Heavy Metal Madness: Men Live In a Vacuum… Tube

My last column, which addressed the gender gap in housework duties, drew a number of responses, all from men, suggesting that while it may be true that men don’t do as much house cleaning, cooking, shopping, or other chores, they contribute equally to the big picture of home life. Men’s traditional duties around the home tend toward caring for the cars, heavy-lifting chores such as taking out the garbage or cleaning the rain gutters, and a variety of infrastructure work involving plumbing, electrical, and HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning). And in my experience, if a man is around, he’s most likely to be in charge of pest control — picking up mouse heads the cat drug in, dealing with a sudden bloom of ants, and rescuing spiders from bathtubs.


Sure, men might know how to enjoy themselves after dinner, but just wait until the toilet backs up or the network goes down. Then they kick into action. From a 1941 General Electric Ad.



But for me, the most prototypically male household duty, historically and currently, is responsibility for the entertainment and information network and appliances. Whether this responsibility is a duty or a hobby is a little hard to define, but it seems as soon as radio and then television came into the home, it was the man of the house who took over responsibility for keeping the signals strong, the picture clear, and the wiring sound. And so the advertising, packaging, and other imagery of this area of modern life are aggressively male.


It’s pretty common for men to take charge of anything in the home with a screen on it.



I spent a great deal of my own childhood watching my dad try to fix the television, accompanying him to the local drug store to test vacuum tubes, holding the ladder for him while he adjusted the roof antenna, and silently listening as he unwittingly taught me how to curse. These experiences prepared me well for the challenges of today’s home networking–wireless hubs, DSL routers, cable or satellite boxes, and the other trappings of a complex home-entertainment and information infrastructure. Much has changed from my Dad’s days, but the cursing is about equal, I’d say.


The television was, and probably still is, the most “male” appliance in the home, at least when it comes to maintenance and size. You can substitute the computer these days and come up with the same basic results.



Dad Handles the “Pipeline”
The quality of family life had, and still has, a lot to do with the strength and quality of various signals and feeds coming into the home. For some reason, men are expected to understand this stuff and are at fault when these connections fail.


This is the real reason men do anything around the house at all.



In the old days, picture or audio quality had almost everything to do with the proper placement and adjustment of the antenna, which if you were serious, resided on the roof and was as large as a small child. Climbing on the roof to install and adjust television antennas was a rite of male passage — and a common catalyst for trips to the emergency room.


Can you hear me now? Obtaining a good strong signal is a satisfying accomplishment for the average male.



Good, Weak, or Replace
Nearly every television or radio repair (and there were many) in those early days involved a weak or failed vacuum tube. These electronic devices, which were first developed in the later part of the 19th century, are as mysterious to me as a computer chip is today, though I do know they were prone to burning out, and they came in every size and shape. A typical television had 10 to 20 of these tubes, and when the set was on and the back off, you could see many of them glowing with a faint orange light that also gave off considerable heat. Like light bulbs (which are essentially the same technology), these electron tubes contained metal-coated electrodes housed in a vacuum environment.


Most men didn’t understand how vacuum tubes worked, but they did know how to test them and replace them when necessary.



By the 1950s and ’60s, the shape of these tubes was mostly utilitarian, but occasionally you’d still come across a tube with a form like a beautiful hand-blown glass vase or other precious vessel.
Nearly everyone dealt with a bad tube now and then, but unlike a light bulb, the only way to know if a tube was good or bad was to test it. An entire industry of tube-testing devices, instruction pamphlets, and tube distribution grew up to serve the home television and radio repair market.
Up until the late ’60s, you couldn’t go into a modern supermarket or drug store and not find a tube-testing machine in a prominent location. What wasn’t in stock at the store was easily ordered, and all kinds of cross-reference charts were available to compare models and part numbers in search of the right tube.


Even though a woman is shown on this tube-testing machine, I don’t ever remember seeing a woman operating one. I think the marketing message here is, “Look, it’s so easy even a woman can do it!” This made the men who tested tubes even more smug.



