In 1965, Admiral’s  15” and 17” portable black and white
televisions had rabbit ears and flat-faced
square picture tubes

This was the tele­vi­sion age before cable or satel­lite or fibre: this was an age when rab­bit ears were the aer­i­al on portable sets and were often attached to the large fur­ni­ture-sized sets that dom­i­nat­ed liv­ing rooms across the country.

This half-page adver­tise­ment for Admi­ral’s portable tele­vi­sions from Life Mag­a­zine, July 23, 1965,  describes these mod­els as light enough for easy car­ry­ing, big enough for easy view­ing with a big speak­er and strong fringe-area reception.

The fringe-area claim is a hint to the qual­i­ty of the image.

This was the tele­vi­sion age before cable or satel­lite or fibre: this was an age when rab­bit ears were the aer­i­al on portable sets and were often attached to the large fur­ni­ture-sized sets that dom­i­nat­ed liv­ing rooms across the country.

The rabbit ears are visible on these Admiral portable TVs in this advertisement

Rabbit ears were two telescoping swivel-based antennae mounted on the back of portable sets or connected with wires to larger sets.

You could pull them out to full exten­sion or not. You could pull them apart, or not. Point them to the front; to the side; to the back; to the ceil­ing; to the floor. Point then dif­fer­ent­ly for every chan­nel in frus­trat­ing attempts to improve recep­tion of any sta­tion oth­er than local television.

View­ers in large cities had mul­ti­ple chan­nels from which to choose and the recep­tion was rea­son­ably clear but, for view­ers liv­ing in rur­al com­mu­ni­ties, the chan­nel selec­tion was limited.

Tun­ing to sig­nals from chan­nels out­side the imme­di­ate local area, i.e. beyond 20–30 miles, was chal­leng­ing with rab­bit ears.

Those were the decades when out­door anten­nas —com­pli­cat­ed col­lec­tions of met­al spokes—sprouted above the roof tops. View­ers did, how­ev­er, get bet­ter recep­tion from those out­door  tow­ers attached to their houses.

Portable and fur­ni­ture-sized tele­vi­sion sets were adver­tised in Sears Christ­mas Cat­a­logue, 1965. Their new instant-sound tran­sis­tor­ized portable with an 11-inch pic­ture fea­tured “a pic­ture- improv­ing atten­u­a­tor switch…press it and sig­nal adjusts for sharpest pic­ture.” It also had a “keyed auto­mat­ic gain-con­trol for pic­ture sta­bil­i­ty.”   It was list­ed at $134.88, and the recharge­able bat­tery cost an addi­tion­al $26.88. The aver­age week­ly wage in 1965 was $104.95.

Pic­ture your fam­i­ly sit­ting in a liv­ing room watch­ing a 9 inch tele­vi­sion!  You can live the expe­ri­ence by sim­ply set­ting a  small com­put­er tablet in the far cor­ner of your liv­ing room.

Put the 9 inch com­put­er tablet into a con­sole that includes one or maybe more speak­ers, a radio and a phono­graph i.e. a record play­er. Include stor­age space in the cab­i­net for LP vinyl records.

That was how the fam­i­ly enjoyed home enter­tain­ment in 1949. Admi­ral adver­tised one of those fur­ni­ture-sized tele­vi­sion sets in this adver­tise­ment from Sat­ur­day Evening Post. It fea­tured a “Mag­ic Mir­ror Tele­vi­sion, an FM-AM dyna­m­ag­ic radio, and a record player”.

The ref­er­ence to four hours of con­tin­u­ous record­ed music prob­a­bly means that the record play­er fea­tured a chang­er that could car­ry mul­ti­ple records.

The list price is $399.95. The aver­age wage in the Unit­ed States that year was $60 per week.

You can read a very detailed account of the estab­lish­ment and growth of the Admi­ral Cor­po­ra­tion on the web­site of the the “Made in Chica­go Museum”

Ross Siragusa founded the Admiral Corp. during the Depression and transformed it from a small radio and phonograph company into one of the leading makers of televisions, audio products and home appliances.

With­in just a year and a half of enter­ing the TV fray, Admi­ral was pro­duc­ing 15,000 sets a day (at mul­ti­ple facil­i­ties across the coun­try) and claim­ing near­ly a quar­ter share of the entire industry’s pro­duc­tion. Accord­ing to Sir­a­gusa, they were also pay­ing for 25% of the TV relat­ed adver­tis­ing in the coun­try, most­ly in newspapers. 

As the TV era explod­ed in the 1950s, work­ers at the Cort­land Street plant—and an ever increas­ing net­work of satel­lite facilities—literally couldn’t keep up with the demand, par­tic­u­lar­ly as the sets became more afford­able, bet­ter func­tion­ing, and increas­ing­ly rich in pro­gram­ming con­tent. Radios were use­ful and all, but the tele­vi­sion was the new cen­ter­piece of the home.

In 1964 only 3.1 per­cent of tele­vi­sion house­holds in the U.S. had col­or tele­vi­sion. In 1965, over half of all net­work prime-time pro­gram­ming in the U.S. was broad­cast in col­or. All three broad­cast net­works aired full-col­or prime-time sched­ules in the 1966–67 broad­cast sea­son, and ABC aired its last new black-and-white day­time pro­gram­ming in Decem­ber 1967.