The auctioneer held up a thick-lensed domed object that looked like the face plate on a deep sea diving suit. My auction buddy Janet nailed it, though. That’s what they put in front of old TVs, she said, using her hands to outline the small size of TV screens back in the day.
Then the auctioneer announced its name to those of us who didn’t know what it was. It’s a TV magnifier, he said. It appeared to be no larger than 10 inches in diameter with brass or gold-plating around the perimeter. I could imagine someone affixing it to a small screen to get a bigger picture when they could not afford a larger screen.
An auction-goer paid $60 for this treasure, and handed it to a friend for show and safekeeping. Curious me wanted to see it up close and find out what he’d do with it.
“Sell it,” said the man, the bib of his baseball cap slightly shielding his eyes. “That’s what I do with everything I buy.” Sometimes I forget that most folks at auction do this for a living. While I sometimes buy things for keeps, most buy to sell. “There’s not a lot of them around.”
I’m pretty sure he’s right about that. These TV screen magnifying lens had their heyday in the 1940s and 1950s during the early years of television. They were sold by companies to fit screens that ran from 3″ to 12″ in diameter, according to the tvhistory.tv website. They allowed for various ways of attachment to your black and white TV set: from the top, sides and bottom, on floor stands. The one at auction had holes for attaching at the bottom. Some even came in different colors – an early mimic of color TV, perhaps.
Most of the magnifiers were made of plastic or Plexiglass, according to the website, and some were filled with oil, water or some other liquid. The one at auction appeared to be filled with a liquid of some sort. Some TV sets also came with their own built-in magnifier.
The website showed an ad promising that the magnifier would enlarge the picture up to three times its size – from a 10″ image to 16″ – and another ad, four times its size. “No eyestrain. No glare. No distortion,” blared the second ad from 1950. Apparently, many of them distorted the picture.
You can still buy newer ones today. I found several selling on the web for less than $100 and one on amazon.com for a few bucks more. With flat screens so inexpensive these days, I wonder who would pay that kind of money for a magnifier.
As for the old ones, nostalgia is the reason why. A handful sold on eBay for up to $100.
“You can’t put a value on it,” the auction buyer said (but I’m sure he’ll come up with one in order to sell it). “It’s a conversation piece.”
The magnifier sparked at least one conversation as a man who stood next to me related childhood stories about his family’s TV viewing. He remembered them having one of these magnifiers but the story was about something else.
His father, he said, came home one day bearing a strip with various colors – red, blue or something – and taped it to the TV set. “He’d buy anything,” said the man, whose boyish head of blond hair was now thinning. “He said, ‘we got color TV,’ and left it up there for weeks.”
He wasn’t finished with his childhood TV stories. Back then, there was only one TV station that was on for six hours, he recalled, followed by a test pastern with a Native American image (RCA used what was called the Indian head test pattern), and spokes coming out of the center at top, bottom and sides. (In the early days, TV stations only ran programming for a certain number of hours because they didn’t believe people would sit through too much of it.)
“We’d just sit there and watch it,” he said of him and his siblings. It’s a little like what kids do today, we both agreed, watching the box incessantly.
Back then, even as now, there were accolades and warnings about television and its effect, according to a Time magazine article:
“Children will go to school in their own living rooms, presidential candidates will win elections from a television studio. Housewives will see on the screen the dresses and groceries they want, and shop by phone.” Just two years later that new-fangled invention was getting so popular, radio comedian Fred Allen warned, that television “threatened to change Americans into creatures with eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all.”
Unfortunately, Allen, a favorite radio star, wasn’t quite able to make the switch to television – on any size screen.
