General Electric 901
1947 43 tube projection TV
This page is preliminary and things will be changing in time. Thanks for reading!
This is probably the heaviest, if not one of the heaviest pieces in my collection!
Originally, I wasn't really interested in adding another television to my collection, but as I've been looking for one of the post-war GE Musaphonic consoles, this one fills the bill, and has an amazing television to boot!
The only two things the Musaphonic console has that this doesn't have is the 15 MHz Shortwave band, and seperate Bass and Treble tone controls. I think I can live with that.
My 14 tube General Electric 502 does have these two features, but again, it's not a Musaphonic.
The 901 is simply a MONSTER! It is so heavy and large, it was an absolute MUST that I put it onto a roll-around platform with heavy-duty steel wheel casters. The board it is sitting on is 2 ft X 4 ft 3/4" plywood. And its not quite enough!
It produces a 30" diagonal picture! This is quite the feat considering most televisions at the time were between 3 inch and 10 inch in size.
Anyhow, I hope to add more to this page as I can
In the meantime, here are some links about this television.
GE 901 at the Early Television Foundation website
Article about the RCA projection system which is very close to the one the GE 901 uses. Also at the ETF website
GE 901 at RadioMuseum.org
I've decided to add some photos of my General Electric 502 to this page as it is somewhat related.
As I've already pulled the power supply out, I decided to take some photos of it as it sits.
The construction is quite amazing. I see all the tubes are original General Electric tubes. The HV rectifiers are labeled "1B3GT" and "8016".
Needs plenty of cleaning. As I've some Kapton tape, I think it will make a good replacement for the old tape going around the quadrupler section.
Thank you for reading!
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