Window to the Future: The Golden Age of Television Marketing and Advertising

When television sets were still a luxurious novelty, manufacturers had to sell the new technological wonders by emphasizing their most glamorous, comforting, and appealing attributes. Window to the Future is a nostalgic, humorously prescient look at the ads and graphics that introduced TV to a consumer public who would make it a fixture in the home within a few short years. From fanciful visions in early radio magazines to the lifestyle ads in the heyday of the "talking picture box," Window to the Future brims with images that projected idealized scenarios of the television as a treasured addition to the household. Celebrities who would come to dominate the medium (Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan not least) endorsed the latest Westinghouses and Zeniths, while illustrations of dapper men and elegant women hosting cocktail hour in front of their new black-and-white console projected the party trend of the future. More than 150 print advertisements, magazine covers, and catalog images show the evolution of our complex relationship with this ubiquitous domestic appliance and a pixellated trip down memory lane of television's youthful innocence.