While the purported aim of this exhibition was to explore the object nature of the evolution of the television set, as designers of the exhibition, we were much more interested in representing how broadcasting as a medium and television in particular transformed the family home from a site of production to a site of consumption. We saw television as bringing about the collapse of distance into communication, to paraphrase Leo Marx, as well as representing the extension into the modern period of specific US colonial ideas about ‘manifest destiny’—a right to claim ownership that extends ‘as far as the eye can see’. This bringing of the world into the home, while underway well before television appears, also marks the transformation of the home from a site of production to a site of display; consequently, the role of the wife and children within the home transforms as well.