavox produced its first all transistor radio in nineteen fifty seven. It cost seventy nine dollars and cents. Now I did go ahead and run that through the inflation calculator just to see how much it would cost today if it were at the same you know, cost level. So brace yourselves, because that eight is dollar transistor radio would set you back more than seven eight bucks today. Seven dollars for a transistor radio. That means the inflation between nineteen fifty seven and today. It means it means a dollar today is worth about a tenth of what it was earth back then Yelsa. Anyway, the price tag probably drives home the fact that these electronics were adopted really by people who are well off right. The average person could not afford to buy these sorts of things. Now that has largely always been the case, particularly in the world of consumer electronics. We see new technology hit consumer shelves and when it first debut is it is exorbitantly expensive, like we saw that with h D t V s. We saw it with DVD players, we saw it with Blu ray players, we're seeing it now with oh LED screens. But then eventually manufacturers, once they see that there's a demand for these technologies, invest in more ways to make the manufacturing process more efficient and less expensive, and the cost starts to come down and becomes more accessible to the average consumer. Um we would see this happen a lot more frequently today if it weren't for the fact that obsolescence is a really big thing. It drives a near constant cycle of new tech that drives up prices. So while the television's five years from now should be less expensive, they're gonna have new features we don't even think about right now that we'll drive those prices up even more. Whether we want those new features or not, that remains to be seen. I mean, we saw that with three D television's that was a big failure. I'm getting off track. Let's get back to Magnavox. So in nineteen fifty eight the company produced its first Hi fi stereo system. So up to that point, the sets that Magnavox were selling were mono. That is, each speaker in the system was getting the same output signal. So even if you had multiple speakers attached to your system, they were all playing the exact same sound. Right, the sound in the left channel and the sound in the right channel. There's no such thing there. It's the same channel going to two speakers, and the sound is identical. Stereo allowed for left and right channels independent of each other, so you could have some sounds coming out of one speaker and other sounds coming out of the other, or maybe it's really loud in one speaker and softer in the other. I've done a whole episode on the history of stereo sound. The history of StereoSound dates much further back, by the way, but it took a while for artists to really embrace stereo, particularly in genres like rock and roll. That's because a lot of artists knew that their fans were relying on older mono sets, so they were more interested in developing records that were really engineered for mono sets, not for stereo sets. The Beatles famously would spend countless hours in the studio engineering their mono recordings, but they would leave the stereo recordings to other people because they knew most of their fans were using mono sound systems well. In nineteen three, Magnavox built a third manufacturing facility in Greenville, Tennessee. It was at the time the largest TV manufacturing facility under one roof in the United States, and for the following years, Magnifux continued to produce stereo systems and televisions, and it also developed plasma panels for the military. So a plasma display is just pretty cool technology. So for a while, plasma displays were really competitive with L E D screens, largely because plasma displays have a much better contrast ratio, which would be the difference and the number of differences between the darkest colors you can display and the brightest colors you can display. So with L e D screens, essentially every section of the screen has a backlight behind it. So even if you're watching something that has a lot of dark colors in it, there's a backlight and some of that light bleeds through the screen, So the darkest colors, like like black, might come out more like a charcoal gray. But plasma is different. Each pixel, each point of light in the panel has a little bit of gas in a cell that represents that pixel, and the controller sends an electric current to the cells that are associated with a picture. Let's say you're just showing up the letter A on screen. Well, the cells that make up that letter A will get current sent to them, and the current excites a gas something like mercury vapor, And when mercury vapor gets excited, it's electrons jump to higher energy levels. Those electrons have to come back down, but in order to come back down, they have to release that energy. They do that in the form of ultra violet radiation. Well, we can't see ultra violet light. However, if we pair that mercury vapor with say certain noble gases, then the ultra violet light will stimulate those gases to release energy in the form of visible light. So if you were to look at a color plasma display like a color plasma television, every single pixel that represents a point of light on that display has three subpixels. There's one for red, one for green, and one for blue. And by timing out the electric pulses going to these subpixels and selectively choosing which subpixels need to fire, plasma display can create images of lots of different colors. Now, in the early panels of the nineteen sixties, we're talking monochromatic