How did the TV, a symbol of wealth in the 1970s, evolve from mechanical to smart?

This article covers the evolution of the television, which was considered a symbol of wealth in South Korea in the 1970s. It traces the technological evolution of TVs from the earliest mechanical televisions to electronic cathode ray tubes, flat panel displays, and now smart TVs, explaining how TVs have gone from being a simple video receiving device to a center of information communication.

 

Do you remember the popular cartoon called “Black Rubber Shoes” that aired about a decade ago? The cartoon depicted the daily lives of ordinary people in Korea in the 1970s from the perspective of an elementary school student named Ki-young. It was a vivid portrayal of the times that made even those who didn’t live through that era relate and laugh. Among them, bananas, ramen, and TV stuck in the minds of many viewers. These three items are commonplace today, but at the time, they were rare enough to be considered ‘symbols of wealth’.
At the time, bananas were an expensive fruit imported from overseas and not easily available, ramen was becoming a new food culture in a rapidly changing modern society, and TVs were a sign of a family’s economic power. When the neighbors gathered at the house of a so-called “well-to-do child” to watch TV, Generation Y, who had not experienced the life of that time, felt a kind of foreignness. Back then, TVs were a symbol of wealth, so rare that schools used to ask students if they owned one to gauge their family status.
However, just as it is now commonplace to not have a TV in your home, the TV in Korean history has shown remarkable growth, development, and popularization in about three to four decades. In this process, TV has become more than just an electronic device, but a major medium that has significantly changed the culture and life of Korean society.
In fact, TVs did not become popular in Korea until the 1960s, but research and development of TVs had been underway in the West as early as the 1880s, when German inventor Paul Nippko developed the Nippko disk, a circular metal plate with holes in a swirling pattern that transformed electrical signals into images. When light carrying an image of an object passed through the holes in the rotating metal plate, the light generated electricity in the selenium photovoltaic cells to restore the image. This metal plate later contributed to the development of “mechanical television,” in which light is converted into electricity and the electrical signal is converted into an image. However, mechanical televisions were cumbersome, requiring the Nippco disk to rotate more than 600 times a minute to recreate the picture, and their image quality was poor, so they slowly fell into disuse in favor of the later development of electronic televisions.
Electronic television, which emerged in the late 1920s and dominated most homes for nearly a century until the early 2000s, relies heavily on the brown tube. Brown tubes, also known as cathode ray tubes (CRTs), are specialized vacuum tubes that change an electrical signal into something visible to the eye by changing the position and intensity of an electron beam striking a fluorescent surface. People often compare the principle of a Brown tube to that of a firecracker, and the science is actually very similar. In a firecracker, heat is applied to certain atoms to accelerate the movement of electrons as the atoms absorb energy, and when the heated electrons return to their initial temperature, they emit energy equal to the temperature difference in the form of light, while in a brown tube, the accelerated electrons transfer energy to a phosphor made of sulfide or silicate, and the phosphor converts it into light to produce a screen. In other words, the only difference is whether the source of light emission is heat or phosphor. The introduction of the brown tube eliminated the movement of parts (rotation of the nipco disk) that was necessary to reproduce the image, and the image quality surpassed that of conventional mechanical televisions.
So, when did we go from black and white to color television? It’s easy to think of mechanical televisions as “old-fashioned” compared to electronic televisions and only designed to produce black-and-white pictures, but the first color televisions were mechanical, not electronic. John Logie Baird, the inventor of mechanical television, succeeded in transmitting a color broadcast on a mechanical television set in 1928, and by the 1940s, the United States was witnessing a battle between mechanical color television and electronic black-and-white television. At the time, electronic color television was still in the research phase, but mechanical color television would lose out to the later development of electronic color television due to several fatal flaws. Chief among them is the lack of backward compatibility. Mechanical color TVs required a special device to be attached to the TV in order to receive black-and-white broadcasts, which was a significant disadvantage at a time when color broadcasting was not yet well established. People didn’t feel the need to give up a lot of black-and-white broadcasts or buy expensive special equipment to watch a few color broadcasts. Mechanical color televisions were also not equipped with sufficient production facilities, and eventually, with the development and commercialization of color brown tubes, mechanical televisions became obsolete.
