@coredumpproject but that simply isn't true. the notion that 1950s tvs didn't display static when there was no valid signal being received. and there was little to no consistency in the tone of the viewable screen, its phosphor layer, and any intervening protective and visually filtering glass layers. not uncommon in the least to have, for instance, a layer of evenly smoked or tinted glass specifically to provide a good deep black level for instance.
i have used and even assisted in fixing, on rare occasions, vintage television sets of the 1950s and even seen the real early 1940s and 1930s tvs. once the picture tube warms up to display anything, you will see static on the tv set when it's not being fed a signal it can understand, and it does look like white, black, and varying shades of grey. depending on particular model from that era and how their adjustment settings are at thee moment it will also be rolling horizontally or vertically pretty substantially too.
similarly the visual artifacts of a weak but otherwise compliant monochrome signal with typical broadcast static noise will look about the same on a very old black and white tv as it did on later color sets - the "snowing" effect of near-random bright and dark dots appearing, the whole nine yards. the one thing you don't get, of course, is any incorrect colors or color fading in and out - since you don't have color decoding logic in the set or a means to display it if you did.
now of course he could have simply been misremembering or thinking of a very worn down set that badly needed servicing. it could have even been a specially equipped tv that had circuitry attached to cut off signal if there was some clever means of determining not enough signal (but needless to say, although that later became a thing with 90s/2000s CRTs that could switch to a standby all-blue screen and cut the audio if they didn't get enough signal over the noise, it'd be be pretty expensive to do a similar cut off to a blank screen in the 50s with 50s tech.). but on a normal 1950s tv? nah you'd see the pseudorandom screen image and hear the blare of static on the speaker just the same as you would on a tv 60 years on.
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