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This is excellent stuff! What's important to notice here is how this TV was repairable even after all those years. Modern consumer electronics is basically disposable and if somebody digs into a new-old-stock 2024 TV in 2091 they will never get it working: no schematics are published, the parts are microscopic and if a device has firmware burned into it, a replacement device will be a blank slate without the firmware loaded in.
(I can't recall having a TV-Repair place nearby for about 25 years now!)
I did something slightly similar with a 1970s ELMO sound projector found new-in-box in a closed camera shop about 7 years ago. Considering it's a simpler device and about 20 years newer, that was pretty light-duty work compared to this TV!
The guy who made that video obviously gets the same kind of joy and satisfaction collecting and fixing old TV's that we do here with movie projectors. Those old Philco's certainly had a unique futuristic look , unlike any other television set.
From the days when America led the world in consumer electronics design and manufacturing. The fact that this old Philco is essentially still functioning perfectly after 60 years is a tribute to Philco's enginerring and quality of that time.
The new stuff is in certain very tangible ways better. That old TV uses a great deal more power and with that two prong plug it certainly isn't as safe. Of course a modern TV has that whole color...thing going on and much better sound. Proportional to the dollars of the time, the new ones are much, much cheaper too.
-all that being said, that Philco TV was made without planned obsolescence and not designed to run a certain number of thousand hours, die and then be standing out at the curb on garbage day. When it eventually failed, it was still worth repairing.
There was also a lot more distinctiveness among different appliances those days, even in the same brand. A television or radio or other appliance had a unique architecture to the case. My Mom had a beautiful electric cake mixer: chromed steel case in Art-Deco style. It's worth noting too that she got this as a wedding present ten years before I was born and it was still working well into my teens.
-a modern TV on the other hand is usually a great black tomb-stone and unless you look for the "Toshiba" or "Sony" or "LG" label, they are pretty hard to distinguish one from the other. We have four of 'em: different sizes and brands, and other than the size and remote used, they are basically interchangeable.
A modern TV is a lot like a bottle of milk: a container that contains a certain limited quantity of a desired benefit (-not calcium and vitamin D but instead Video Entertainment), that you accept upon purchase that it will eventually be depleted and you'll need to go to the store and buy another one. It's the benefit that you care about and two weeks after the new one goes in you won't particularly notice a difference.
The brand usually isn't a big difference either: let's face it. Milk is Milk!
One thing I have always wondered about when seeing ads for that Philco TV was the safety of having an exposed external 18kv cable running up to the CRT.
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