Posted 7:54 PM by Gene

TRAGEDY: While skimming idly through eBay listings I found one that linked to this site for a rebuilder of Philco Predicta TVs -- those late-fifties models with the tube mounted atop the chassis -- and came across these five remarkable ads, like the one above, most likely from the same program: the Miss America Pageant. (Paul Whiteman, working for ABC, brought the pageant to TV in '55, with Philco as a sponsor.) These ads are chintzy now (the pictures on the sets are clearly superimposed) but it is easy to imagine people being as excited at the new TVs as they were at the pageant. Certainly they'd be excited with a set with a totally separate chassis and picture tube -- sort of. (That was the Predicta Tandem, which also featured an ungainly 25' cord -- something cleverly hidden in the ad here. It was Philco's idea of Zenith's remote.) Refrigerators, washer-dryers, air conditioners, stereos -- there was nothing Philco couldn't make. Which is why Ford Motor bought it three years later, the first step to oblivion. (Today only a Brazilian remnant survives; Ford merged Philco with an earlier aerospace acquisition, selling the TV and appliance businesses in the meantime; by 1990 the rest was spun off to the notorious Uncle Bernie Schwartz.) Now we take TV for granted -- we should, watching it by computer; and our consumer electronics manufacturing and the Miss America Pageant have all but ceased to exist; and we greet technology not with ecstatic anticipation, but with a shudder.