In cleaning out my late brother's home, my nephew came across these 2 glare reducing filters and passed them on to me. I had to explain to him what they were. I'm not a collector of early T.V. but would be pleased to pass these two on to a worthy place gratis.
One of the glare reducers is plastic, the other glass. The plastic glare reducer had stickum around its periphery, the idea being to stick it to the picture tube's surround. Some paper is still stuck to the stickum. The glass one has some of its plastic wrapping stuck to the inside. Both glare reducers seem to be for 10 inch semi-rectangular picture tubes with plenty of margin.
The first commercial TV sets had 7" diagonal black and white pictures shown on a round faced picture tube suitably masked off. The "white" of the picture was excited phosphorescent coating on the inside of the picture tube. The picture itself emitted a certain amount of glare that made long term watching tiresome. Oil filled heavy glass magnifying "glasses" were sold to make the picture larger. They had a bracket that the T.V. sat on. Believe me, those T.V. sets were very heavy. By 1950, 7" T.V.s were obsolete. 10 inch picture tubes were the sought after ones.
My father, Jerome A. Robinson (born 1896 in Brooklyn NY), obtained a patent on putting a filtering plastic in front of a T.V. picture tube to lessen the glare, but he didn't realize that he could have added making the picture tube's glass of a filtering nature. Didn't take long for the tube manufacturers to get Corning and Libby Owens Ford to make glass with some sort of Polarizing to bypass his patent.
The patent was issued to him at 17 St. Andrews Place, Yonkers. My late brother may have had the patent info, but it's too late to get that information now. Unfortunately, I don't have any paperwork relating to his patent nor remember the patent attorney's firm. Figure on about 1949-52 as the time frame.
Interestingly, when I graduated from high school in 1953 with no financial chance for college, I immediately got a job in the TeleRay Tube Mfg. Co. on Saw Mill River Rd. in Yonkers. We bought 19, 21 and 13" glass envelopes in bulk. These were the main glass parts of the picture tubes. We installed "getters," the electronic components, and then glass welded the thin ends of the tubes to the fat ends, then evacuated the tubes and sealed them shut. Protruding from the long skinny ends were maybe 7 +/- thin copper wires. My job was to thread each wire into a Bakelite "cap," glue it to the glass, and solder each wire into a matching hollow "pin." This entailed fluxing the pins, turning the heavy picture tube upside down, immersing the pins in a bucket of solder for a couple of seconds, and then putting the tube onto a rolling rack to be moved to the packaging area.
One day one of the tubes on a rack imploded which caused a number of nearby tubes to get hit by flying glass and also implode. We had a safety barrier made of stacks of unfolded cartons. The crew dived for protection behind it until the glass stopped flying. We probably lost a dozen tubes out of a day's run of around 100.
Not changing any of our methods, some days were were branding Magnavox, other days RCA, G.E., Raytheon, etc. and putting them into appropriately marked cartons to ship out.
In August we started to process 23" picture tubes. Monsters to handle by both size and weight. Standing only 5'6" and under 120 pounds, that was a bit too much for me. My redemption came with a mid August letter stating that I'd earned a full scholarship to NYU. Having come from a family with very modest income, that was my key to advanced education and a far different life from factory work.
