Tedium - The Cover-Up 📱

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Why early televisions needed “screen protectors”: It wasn’t because you needed to touch them

In the early days of screens entering our lives, the concerns about the screens were different from what they are today. As the famed YouTuber JerryRigEverything puts it, we’re concerned about scratches at a level 6, with deeper grooves at a level 7. (Shout-out to Mohs Hardness Scale.)

We didn’t need to worry about touching our screens, really. Rather, we needed to think about degaussing them, about ensuring that the surface of the screen stayed intact, and wasn’t negatively affected by dust. And since we were talking about a different technology than the LCD used, the needs were simply different.

And during the early years of the television set, our living room hubs needed a product very similar to a screen protector, albeit one that had a different purpose.

See, early cathode ray tubes faced a risk of implosion. After all, happening inside that good ol’ electron gun is a vacuum effect that put them at a small-but-constant risk of imploding.

If the word “imploding” gives you memories of our piece on Canada’s exploding soda bottles, you are thinking in the right direction. Imagine your family in the living room, watching an episode of Ed Sullivan or Mr. Ed, and all of a sudden, the screen goes awry, sending shards of electron-splashed glass violently flying everywhere, and you kind of get the idea. (If Stephen King had written a short story with basically this plotline, randomly exploding TVs everywhere, I would not be surprised.)

This facilitated the need for screen protectors on early television sets, but rather than protecting you from breaking the screen, these protectors were trying to protect the screen from breaking you. As a 1964 New Scientist piece put it:

Because they are large evacuated vessels, cathode ray tubes can implode, just as a toy balloon can explode. In practice they hardy ever do, and the very few implosions that do occur each year (probably never running into two figures) are often the result of accidental mishandling of the picture tube, which is inherently extremely strong. Yet the one in many millions chance that a viewer might be hurt by flying glass has made it necessary to fit a clear protective guard between the tube and viewer into every receiver that is made. These guards have taken many forms, including flexible and moulded plastic, armour-plated glass, and heavy curved sheet glass glued to the front of the tube.

So early television screens had “implosion guards,” which existed on the off-chance you got a defective unit or the repair didn’t go very well. Talk about entertainment.

The homeowner’s frustration sells it. (The Hammond Times/Newspapers.com)

You may think that it’s unlikely, but I did a search for “exploding television sets” and immediately found stories of cathode ray tubes shattering throughout living rooms in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In one case, from Indiana, the set spontaneously exploded in the middle of the night, causing a situation that the homeowners describe as being similar to an “atom bomb.” A common thread in some of these situations is that the picture tube had recently been changed. (Perhaps the TV repairman forgot the implosion guard?)

So, all this meant that television sets needed screen protectors, though they had a much more imposing name back then. These guards, made of plastic or glass and appearing as early as 1953 in the United Kingdom, had many of the same types of issues that you might see with a screen protector on your phone. Back to New Scientist:

Conventional methods of implosion protection can be seen to suffer from many disadvantages, such as the disturbing occurrence of multiple reflections of objects and lights in front of the receiver, or the penetration of dust into the inaccessible space between the tube faceplate and the guard. (This second problem, particularly troublesome in industrial districts, is aggravated by the fact that the tube acts as its own electrostatic precipitator.)

Added unwanted reflections and a risk of dust getting between the layers? That basically describes the problems with most screen protectors.

So, how come you’ve never heard of an implosion guard? The reason, essentially, comes down to efforts to improve the technology, so the added layer wasn’t needed at all, or at least wasn’t obvious to the consumer. As early as the 1960s, companies were attempting to make television sets more resistant to imploding. Fore example, Owens Illinois, a glass-maker once associated with Owens Corning, received a patent in 1966 for an “implosion resistant cathode ray tube” that relied on mounting elements to hold the screen in place, one of many patents the company received in an attempt to fix this knotty issue.

Many of the solutions that became popular used a similar method to cut back on the stress that the monitor faced. Many later CRTs have this surrounding bracing, which helps take the pressure off the glass itself and even allows the designs to be less curved. As a result, the real reason that the “screen protector” was there no longer became necessary.

Years later, screen protectors found another television use case, but for rear-protection televisions that were used in big-screen settings before the LCD panel, but those used different technology that didn’t face concerns of implosion.

But there was one type of CRT-style panel that benefited greatly from a smartphone-style screen cover, and it directly inspired some of the first patents for handheld-device screen protector technology.

That’s right—we’re going to talk about “fish finders.”

If you look on YouTube, you will find more than a few people who are impressed with Apple’s elaborate system for putting screen protectors on new phones. Using covers produced by Belkin and a device that looks vaguely like a panini-maker, the process is multi-step, bubble-free, and fool-proof.

It almost makes you wonder the obvious question—why does Apple not just put these high-quality things on the screen by default? And not the cheap film that comes off after five minutes, either; long-term screen protectors that are built to last. After all, this will look significantly better than any regular user doing this. Try as you might, whether with tempered glass or with a layer of PVC, you are always going to miss some detail that is going to put a tiny speck of dust under your screen for the next year, slowly driving you mad or leading you to have to reapply the protector.

Apple’s factories are often fairly clean. Hell, so are their stores. Your bedroom is probably a pig sty in comparison.

And the other thing you might be thinking: Is this screen protector thing a racket? Would we be better off not paying for these cheap covers and just taking our chances with the elements? Maybe not, but there are in fact alternatives, and they’ve been around a long time.

The DIY approach to protecting your screen involves a thick piece of packing tape or clear vinyl covering, dish soap, a pen knife, a credit card, and a little bit of pre-planning. You are essentially cutting the plastic to shape, with the hope that the material (whether via adhesive or static) sticks to the device long-term. Unless you are an expert cutter, odds are you will not be able to do more detailed cuts like a punch hole or rounded corners for your makeshift screen protector, but given the right shape, you can save a bit of money.

After all, the reason why there are so many random companies selling this product on Amazon and elsewhere is because it’s insanely easy to produce, so why not produce it yourself?

That’s the way the thinking goes, anyway. But one piece of advice to offer: Don’t go down the road of trying to buff down the glass yourself using sandpaper or car wax. Your phone isn’t built for it, and as a 2012 Popular Mechanics piece notes, nearly all of these techniques do basically nothing to solve the actual problem.

So maybe we are stuck buying cheap screen protectors from no-name companies on Amazon after all.

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