Televisions through the years

John Logie Baird in 1925 with his original television apparatus Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images Photograph: Hulton Archive/guardian.co.uk Watching the Derby on a Baird television, 1931. We suspect that the velvet-jacketed flapper on the right may have a betting slip in her fist Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images Photograph: Hulton Archive/guardian.co.uk A relatively compact early television on display at the Radio Exhibition in 1938. The BBC had begun regular TV transmissions from Alexandra Palace two years earlier Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images Photograph: Central Press/guardian.co.uk 1941: Baird experiments with colour TV apparatus at his home in Crescent Wood Road, Sydenham, south London. BBC TV had ceased transmission for the second world war, returning in 1946 Photograph: Science & Society Picture Librar/Getty Images Photograph: Science & Society Picture Librar/guardian.co.uk Your complete home entertainment system: a Dynatron combined radio and television - it looks like it might also do as a sideboard - on show at Olympia in 1949 Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Photograph: Hulton Archive/guardian.co.uk 1950: A family watching television at home. The sideboard look still holds, although it's a sleeker, Festival of Britain-style sideboard Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images Photograph: Keystone/guardian.co.uk Televisions did not remain monstrously large for long, however, as is shown by this 1958 image of modern life in the new town of Harlow, Essex. They would have had ITV from London for three years by this point - although we're not expert enough to know what channel they have on Photograph: Frank Martin/Hulton Archive Photograph: Frank Martin/guardian.co.uk 1963: A little boy watches Andy Pandy at home on a pay television. A slot meter on the right allows him to insert 6d coins for an hour of viewing. James Murdoch would approve Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images Photograph: Hulton Archive/guardian.co.uk A Bush television from 1967 - still black-and-white, but able to handle higher resolution 625-line UHF transmissions, as well as the 405-line ones standard in Britain since 1936. BBC2 launched in 1964 as a UHF-only service, starting to add colour three years later; 405-line transmissions finally ceased in 1985 Photograph: Science & Society Picture Librar/Getty Images Photograph: Science & Society Picture Librar/guardian.co.uk ...and here is colour, circa 1970 Photograph: Lambert/Getty Images Photograph: Lambert/guardian.co.uk 1970: a battery-operated Sony Micro Television Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images Photograph: Keystone/guardian.co.uk 1981: An even tinier portable TV, designed by Clive Sinclair, with a 2x2 inch screen and a £90 price tag Photograph: Science & Society Picture Librar/Getty Images Photograph: Science & Society Picture Librar/guardian.co.uk 2007: A visitor rests next to LCD flatscreen television displays at the IFA electronics trade fair in Berlin Photograph: Marcel Mettelsiefen/Getty Images Photograph: Marcel Mettelsiefen/guardian.co.uk The next big thing? A 60-inch Sharp LCD panel for 3D televisions, unveiled in Tokyo this April. It uses a four-colour display - with yellow as well as the usual red, green and blue - to help restore the brightness lost by watching your TV through polarising glasses Photograph: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images Photograph: Yoshikazu Tsuno/guardian.co.uk Perhaps not the next thing, but certainly big - Panasonic's Toshihiro Sakamoto presents a 150-inch, or 6ft by 11ft, plasma screen at CES in Las Vegas, 2008 Photograph: David Paul Morris/Getty Images Photograph: David Paul Morris/guardian.co.uk