Manufacturer SPARTON OF CANADA, LIMITED

Sparton Colour Television

Date1960s

Dimensions19 x 40 x 30.5 in

Credit LineGift of Samuel McCoy, London, Ontario, 2014

Object number2004.014.001

Label TextSparton of Canada manufactured this 1960s era colour television. Scientists had developed colour television in the 1940s after decades of effort. Sparton had arrived in London in 1930 as a wholly owned subsidiary of an American firm, the Sparks-Worthington Company (hence Spar-ton). It took over the former Sherlock-Manning piano factory on Elm Street and began building radios and refrigerators, as well as pressing albums for Columbia records from 1939 to 1954. By the 1960s, the company was producing a full range of entertainment products, including televisions. Sparton also began to build sensing devices for the Navy, beginning in the 1960s. The sonobuoy became one of its biggest products. Dropped from an aircraft, it released a transmitter and a sensor used to detect the presence of submarines. Since the end of the Cold War, the company has again repositioned itself and now one of its chief products is the expendable bathythermograph (XBT), a device that measures water temperature and depth and sends back the data through a wire. It is used by fishing fleets.

NameTelevision