“Mad Man” Muntz was famous for snipping out parts on a test bench that weren’t needed until it failed. “Put that one back in.”
Televisions were expensive complicated affairs to produce, made with lots of human labor intensive point to point wiring. If you lived in a large metro area with lots of strong local stations much of the circuitry wasn’t necessary to produce a usable picture the way it was for someone living in a rural area. Stripped down televisions allowed him to sell televisions in those markets at a competitive price. You wouldn’t buy a Muntz TV if you lived in South Dakota, but if you lived in Chicago that might be a good buy.
I seem to remember reading he had some association with Lear jets, and 4-track tape players, the predecessor to 8-tracks, both of which were basically the first practical way motorists could play their own music in their cars. Record players existed, but were expensive and didn’t work very well. Cassette players came later.
Yes, the electronics in early TV’s was pretty basic - tubes, and later discrete transistors, were used to generate things like the horizontal and vertical sweep. Generating a sawtooth wave was not simple, most oscillators want to produce sine waves - so there were adjustments to circuits to add harmonics with certain amplitudes to produce an approximation of a sawtooth. Fiddling with those “extra” controls helped st the linearity of the sweep.
As Francis mentions this was replaced later - a simple IC circuit using transistors to count up at a regular speed automatically produced a smooth sawtooth - but how many tubes or discrete transistors in a simple “count to 480” circuit?
Just one example of how complex electronics simplified the TV itself.
British TV stations (there was only one for many years, then two, in 1964 a third part-time one, and in the 1980s a fourth one came along) shut down at night and didn’t start broadcasting again until around lunchtime, except for schools & colleges educational stuff. The BBC testcard, of which there were several versions, (this is the most remembered Test Card F - Wikipedia ) enabled TV engineers to tune newly installed or repaired sets correctly. It usually came with music, or some times just a continuous tone.
As early as 1974, we had “5 All Night” here in Boston. With your host George Fennell. Lots of Charlie Chan movies (whom he affectionately referred to as “Chuck Chan.”)
