A part of the family ... and the furniture.

Lynn Spigel's history of the television's "installation" in American domesticity points, interestingly, to a time when machines were compelled to look less like machines and, instead, more like furniture. This, in part, probably helped to assuage some of the fears of Americans about these early techno-monsters taking over their living rooms (formerly parlors). Spigel also applies these efforts at furniturization to anxieties about the television's watchful influence over the domestic realm when she demonstrates how "... the attempt to camouflage technology as a piece of interior decor went hand in hand with the more specific attempt to 'screen out' television's visual field, to manage vision in the home so that people could see without being seen" (118).

There is, however, an entire tradition of this kind of "camouflage" of mechanical aids within the home, beginning with the Singer sewing machine (referred to briefly by Spigel on pg. 24). Anyone who's come across an old Singer in their local second-hand store is probably familiar with the sewing machine/table combo design that required the machine to be lifted out of the center of an otherwise innocuously appearing "endtable". For a while, this was also popular with record players: a host of forties and fifties-era turntables lurk similarly within tables or other kinds of furniture. The television pictured above is at 1958 German design that was marketed as an effort to combine television's functionality with aesthetic grooviness. It's kind of wacko looking, if you ask me: lip chairs everywhere beware of the flying-v tv!

At any rate, I am impressed by the extent to which one might be able to chart the social acceptance of these sorts of in-home technologies over the years by their forms: the more accepted they become in American culture, apparently, the less they have to resemble other household items, or appear to fulfill other functions. The stove/television contraption mentioned by Spigel is another example of manufacturers' desires to assuage their consumers: the setup almost suggests that watching a television is like watching a chicken cook, or a pie bake -- second nature to women's habits for decades previous.