America Invented the Flat Screen TV. It Doesn't Make a Single Screen.

In 2018, the President broke ground in a field in Wisconsin on a factory that was supposed to make TV screens outside Asia for the first time. It was never built, and part of that land is now a Microsoft data center. This year, Sony agreed to hand control of its TV business to a Chinese company, Panasonic handed its TVs to another, and Sharp said it would shut down its famous screen plant. The strange part is that America invented the flat screen, four times over. RCA showed the first liquid crystal display in New York in 1968. Peter Brody built the first active-matrix screen at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh. The University of Illinois invented plasma. Kodak invented OLED. Every one of them ended up being built in Asia. This is the story of how it happened: a General's dream of a TV you could hang on the wall, a company that walled off its own inventors, a Supreme Court case, a plasma startup in an old apple juice factory, and a race that America kept quitting first. 0:00 Cold open 2:12 The General 4:14 The Milky Glass 7:12 The Shrug 11:36 The Screen on the Wall 15:21 The Flood 19:12 The Court 23:44 The Neon Glow 25:58 The Apple Juice Factory 29:51 Japan's Golden Decade 33:17 The Lucky Failure 37:24 Change Everything 40:24 The Wheel Turns 44:56 The Last House 48:33 Epilogue: Who Builds It Did your family own a Zenith or an RCA? Would you pay more for a TV if the screen was made in America? Tell us in the comments.