Folks erected massive homemade towers to catch a signal and would sit for hours watching-anything to see this marvelous, new big-city invention. Nothing in modern society compared with a TV, which in 1948 sold for $149 ($1,100 in today's dollars) in the Sears Roebuck catalog. The comedian Milton Berle, as host of Texaco Star Theatre, did more to sell TV sets in the late 1940s than any RCA salesperson, and by 1952, I Love Lucy drew 10 million of the nation's viewers. Little wonder that TV became the largest advertising medium in the world almost overnight. The mass embrace of the medium that
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