displays, so we didn't have to worry about the subpixel part. They were expensive. They were generally reserved for stuff like military use, and eventually plasma televisions would come on the scene for consumers much much much later. Uh, they would struggle to be profitable because other types of televisions would ultimately win out and manufacturers would drop out of plasma TV production. There's some other issues that plasma displays have, but that's not really important for this episode, so we're gonna move on. Now. We're running up to the end of our story here, and I already talked a bit about Ralph Bayer and Bill Harrison and Bill Rush in some recent episodes I did, or an episode I did about the nineteen three video game crash. So, these three guys, working for a company called Sanders Associates Incorporated, developed a video game console that could play an electronic version of table tennis. Uh. There were also some other programs that the machine could run. It was a limited number because it was hardwired to play certain number of games. Uh. There was a checkers game. There was a game that used a very early light gun. The detector for the light is built in the gun itself, so the gun can tell if it's pointed towards the pixels that are should be created on a display. Uh. The bears thought was that he could create a system that would give people the chance to play games on their TVs. So by the late nineteen sixties, TV prices had declined enough so that the average family could afford one, and this would give more functionality to the television. Sanders Associates shot this idea around because you know, they weren't gonna make it. They just wanted to, you know, license the idea to someone else, and Magnavox was interested, so In the early nineteen seventies, Magnavox entered into a licensing agreement with Senders Associates for the brown Box that was the nickname given to Beyar's invention. He had covered it with vinyl tape that had a wood grain pattern on it in order to make it a little more attractive and not look like, you know, a big metal box with switches and knobs on it. Magnavox would design a new console to house the electronics and introduce the device as the Magnavox Odyssey in nineteen seventy two, the first home video game console, and had a handful of programs that were coded into the console itself, and you would activate it by putting in a what they called game cards that sort of a predecessor for cartridges, and the game cards completed circuits that would allow the console to play a specific game. It was different from later video game consoles. You couldn't like, program a new game for this to run. It was a limited number of pre determined games that this would run, So you couldn't build Pac Man for the Magnavox Odyssey. In other words, so the Odyssey could only display very blocky graphics and it can only display monochromatic graphics, so black and white. To compensate for that limited Asian, Magnavox also produced color screen overlays. So it's like a plastic overlay that had color in specific spots on there, and you would slap that onto your TV screen and thus the light coming from the TV screen would show through this clear plastic and you would get quote unquote color graphics. Pretty low tech work around for the limitations of the device. Well, the Odyssey ended up being a modest success. Magnavox sold a few hundred thousand units, but that would be later dwarfed by other video game consoles that would enter the market later in the seventies and into the eighties. In nineteen seventy four, Phillips, the electronics company based in the Netherlands, made an offer that Magnavox couldn't refuse. So Phillips was looking to establish a foothold in America, primarily as a way of creating a distribution network for Phillips products. Magnavox would become a subsidiary of Phillips, while Magnafox would continue producing products, it was doing so under the direction of Phillips, with the goal of pushing Phillips based technologies. So Magnavox did play a part in certain Phillips products, like the manufacturer and distribution of the LaserDisc format, but the division didn't do a whole lot more. They did make some home pinball machines in late nineteen seventies. That's kind of cool, but that was pretty much the end of Magnavox the company. It still existed as a brand, so Magnavox the brand was still a thing, but that was something that Phillips would sometimes slap on certain products because the brand recognition was important in the American market. Also, today, around the world, there are different companies that own the rights to the Magnavox brand in those specific regions, which means you could buy two different products, each of them have the Magnavox logo on them. You buy one in one part of the world, you buy another one in the other part of the world, and ultimately they were made by two unconnected, different independent companies. Right, they have no connection to each other apart from the fact that they each have the regional rights to use the Magnavox brand. So we don't really have a Magnavox company anymore. But it was really fun tracking down the history of Magnavox and talking about its role in the consumer electronics UH industry, particularly in the United States. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on tech Stuff, whether it's another company or a specific technology or trend in tech, anything like that, let me know the best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle we use is tech stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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