Hotpoint Tv?

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drewz

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Jul 21, 2005
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Alexandria, Virginia
Who Knew?

 

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i have one

i have the one on the right,mine showing late-'56 date codes,it's a "transfomerless
type"set with series string tubes and two selenium rectifiers.Mine works decent,
but is all original except a couple bad tubes i had to replace-probably has a few
"dry"caps and "drifted"carbon resistors that could be replaced to improve
performance a bit.I don't know for sure,but it did not look"GE" to me internally.
 
Everybody, except maybe Frigidaire and APEX, marketed a TV it seems. I got a little Westinghouse portable with a sun screen over the picture tube as a high school graduation present and it worked beautifully for decades. Amazing.

In the 50s, a lot of the portables had metal cabinets. It might have been to reduce fire risk because, in the South, TVs, "Blew Up." I could never determine what that phrase meant, but I used to see sets sitting all forlorn in corners and was told the reason they were not being used was that they "Blew Up." I don't know how this was related to the other highly technical term, "Tore Up," as in "It's tore up" or "He tore it up" but these two conditions afflicted lots of mechanical things in the South of the 50s.
 
I recognize those designs as GE. But I don't remember Hotpoint US advertising TVs. Not even on Ozzie and Harriet where Hotpoint was the primary sponsor. Anything's possible though.
 
Souht?Heat Humidity-and components in older sets,flyback transformers,yokes,wax coated capacitors were NOT flameproof.If they started on fire-they kept burning.And if the set is in a metal cabinet-and transformerless-BEWARE--in older cords the plugs were non-polarized-so the WHOLE cabinet could be charged!!!I do remember a lot of transformerless sets--the twin selenium rectifers in a voltage doubler circuit-give a main B+ voltage of about 220-250DC for the plate voltages of the tubes.I was trying to remember if any transformerless chassis were used in metal cabinets-if so--scary.A polarized cord and plug would need to be fitted to prevent the case from being charged.I don't remember Hotpoint TVs-always remember Hotpoint appliances such as the small ones and ranges,fridges,washers and such.Now I see that Hotpoint Did make electronic appliances.Wonder if they made radios,too.
 
tolivac, thanks for the background on the South heat issue. What you describe reminds me of one of my mothers friends she came running over to our house telling my mother that the color was coming out of her tv set on the carpet?  I was probably seven at the time and could not understand how this could happen so we went over to her house and she had a big Zenith color console probably 1967 or 68, anyway my mother and her moved the set and found like orange wax in little piles on the carpet, and she thought it was the color leaking out of the set.  I guess women did not pay attention when the repair man came and looked and asked questions like most kids do, so they could see for themselves there was no liquid color inside of a color set.
 
"hot"chassis

my hotpoint transformerless has a metal cabinet,but the chassis is isolated from
the cabinet by plastic insulators-however if a plastic knob was removed or
replaced with a metal one,could be a real shock hazard...This set also has
printed circuit boards.Another small transformerless portable TV i have,made in
1960,has a couple white ceramic"sarkes tarzanion"silicon diodes that plug in like
fuses instead of selenium rectifiers
 
Sarkes Tarzan rectifier

when I was going to college at the University of South Dakota At Springfeild,South Dakota-they had a Sarkes Tarzan Ch#2 TV transmitter that used to be used by the PBS station in Vermillion,S.Dak.It was a special project to get that college gift unit running.--and in its power supply,600-1200VDC was huge stacks of those Sarkes Tarzan plug in diodes-they were used in all kinds of things starting in the late fifties onward.Yes,got that transmitter going and had to order a case of those diodes thru the school to get it going!The school had a dummy load for me to run the transmitter into for its tests-some signal leaked to a neighboring dorm-they would see my test patterns and videos over Star Trek-the folks in the dorm didn't like that.Never told them what it was.When I lived in a dorm at that school-a neighbor there loved to paly his stero LOUD while I was trying to study or sleep.Listened closely-he was listening to a FM rock station-so I had a handy sweep generator (test device for aligning TV's and FM radios)Tuned it to the station the neighbor was listening to----and HUMMMMMMMHUMMMM!!!It got really quiet.So kept that sweep generator handy while studying or sleeping.And that man had only one record he would play all of the time-so sick of it!Couldn't jam that!
 
I've got one too

I've got a Hotpoint portable. Yes, they are GE sets.
I found the 9" sets interesting. They had no second anode on the CRT. Instead the HV was sent to gun and it shot right to the screen. Sorta like a scope tube but with a yoke. The CRT has no aluminization so you can watch the show from behind the screen. Cheapest design I ever saw of that era, but cute.
I heard (but cannot prove) that the Hotpoint TVs were sold sorta-kinda as a promotional product when you went to buy a major appliance. That would make sense for the portables as TV in the kitchen was quite the luxury.
However, I've only seen one Hotpoint console. The one picture by 112561 is a super-fancy one that I've never seen but it screams GE all the way.
 
I'm looking at my Hotpoint right now, a 14” portable in two-tone rose and pink, badged on the rear a product of General Electric. It's a sharp looking set with all the controls on top, even includes the stylized Hi-Vi logo on the side, however on the inside it's got that GE penny-pinching. Barebones chassis with a total of 14 tubes, transformer-less, Masonite back captured by the bottom of the cabinet and a grand total of 2 screws to keep it in place (by design). I can just see someone carrying this steel monster and putting their knee right through the back and into the picture tube! -Cory
 

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