September 10th is a special day for television viewers around the country -- National TV Dinner Day!
The first TV dinner arrived in stores in 1954 and became a staple of living rooms across America.
Here's five other things you never knew about America's favorite aluminum tray meal.
1. There's debate over who created the TV dinner
Frozen dinners were first served during flights on airplanes and several other frozen dinner plates were available at the time but most credit C.A. Swanson & Sons with creating and marketing the meal to be heated in home ovens. The L.A. Times tried to get to the bottom of it.
Christian Montone/flickr.com
2. The first TV Dinner was an entire Thanksgiving Dinner
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eSF0JpZFbQ
3. The original tray is in the Smithsonian
The Swanson aluminum tray is classified under the
4. Swanson sold 5,000 TV dinners in 1954. A year later they sold 10 million.
In 1960 Swanson added the little desert area with a fruit cobbler. Sueism1/flickr.com
5. The Swanson company stopped using the phrase "TV Dinner" in 1962.
Company executives decided to drop dinner from the title because they feared that customers wouldn't eat the meals at other times of the day. They also launched a breakfast meal line a few years later.
Find out more about TV dinners from our friends at ABC NEWS:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_S6KCsmyoI
WSBTV
