Today, television is the prose of life; it is impossible to surprise anyone with it. Every family man knows that lying on the couch looking at his screen is the best way to piss off any, most patient wife. And there were times when this electronic device delighted, surprised and inspired hope for the omnipotence of technological progress.
The first television in the USSR was developed back in 1932. It was significantly different from those devices to which our contemporaries have become accustomed over the past half century. Its main feature was the complete absence of such a necessary, at first glance, detail as a picture tube.
The design was optical-electromechanical, and the image arose as a result of the rotation of a special disk illuminated by a neon lamp. Naturally, the "picture" was muddy and formed only 60 lines. The German engineer Nipkov came up with the circuit diagram, and a domestic receiver was created in Leningrad, at the plant named after Kozitsky. Based on the documented fact of the first video broadcast that took place in the Soviet Union in 1931, April 29 is considered to be the birthday of Soviet television.
Attempts to create a mass transmission network were made in different countries, but World War II for a long time distracted the best minds of the planet from this issue, forcing them to engage in the invention of weapons. Before the war in the USSR, they still managed to produce a small number of TK-1 receivers. It was the first television in the USSR to be equipped with a cathode ray tube.
Older people often recall with nostalgia the lenses fixed in front of screens - “saucers”, without which it was simply impossible to see anything. A regular video broadcasting began in Moscow in 1948, and in order to introduce as many workers as possible to a new type of propaganda, the first television in the USSR, produced in mass editions, KVN-49, was widely sold. This name is not deciphered as “a club of fun and resourceful”, the abbreviation consisted of the first letters of the names of development engineers: Koenigson, Warsaw and Nikolaev.
This was the first and last case in our country when household appliances were named in honor of its creators. The device was produced until 1962, then other brands of televisions appeared. The USSR became one of the largest manufacturers of “blue screens" in the world, production capacities were put into operation at various enterprises, including those that specialized previously only in defense products.
KVN was replaced by "Record" with its own unique scheme. This was the first TV in the USSR, the repair of which was simplified as much as possible due to the high degree of unification.
But progress does not stand still. The quality indicators of receiving equipment come to the fore. Among them - the screen size, reliability, beautiful appearance, ease of use and maintainability. But this is not enough, all over the world the black-and-white image gradually goes down in history.
The first color television in the USSR was made back in 1954, but the mass production of Rainbows was mastered only by 1967, and then broadcasts began in a new format, borrowed from the French (SECAM). Until the mid-70s, the possession of such a device testified to a high level of income, and there were often cases when guests came to see this miracle of technology.
“Birches”, “Horizons”, “Rubies”, “Electrons”, “Shilyalis” were produced in the Soviet Union en masse and over time, despite the considerable cost, became scarce goods. Ahead was the information-electronic revolution, the first "petrels" of which were the very same KVNs ...