Where did TV Dinners come from?

When the TV dinner came onto the scene in the 20th century it would shift the West's approach to dining forever. From the first meat-and-vegetable-filled metal tray to today's creative approaches, we chronicle the life of the TV dinner from the 1940s to the present day.

While credit for inventing the beloved TV dinner is usually given to long-standing frozen food company Swanson, there were actually earlier iterations. The very first TV dinner-style meals – including a compartmentalized aluminum tray laden with meat and two vegetables – were manufactured shortly after the Second World War by Maxson Food Systems Inc, and were served on Pan American Airways.

Despite these earlier attempts to crack the market, it was frozen food heavyweight Swanson that had the ingenuity and the marketing prowess to win America over. It launched its product with an elaborate campaign and a neat name to sum up its invention: the TV dinner.

Gerry Thomas, a salesman who purportedly came to the rescue. Inspired by the meals served on a recent Pan American Airways flight he'd traveled on; quick-thinking Thomas pitched the idea of a frozen dinner to bosses. He proposed a metal tray perfectly sized to plate up a full evening meal and designed so it could comfortably sit atop a customer's lap while they watched TV, something that was becoming an increasingly popular pastime during this era.

The bosses loved the idea, and the result was America's first official TV dinner, with turkey and gravy, sweet potato and peas. It was neatly packaged in boxes made to look like televisions – complete with tuning knobs and all – and sold for 98 cents apiece. A mere 25 minutes in the oven and you had yourself a turkey dinner.

You can still find TV dinner for 98 cents today too, but they look like they were made in the 1950's.