This early Zenith color TV ad dates to the 1960s and promotes the AFC, automatic fine tuning control that is so easy “you can use it blindfolded” even on those “new UHF channels”. “The quality goes in before the name goes on.”

Zenith was co-founded by Ralph Matthews and Karl Hassel in Chicago, Illinois, as Chicago Radio Labs in 1918 as a small producer of amateur radio equipment. The name “Zenith” came from ZN’th, a contraction of its founders’ ham radio call sign, 9ZN. The first Zenith television set was sold to the public in 1948. The first national color broadcast occurred on January 1, 1954, but over the next dozen years most network broadcasts, and nearly all local programming, continued to be in black-and-white.

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