Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter.N.
I've never seen one of those, in fact I didn't know Murphy made TV's before the war. You have certainly done a brilliant job on it.
The CRM91 seems quite a modern tube for a pre war set, they were still using them in the '50's and they weren't a lot of good then, at least the 12" one wasn't, we had many fail under guarantee, but yours looks fine.
We scrapped a number of pre war TV's in the '50s - I wish I had them now!
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Murphy made two generations of pre-war televisions. The A42V in 1937, and the A56V/A58V in 1938 (the A58V was just an A56V with a radio, essentially the same set).
According to some information on the internet, Murphy had been doing television experiments before the start of television in November 1936. But for whatever reasons they were not ready with a television for the start in November 1936. For all intents the A42V when it was introduced in 1937 was "late to the party", it was a mirror lid television when the likes of EMI were introducing direct view televisions (i.e. no mirror). If the quoted sales figures are reliable they only sold 62 sets. It probably didn't help that the A42V was probably over-engineered and too costly for the target market, who were more interested in price.
The A56V and A58V introduced in 1938 seems to be a sea-change in attitude, they obviously realised cost was the primary stumbling block for sales. The A56V had a 9" CRT tube for the amazingly low cost of £30, when the EMI competition could only offer a tiny 5" tube for 30 guineas (i.e. £31 10 shillings). It is probably quite evident Murphy were subsidising the cost of the A56V to gain market share. The A58V with radio sold for £45 which was comparable to say a HMV 907 at 45 guineas (i.e. £47 5 shillings). So Murphy were probably not making a loss on the A58V.
The A56V according to the quoted sales figures sold reasonably well at 1445 sets. The A58V sold rather less well at 225 sets. Perhaps due to having no cost incentive people choose to go with the market leader (EMI with their HMV and Marconiphone brands) when it came to the A58V.
As far as survivability is concerned, oddly about 7 sets survive for each of the A42V, A58V and A56V models, making a total of about 21 sets. Which both means Murphy televisions survived in very low quantities, and that the A56V survived in vastly lower quantities percentage-wise than the other models.
One can only speculate why so few Murphy televisions survived. Here first you have to consider the survival rate among all pre-war television manufacturers. One thing which is clear is table models are over-represented in respect to the larger console models, presumably because table models sold more and were easier to store after they ceased to be usable. None of the pre-war Murphy televisions were table models, and hence suffered a higher rate of destruction, which exacerbated their low sales in respect to other manufacturers.
But there is another thing in play here, the really expensive televisions survive in greater ratio than cheaper sets, presumably because they cost so much, despite being bulky.
So as usual there's a certain squaring of the circle here. The expensive sets survive because they were expensive. The cheapest sets survive because they were table models and easy to store.
Perhaps the A42V and A58V survive in high quantities percentage-wise because they were expensive. The A56V survives in vastly less quantities percentage-wise perhaps because it was neither expensive nor easily storable being a console.
My good CRM92 tube is a result of buying as many post-war TVs with a CRM92 as I could find. That way I have obtained 4 CRM92s, by luck one of them turned out to still have a good emission tube. With the other 3 I obtained two fairly useless low emission tubes, and a reasonable emission tube, it shows signs of lower emission but it still works reasonably well. I had that tube in the V56V for most of the restoration work, swapping it out for the better emission tube for the video and the picture of the test card.
I have read that many dealers in the 50s deliberately scrapped pre-war televisions because of the dangerous mains derived EHT power supplies. They didn't want them to fall into the wrong hands. Call it in hindsight the wrong move but it was done then for the best of reasons.