Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: rpm on July 23, 2005, 11:36:45 PM
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link (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/21/AR2005072102249.html)
Gerald E. Thomas had one little idea that changed the sociology of the American family, encouraged the feminist movement, ignited the obesity epidemic and introduced countless Americans to something called Salisbury steak. And all for less than a dollar.
Thomas, who died this week at the age of 83, didn't invent the TV dinner (the U.S. Army and later an airline "food service" company had the same concept before), but he did invent the TV Dinner, C.A. Swanson & Sons' hugely popular meal-ready-to-heat.
A Swanson salesman, Thomas thought he had a clever way to get rid of 520,000 pounds of unsold turkeys following the post-Thanksgiving lull of 1952. On one of his sales calls, Thomas noticed that his customer was shipping boxes of foil-wrapped aluminum trays to Pan American Airlines, which was experimenting with ways to serve hot meals to its passengers. On his flight home, Thomas designed his own three-segment version of the tray, and talked the Swanson brothers into setting up an assembly line (two dozen women armed with ice cream scoops) to plop turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes and peas into 8,000 trays.
The next year, Swanson sold more than 10 million of them at 98 cents each.
But the real breakthrough was the name Thomas bestowed on his brainchild. At the time, just 10 percent of households had TV sets, though it's probable that the other 90 percent wanted one. In 1998, upon being inducted into the Frozen Food Hall of Fame (if you go, check out the fabulous Flavorless Peas exhibit!), Thomas said one of his motivations was to link eating and TV. "Anything that was connected with TV was like anything connected today with . . . personal computers," he said. "That's cool. You're with it if you're into that. That's what TV was." Swanson cleverly designed the package to look like a TV screen.
One of the original aluminum trays that Thomas designed now belongs to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
I personally made that man a million dollars in the 70's.