I was enamored with vacuum tube packaging. Each tube came in its own small cardboard box, which was almost always printed in red and black.


The red and black colors of many vacuum tube boxes conveyed strength and manliness.



Typical tube-supplier names ended in “tron,” a nod to the electron technology at the heart of these devices. Lightning bolts were a common graphic on the boxes, which I was always allowed to keep, along with the burnt-out tubes.


Selling tubes was once a big business populated by well-known brands. Now, most tubes come from former Soviet states, though the package design remains the same.



Tube-testing machines were complex. You not only had to find the right receptacle to put the tube in, but then you had to set various dials and switches to match the specifications of that particular tube. Once properly hooked up you’d wait a few minutes while the tube warmed up, and watch with anticipation as the meter would deliver the verdict: replace, weak, or good. And if the result was “replace,” you’d jiggle the tube a bit, tap on it with your index-finger nail, and otherwise wrangle it to make sure it wasn’t just a connection problem.


The meter tells all. If it’s in the green, it’s good. If it’s in the red, it’s time for new.



If someone like my dad was lucky, popping a couple of tubes out of the set and taking them down to the Thrifty Drug Store would uncover a single culprit. A quick purchase of a replacement tube (along with a six pack of Olympia Beer and a carton of Camels), and the family would be back in front of the television eating popcorn before you knew it. But if all the tubes tested fine, then a call to the TV repair guy was likely next.
All Brains are Wired Differently
These days, we don’t have replaceable parts, supposedly, but I still find myself going to CompUSA or Radio Shack about the same amount of times my dad went to Thrifty Drug to test tubes. Keeping a home computer network up and running can be tricky, and going without the Internet or cable is even more debilitating than it was in my childhood. Back then, there were only three channels to miss.
It’s pretty easy to figure out why things like backed-up toilets and leaking water heaters seem to be men’s work. I suppose we deserve that, and of course we love to be problem solvers, especially if it involves several trips to the hardware store. Men like a problem that is visual, and that stimulates the ego to buck standard procedure and “do it my way.” Admitting we don’t have a clue is just not in the cards.
But I’ve never understood why networking in all of its historical guises is mostly a male domain. It seems to me the discipline, thoroughness, and analytical nature of this work is better suited to the female brain. Once again I suspect it comes down to a matter of control — men can easily create the impression of a complex world of wires and airwaves that are simply “too complicated” to explain.
The other issue may be purely practical. Had my mother ever been the one to take the vacuum tubes down for testing, we would have never gotten the set fixed. She would have insisted on reading the directions, and as all men know, that is a complete waste of time.
Read more by Gene Gable.

Gene Gable has spent a lifetime in publishing, editing and the graphic arts and is currently a technology consultant and writer. He has spoken at events around the world and has written extensively on graphic design, intellectual-property rights, and publishing production in books and for magazines such as Print, U&lc, ID, Macworld, Graphic Exchange, AGI, and The Seybold Report. Gene's interest in graphic design history and letterpress printing resulted in his popular columns "Heavy Metal Madness" and "Scanning Around with Gene" here on CreativePro.com.
  • Anonymous says:

    I was just telling my girlfriend about going to the drugstore as a ‘kid’ and testing the family’s TV tubes.
    I was trying to describe the testing part of this unit and the storage cabinet.
    So, she desided to ‘google’ for images and your page came up.
    Thanks for bringing back these images from my childhood.
    Allan C. (from Toronto, Canada … childhood in Montreal, Canada)

  • Stephen Barnard says:

    Beautifully written nostalgic piece, Gene. I recall using those tube-testing machines. You speculations about male/female roles rings true, as well. The TV cameras of the 50s stand out in my recollection. They were huge, must have weighed hundreds of pounds, and recorded majorly shitty analog NTSC. I have a camera on my consumer drone that weighs an ounce or two and records beautiful 4K, storing it on a 64GB microSD card about as big as the thumbnail of your small finger.

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