Venus arrives. The furniture can leave.

This television has shoulders. In the National Science and Technology Museum's photograph, Tatung's Venus stands between tall, dark columns, with two great circular grilles below the screen. It looks ready to receive foreign dignitaries. Bring it home and the other furniture would have to accept a humiliating reshuffle.

That was part of its charm. The museum's collection account puts these large wooden televisions back among the household furnishings they were designed to impress. A colour set could even be a wedding dowry. Never mind turning it on. You had barely plugged the thing in and its owner's prestige was already glowing.

Fighting for those two centimetres

The museum's history of the Venus explains the offensive. In 1973, Sampo introduced its 20-inch Napoleon, drawing on a Japanese Sharp design inspired by a bay window. The body could swivel 15 degrees. Tatung answered with a cabinet two centimetres wider and two centimetres taller, two extra decorative speakers, and a swivel increased to 30 degrees. Even the specification sheet refused to give way. Mine is bigger.

Having won on dimensions, the name could hardly concede defeat. Project leader 鄭源錦 thought of the saying 英雄難過美人關—even a hero can be overcome by beauty—and summoned Venus. Napoleon was now up against a Roman goddess whose cabinet was larger than his. The sheer commitment to this old appliance war is rather endearing.

Give the rest of the machine a look, too. Consider that substantial wooden frontage and how much space went into making the thing imposing. On Venus, the enormous lower grilles and tall sides reduce the picture tube to a tenant renting one room. Today's thin black screens give a fair amount of space back to the wall. These old cabinets weren't surrendering an inch.

The emperor advertises

To hear Napoleon pitching himself to the household, visit the National Museum of Taiwan History's 臺灣音聲100年 archive and open its 1975 Taiwanese-language Sampo Napoleon colour-TV advertisement. The page's play button starts a clip of about 33 seconds. The recording comes from Ming-Chi Recording Studio, founded in 1966; the museum began organizing the donated materials in 2014. A voice recorded to sell things has ended up in a museum collection itself.

For the grand cabinets, head to the sixth-floor Taiwan Industrial History hall in the National Science and Technology Museum's north building. See how broad Venus's shoulders are. Those extra two centimetres were never meant to be polite to your living room.