The Glass Eye Invasion: Television Sets Invade The Midcentury Home

by Steven John Kosareff

Overview

It's TV Time!

Strap on your beanie, spin the propeller, and travel back in time when the first television sets invaded American homes. It's 1952 and you've heard of television. You've even seen a demonstration at a county fair-but you don't own a television set. You'd have one--except for one little problem: there isn't a television station in your town. Fortunately, the FCC has just lifted its freeze on new television stations and your city is planning to be the first out the gate with television. Unfortunately, so does every other city in the United States. The television set gold rush is on!

Unlike anything before it, including the radio, telephone and telegraph, the television set transformed the American home forever in ways both good and bad. It altered family relationships, both within and without the family. Lives were now scheduled around favorite television programs which, unlike today, could only be seen during their original broadcasts. Visiting with friends and relatives took a backseat to viewing television either, in avoiding other people, or inviting them in to commune in front of the television set. Early owners hosted planned, and sometimes spontaneous, television parties. Many people believed television would be the end of polite conversation and, worse yet, civilization.

Television sets were a national conduit for conversations on child rearing and education; provided respite for people who were physically challenged; and even tested one's vision before sending them to the optometrist for glasses. Television sets acted as channels for conspiracists who thought their sets were watching them or receiving signals from outer space. Broken television sets tested men's electronic repair abilities and provided more than one lonely housewife a repairman to pay her attention. The one thing all these early television set owners had in common was that, no matter how hard they may have tried, they couldn't live without their television set.

The Glass Eye Invasion had conquered America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798349244155
Publisher:	Glass Eye Publications
Publication date:	09/02/2025
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Steve Kosareff is an author, graphic designer, historian, screenwriter, film director, editor and producer. His first book, Window to the Future: The Golden Age of Television Marketing and Advertising, was published by Chronicle Books in 2005. The book fondly looks back at the culture of marketing and advertising television sets during the golden age of American manufacturing in the 1950s and 60s. He next wrote, produced and directed a related documentary, TV Man: The Search for the Last Independent Dealer about the few remaining mom-and-pop stores which sold and repaired television sets in the United States. As a student of film noir, Kosareff revisited his past and wrote the true crime memoir, Satin Pumps: The Moonlit Murder That Mesmerized the Nation published by WildBlue Press in 2021. The book revisits the infamous 1959 Finch-Tregoff murder case in which Dr. Bernard Finch and his girlfriend and medical assistant, Carole Tregoff, conspired with others to murder his wife, Barbara Jean. Kosareff was just eight years old when Finch, who also happened to be the family doctor, murdered his wife. Kosareff's personal connections to the players and the close physical proximity to events proved to be invaluable in building the story from his point of view as a child and later as an adult looking back at contradictions that have plagued the case for sixty years. He lives in Santa Monica, California with his companion, designer Paul L'Esperance and their lovebird, Mousie.