Brown tubes defeated the Nippon disk and were loved by people around the world for more than a century, but their lives were threatened in the early 2000s when flat-panel display TVs began to appear. Flat panel displays are image display devices that are thinner and lighter than conventional TVs and computer monitors, with LCD and PDP being the most common. LCD TVs use liquid crystals called “liquid crystals,” which change their internal molecular arrangement in response to electrical signals, resulting in a specific orientation. The basic way it works is to place a polarizing filter, a color filter, a panel (a plate with a regular and dense arrangement of liquid crystals), and a backlight (a backlight), and then fire light from the backlight onto the panel. The light is then refracted into different patterns as it passes through each liquid crystal, and the refracted light is converted into pixels of different colors and brightness as it passes through the polarizing filter and color filter. PDP TVs use plasma (gas discharge) to produce light. Plasma is an electrically neutral substance that is created when a gas is heated to a very high temperature or split into electrons and atomic nuclei by an electrical discharge. The working principle of PDP TVs is to inject neon and argon gas between two thin glass plates, generate an electric discharge between electrodes mounted on the top and bottom, and self-luminesce with ultraviolet light to reproduce the screen. These two types of LCD TVs and PDP TVs have pushed out brown tube TVs and now dominate most of the TV market.
So far, we’ve been talking about TVs in passing, focusing on the “hardware” of TVs, but defining what exactly a TV is is a real challenge. We subconsciously define a TV as “a big machine that sits in your living room and watches video,” and that’s why I’ve focused on the hardware to explain how TVs have been built and how they work throughout the ages. However, as they say, “there is no such thing as a TV anymore,” and as computers and cell phones have taken over the roles of traditional TVs, we need to rethink what a TV is. The dictionary definition of television is a method of electrical communication in which an optical image of an object is transmitted by radio waves and reproduced on a receiving device, or a receiver that receives the image. If we focus on the “telecommunication method” rather than the “receiver,” this definition alone means that DMB or broadcasting on a computer already falls under the category of TV. However, if the hardware of a TV does not just reproduce images, but also performs functions such as the Internet and calls, should these functions be included in the category of a TV? A typical example of this is smart TV, which is a TV that can freely switch between three screens (TV, mobile phone, and PC) to watch videos. As it is not yet a widespread product, many people still view it as a product that simply adds the functions of a mobile phone and a PC to a conventional TV, but in the not-too-distant future, when the distinction between computers, TVs, and other electronic products becomes completely irrelevant, the TV will not be a device that reproduces images of objects, but a device that reproduces the information that users want on the screen in various fields such as broadcasting, communication, the Internet, and games.
It has been said that TV is no longer an idiot box. It’s true that the introduction of advanced technology into TVs has led to remarkable advances in functionality. In the past, TVs were called dumb boxes because they only provided stimulating information to viewers, but now they are becoming smart boxes as they converge with communication and the Internet. Viewers are also changing from passive viewers who just stare at the screen to active viewers who use TV to get the information they want in various fields such as health and education. TV content is also becoming increasingly personalized, allowing users to freely choose programs that suit their tastes and receive personalized information. In addition, TVs that incorporate artificial intelligence are now able to recognize the voice and behavior of the viewer and respond accordingly. While the technology has been evolving over a long period of time, the functional aspect has been growing relatively recently, so it is worth looking forward to how TVs will be developed to improve people’s quality of life in the future.
As such, TVs are no longer just a device for receiving video, they are now the centerpiece of information and communication technology and are becoming an indispensable part of modern life. As the future of TV evolves, we will need to adapt our lives and mindsets to accommodate the changes. If you look at the history of TV, you’ll see how fast and colorful its evolution has been. As it continues to evolve, it may yet revolutionize again, perhaps with new features and roles we’ve never imagined. It will be interesting to see how TV will become even more embedded in our lives in this wave of change.