It seems that only grandparents can not be explained what KVN is. No, not the "Club of the cheerful and resourceful", founded in 1961, but the same "bought - turned on - does not work", which first appeared in the year 1949. This is the first national TV set of its own production in the Soviet Union.
The invention "Method of electrical transmission of images over a distance" in Soviet documents dates back to 1907, but because of the revolution and two world wars, the development of a television, available to any citizen of the USSR, began only in 1944 in Leningrad. It took four more years for the developers of a fundamentally new device to create a prototype and set up streaming production. The letters KVN, cherished for millions of families, mean "Konigson - Varshavsky - Nikolaevsky" - these are the names of the engineers - the main creators of the first mass Soviet TV. In fairness, it should be noted that there were televisions in the USSR before KVN. For example, in 1932, the B-2 appeared in the country - a strange device with a formidable name, a screen the size of a postage stamp, a telephone dial for switching waves and no speakers. From the 38th, all the party bosses had TK-1 in their apartments - Soviet televisions assembled according to American drawings and licenses. There were also VRK, and ATP-1, and 17TN-1, but all of them were expensive, rare and practically inaccessible outside Moscow and Leningrad. KVN became a real people's apparatus, for just a couple of average salaries available to both a worker and a collective farmer. The first "talking boxes" with KVN letters rolled off the assembly line in the city of Aleksandrovsk, Vladimir Region at the end of 1949, and therefore received the official name KVN-49. Folk humorists immediately christened it “I bought it - turned it on - it doesn’t work”, and in general it is not unreasonable. The first KVN turned out to be incredibly capricious and difficult to set up, weighing almost 30 kilograms and containing almost two dozen fragile lamps. He received only three channels, and the size of the picture tube was only 14 centimeters by 10, 5 centimeters! But the wooden case of the TV turned out to be massive and very noticeable in the interior. Even more space in the apartments was occupied by special lenses filled with water or glycerin. These aquariums worked like ordinary magnifying glasses and were placed in front of the KVN so that the screen became a little larger - in front of the TVs they gathered not only families, but also yards, communal apartments, whole villages. Soon after KVN-49, KVN-49-A was born., the main differences with the original, at the request of the workers, were a clearer picture tube and a modified circuit diagram. The sound, however, left much to be desired. So, revision after revision, modernization after modernization, the factories of the Soviet Union produced as many as seven families of KVN. Then there were other televisions. The "Record" TV, which is still being produced to this day, is considered the full-fledged successor of KVN; KVN is the ancestor of not only modern mass television, but television in general, since without prevalence there would be no audience.
