World's first TV commercial aired 1941

(Photo: YouTube/screenshot)

The world's first TV commercial aired in the USA on 1 July 1941. It was a spot for Bulova, a watch and jewelry company established 66 years earlier in New York. This static 10-second advert featured a voice saying "America runs on Bulova time," teve.ba cites Mashable as reporting.

The first "legal" ad in the history of television was broadcast at 2.29 PM, right before a baseball match between Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies.

Bulova paid USD 9 for this spot aired on NBC's channel WNBT that started broadcasting on that very day. However, this commercial was seen by only few thousand people, given that there were only about 4,000 TV sets in New York at that time.

Mashable points out that the Bulova commercial was the first legal TV advertisement. Two years earlier NBC ran experimental adverts for three companies - Procter & Gamble, Socony Oil (called Mobil today), and General Mills, also during a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball game.