In the 1920s, television was not just a new, futuristic technology; it became a symbol of the future itself. The print ads and magazine covers of the day celebrated the advent of TV with breathless descriptions of new developments and potential video services that were coming “Soon!” or even just “Maybe!” — such as this cover from “Radio News,” a very popular US periodical in its time. (Note that television was thought of as an add-on to radio in those days. Note also that it took nearly a hundred years for this magazine cover’s vision of getting medical care via audio-video transmissions to be realized, via a technology no one in the 1920s saw coming: the fusion of video and telephony that we call the “smart phone”.)

But television didn’t really take off until after World War II, and by the 1960s, when reasonably priced color sets from Japan began to swamp the global market, TV was such a normal part of industrial-world households that it called less and less attention to itself, as a technology. Ads for televisions focused more and more on the sensual experience it was there to provide. TV was no longer “the future” — it was “magic,” a “wonderland of color” and a “thrilling” window to a world of entertainment and distraction.

And occasionally, a window to visions of the future itself, for it was television that introduced the world to Star Trek — the first  series built around an imagined future where humans had conquered the galaxy with starships.

Source: Window to the Future: The Golden Age of Television Marketing and Advertising, by Steve Kosareff, Chronicle Books, 2003