Word: tv
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When her first TV series debuted on Oct. 15, 1951, there was no way to tell that Lucille Ball was beginning an apparently immortal love affair with the American public, and not much reason even to expect commercial success. Ball was a comely redhead with a semisultry voice and knockout legs, but she was also nearly 40 and a veteran of almost two decades in the supporting ranks of show business. She had been a movie actress but hardly a superstar; she had enjoyed moderate success in radio but had only fleeting experience in the new medium of video...
Nothing, in short, about her prior career hinted that she could be as deft and daring as Harold Lloyd, as rubber-faced as Bert Lahr, as touching as Chaplin -- and more ladylike than Milton Berle. Along with the other foremost icon of the '50s Golden Age of TV, Jackie Gleason, Ball was a larger-than-life talent uniquely suited to the small screen. Her signature series, I Love Lucy, and its successors endured more than two decades in prime time, from 1951 to 1974, one of the few immutables in a sea of social change. Lucy, seen in more than...
Introduced at the end of a decade of economic hardship, TV was touted early on as a creator of jobs as much as a purveyor of entertainment. The centerpiece of the Smithsonian's exhibit is a display of old TV sets -- clunky wooden boxes with tiny, anemic-looking screens. But perhaps more significant is a selection of print advertisements that tried to sell Americans on this strange new gizmo...
...first ads for TV sets showed elegantly dressed models watching in posh surroundings, and often contained practical advice. ("Should the room in which you are viewing television be darkened to resemble a movie theater? Answer: Definitely not!") But soon the marketers of TV had a brainstorm: promoting the new device as a way of bringing the family together again. "There is great happiness," exulted an ad for DuMont sets, "in the home where the family is held together by this new common bond -- television." Another promotional piece listed the things that "took the family away from home" -- including baseball, vaudeville...
...various 3-D worlds -- a space station orbiting the earth, for example, or the landscape of Mars. The gloves are equipped with magnetic position trackers and fiber-optic sensors that telegraph every movement of the hand directly to the machine. The helmet is equipped with a pair of stereoscopic TV projectors, one for each eye, that are carefully coordinated so that a slight turn of the head to the right will shift the entire synthetic world to the left...