cathode ray tube

It wasn’t until 1895 that a physicist named Wilhelm Röntgen tried something new: He put the hand of his wife, Anna, between a cathode-ray tube and a photographic plate.

Certainly, television — in the ad-supported, cathode-ray tube age — was an imperfect medium for watching theatrical features.

A huge great buzzing cathode-ray tube that takes five minutes to warm up and generates enough static to hoover all the dead skin cells out of a surrounding arc of carpet.

Then the cathode-ray tube glowed like an imitation, feeble TV image; a collage formed, made of apparently random colors, trails, and configurations which, until the handles were grasped, amounted to nothing.

For Thrust, Earl Reiback dismantled a television—“detached and emptied the cathode-ray tube” and “scraped” the phosphor layer from the screen—and reassembled it.