This TV set was the futuristic vision of illustrator Frank R. Paul in 1922. And I absolutely love it.

History was made when the first in-flight movie was screened over Chicago in 1921. But it wasn’t until 1939 that passengers were treated to the first in-flight TV. What was playing on the boob-tube in the sky? Live footage of their own plane, oddly enough.

On March 10, 1933 the movie The Crooked Circle became the first feature-length film ever broadcast on TV. What might surprise people today is that it was still in theaters at the time.

Visitors to the National Radio Show at Earls Court in 1961 got a peek at the future of TV. Far from the enormous boxes that might sit on your living room floor, this TV was sleek and stylish — a preview of the TV modernist ideal that was slow to actually arrive.

Futurist-minded weirdos were dreaming up 3D movies as early as the 1910s, back when feature-length films were still in their infancy. But in 1928 the hot new techno-hype was all about television: specifically, 3D TV that people could watch in a theater. Complete with that newfangled sync-sound!

In 1939, the first Major League Baseball game was broadcast on TV—a double-header between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers—at a time when American TV was still very much an experiment. But this broadcast was a long time coming. In fact, years before practical TV tech had even been demonstrated, people were…

Television was hardly a reliable broadcast medium in the early 1930s. But that didn't stop companies from speculating about TV designs of the future. Like this Marconi-brand "radio set of 1960."

Today advertisers use futuristic tech like jetpacks and robots in their TV ads so that potential consumers think of their brand as forward thinking and innovative. In the 1920s, the cutting edge gadget that advertisers most wanted to associate themselves with was television. But, since the technology was still in its…