UNITED KINGDOM – JUNE 16: The Japanese Sony company have been manufacturing televisions since 1961. In 1968, Sony developed a superior cathode ray tube which completely revolutionised the picture quality of colour television. It was called the Trinitron tube: a name derived from ?trinity?, meaning the union of three, and ?tron? from the electron tube. The Trinitron tube employs an aperture grille (where the wires are stretched down the screen), rather than the more usual shadow mask (a metal plate with holes in it), and produces brighter, clearer images. By the early 1970s, there were over 200 million television sets in homes throughout the world. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)