Spockvarietyhour

spockvarietyhour chernobyl907

This does not even begin to cover the weirdness of cathode ray televisions.

They are literally particle accelerators that you point at your face.

And for eighty years, Americans' favorite thing to do was turn them on and stare at them for hours.

If you overcharge them, they emit gamma radiation.

Servicing them is like disarming a bomb -- their capacitors are enormous and are usually charged to hundreds or thousands of volts, and most of them have no bleed system that drains that charge, meaning that they can still be dangerous months or years after the last time they were powered up. A discharge can not only electrocute you, it can cause tools to melt or explode.

A black-and-white cathode ray TV driven by an unmodulated analog signal is theoretically capable of resolution that would require a microscope to perceive.

jesuisloupseul

Old school CRT monitors had the same issues.

Back when, I worked at a small whitebox pc manufacturer. One day, a service tech brought back an older, gigantic (30 inch or so) AutoCAD monitor from a service call. The customer said "Made me feel nauseous"

So, we put it on the bench and fired it up. You immediately felt the hair on your body stand up, and my co worker put his hand up close to turn the power off, and his hand and forearm started spasming - I yanked the power cord from the wall as the tingle I was feeling began to feel hot.

No idea what was wrong with the thing, but it was kicking out some serious electro magnetic radiation.

hamvendor

Remembering the almost imperceptible high pitched buzzing that let you know the tv was still on even when nothing was on the screen. Also putting your forearm near the screen and watching the hairs stand up

commodorez

It's a few dozen kilovolts of charge stored in a CRT, but that's what flings the electrons from the guns at the back to the phosphors on the screen. The key is to discharge the tube safely before servicing, and when you've got to do certain calibrations while it's powered on (like convergence alignment), you use insulated tools and follow the one-hand rule: only let one hand into the chassis at a time. The idea is not to give the electricity a path to discharge from one arm through your heart out the other arm. I tend to keep one arm behind my back while working on CRTs as a result.