Published: January 11, 2008 01:11 am            

A big, honkin’, vast wasteland

As he was tilling a potato field on his father’s Idaho farm in 1921, a 14-year-old Mormon boy named Philo T. Farns-worth realized an electron beam could scan images in a similar fashion, line by line, just as you read a book, and project them.

Thus the concept of television was born.

TV has come a long way in the decades since.

When I was a child, somewhere this side of the mesozoic era, televisions were rectangular wooden boxes featuring small, roughly elliptical screens.

Reception was spotty, at best, particularly if you had to rely on small set-top antennas, known as rabbit ears. Sometimes you had to fiddle with the rabbit ears for long minutes, turning them this way and that. And the picture was best only if someone stood and held them just so, which, of course, nobody ever wanted to do.

We were pleased with our primitive televisions, spending hours staring at the grainy black and white pictures, enjoying everything from boxing and baseball to variety shows and professional wrestling.

Color television came along in the 1950s but didn’t really catch on until the early 1960s. The debut of “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” in 1961 is credited as a turning point in the history of color TV, prompting consumers to go out and buy new sets.

Since then, the industry has been changing rapidly. VHS and Beta battled it out for supremacy of the home videotape market, with VHS winning. Now VHS has given way to DVD, which is about to be supplanted by high definition DVDs or Blu-Ray discs.

Rabbit ears gave way to rooftop antennas, which have since been replaced by cable and satellite TV. In February 2009, digital TV will replace analog.

For a time the trend in television was to go small. Sets the size of transistor radios, with screens the size of business cards, were introduced in the 1980s and lasted about a decade.

Today the trend in TV is quite the opposite.

Earlier this week, at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Japanese electronics manufacturer Panasonic struck a new blow for “bigger is better” advocates by introducing a 150-inch plasma television, a set it calls the world’s largest.

That is, for those of you who don’t do mental math early in the morning, about 121/2 feet of TV screen. That is larger than your average hippopotamus.

“Can you imagine watching the Olympics on this baby?” Toshihiro Sakamoto, Panasonic president, asked at the unveiling.

The mammoth set would be advantageous for watching many events. Besides all sports, there are nature shows, travel documentaries and, of course, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.

But can you imagine 12 feet, six inches of Donald Trump? The mind boggles.

The set, known as “Life Screen,” will not be available until 2009 at an undisclosed price. Given the fact the company’s 103-inch TV, released last year, sells for just under $70,000, look for the 150-inch monster to hit triple digits. Start digging in the cushions of the couch now, guys.

Just imagine watching the Super Bowl in high definition on a 150-inch television. Viewers would be so close to the action they would risk a groin pull.

Watching golf on the 150-inch set you could almost smell the grass. Watching political debates you could almost smell the, well, you know.

How about it honey? If we knock out a wall, get rid of about half the furniture and go without natural gas and water for the next year, we could swing it.

I figured she would say no. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s my turn to hold the rabbit ears.



Mullin is senior writer of the News & Eagle.