In the old days, your TV might generate enough static electricity to lift your hair, or even torture your brother with static electricity like an evil cartoon. Where did the static electricity go?
Here’s why old TVs are stable
To understand why old TVs give people the power to attack people, hair rises from your head when you approach them, and spiky hairs when a cat passes by and rubs the screen. or yourself) With one touch, you should be looking at how the old CRT giant worked.
First, let’s take a cross section of the inside of a cathode ray tube (CRT) TV to identify the main parts of a good old 20th century TV.
First, there is a series of electronic guns (1) that shoot a stream of electrons (2) from the back of the tube towards a beam mask (3) to separate the red, green and blue components of the image. The beam passes through the ultra-fine mesh of the ray mask and strikes inside the phosphor-coated television glass (4). The inset magnified view (5) shows how the beam strikes and excites the phosphorous layer. This creates an iconic glow for the TV.
The whole process was high energy. In fact, if you’ve ever heard someone warn you not to open an old TV because the shock can stop your heart, they’ve been giving you good advice.
Old kits included a transformer that produced a high-voltage current to power the electron gun. A constant barrage of electrons on the metal screen behind the thickened glass of the TV produces a constant positive charge. If left alone, static electricity will slowly dissipate in the room, but before that, if you bring something with a negative charge (like your hand) near the screen, the object will be attracted to the screen.
At relatively low levels, the charge can be felt as a kind of steady hum or pull, and at higher levels you can even hear a crackling sound as your hand moves across the screen. If the static accumulator is high enough, it will “jump” and “shoot” off the screen.
This is also the reason why old TVs always look dusty. Airborne dust particles near the TV were drawn directly into the glass as if the screen were a vacuum cleaner.
Why new TVs are not fixed
It is wrong to say that flat screen TVs are completely free of static electricity. All electronic devices in operation generate a small amount of static electricity.
But unlike a giant cathode ray tube that shoots a steady stream of electrons into the glass of old TVs, modern TVs are a much slimmer (and less energy) material without much electronic levitation.
Instead of using large amounts of energy to excite the phosphor layer covering a thick piece of glass, modern televisions use much less energy to route signals to individual small pixels in a very thin network to turn them on or off.
Exactly how pixel mode works and how certain signals are handled depends on flat panel technology. However, the general assumption applies whether you’re talking regarding an old flat-screen computer monitor or a shiny new OLED TV.
So while both older CRT TVs and newer flat screen TVs use electricity, modern TVs use much less energy and are not used in ways that generate large amounts of static electricity on the screen’s surface.
The body of a flat-screen TV collects slightly more dust than a similarly sized non-electronic body in the same place, but most of it is attracted to the TV’s plastic body. It’s not a screen as it was historically.
It not only reduces dust generation, but also saves electricity. Modern televisions, even living room televisions, have significantly lower operating and phantom power loads than older televisions. So you can enjoy much higher resolution images while saving time removing dust and rough screens and saving on your electricity bill.
