The surgeon general eventually issued a statement, saying that testing showed that this low level of radiation posed only a small risk to any one set-owner’s health as long as he or she was watching a set in “normal viewing” conditions. Further testing was conducted by the National Center for Radiological Health (NCRH) and the Public Health Service into early 1968. By late July of 1967, television-industry representatives were brought before a congressional committee, which eventually proposed a federal radiation-regulation bill (which became the 1968 Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act). Initially, the radiation concern was limited to a single model, but by late in the year it became clear that televisions from almost every manufacturer were potentially affected-as many as 112,000 sets. Scientists speculated that the high voltage required by color sets was partly to blame. But it wasn’t until 1967, when routine testing revealed that specific large-screen models of GE color sets were emitting “X-radiation in excess of desirable levels,” that there seemed to be any real evidence of such a risk. Since the 1940s, there had been long-standing concerns about radiation leaks from black-and-white picture tubes. Color sets, the new technology of the time, were found to be radioactive. In retrospect, that period might also serve as the explanation for why those of us of a certain age can recall the urgency with which our parents forbade us from sitting too close to the TV. Samsung even warned of possible health risks from watching its 3-D TVs-pregnant women and the elderly were advised not to watch 3-D sets at all.īut in the history of television, the gravest and most all-encompassing danger from the proximity of human bodies to a screen came in the 1950s and ’60s. People still worry about spending too much time in front of a television (much of the recent focus has been on the effects on children and weight gain). From the time of their commercialization, people worried about the potential harms of the device: the harms of placing their face close to the screen, of watching for many hours at a time, of the appliance’s position at the center of domestic life. It’s one of many effects that constant engagement with screens could be having on our eyes, which together produce anxiety about the negative physical effects of contemporary technologies.īefore smartphones and handheld devices, that anxiety was directed at televisions. I picked up my phone again, this time in a panic, to Google my symptoms, and quickly learned that I had experienced what medical researchers have called “ transient smartphone blindness.” It can occur when you look at a bright screen while lying down with only one eye open. When I turned the screen off, I was alarmed to discover that I could no longer see out of my right eye. On a recent morning, I indulged one of my worst habits-checking Twitter on my phone immediately upon waking up.
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