(FORTUNE Small Business) – It all started with holiday leftovers. Just after Thanksgiving in the fall of 1953, C.A. Swanson & Sons, a poultry producer, found itself with a catastrophic surplus: 260 tons of unsold turkey meat. There wasn't enough refrigerated storage room in all the company's warehouses, from Omaha to Jersey City. But the Flying Dutchman solution--shipping the turkey back and forth across the country in cold boxcars--couldn't last.

If that was the necessity part of the invention, the inspiration came on a routine sales call to Pittsburgh. Noting the new aluminum trays that airlines were using for in-flight meals, Swanson sales exec Gerry Thomas began to ruminate. Hmmm. What if we took this thing and...?

In those days, the Swanson company, founded in the early '20s by Swedish immigrant Carl Swanson, was run by his two sons, Gilbert and Clarke. Gilbert was the close-to-the-vest, conservative brother. Clarke, while hardly a riverboat gambler, was more inclined to wing it. As luck had it, Gilbert was on vacation in Hawaii that fall, and the derring-do Clarke was in charge.

Back from Pittsburgh, Thomas showed Clarke the tray with its three separate compartments. "Look," he remembers saying, "what if you put frozen turkey in here and cornbread dressing in there and sweet potatoes in there? Stick the whole thing in the oven, and in less than half an hour--no fuss, no bother--you've got a meal!"

In retrospect, the happy encounter of new technologies--refrigeration, lightweight aluminum, and television--seems inevitable. At the time, though, the idea of a complete, ready-made meal was radical. The country was just emerging from its radio days; only one in five Americans had bought one of those big, clumsy picture boxes. Even fewer had freezing compartments in their iceboxes.

Then there were the cultural questions. In the era of Norman Rockwell and Senator Joe McCarthy, asked Swanson skeptics, should responsible Midwesterners mess with the hallowed family dinner? Would the little woman stoop to it? Would her husband put up with it?

But Swanson executives knew that the rigid rules of society were thawing. Millions of women who had gone to work during World War II were still on the job and might be grateful for a chance to skip dinner preparations--maybe once a week. They could join the rest of the family in front of that new TV for Uncle Miltie or Lucy. Almost imperceptibly, says cultural historian Jackson Lears, the American hearth had begun to shift from the fireplace to the television. Linguistic history was made when the name burst from the lips of Gerry Thomas: "TV Dinner."

Clarke Swanson decided to seize the moment. Soon there was an assembly line of women with ice-cream scoops ladling food into trays. The first run was 5,000 meals, at 99 cents each. The next year, ten million dinners were produced and snapped up by shoppers.

Today, Vlasic Co., the current owner of Swanson, sells three million frozen dinners every week, and its competitors sell another six million. We might call the TV Dinner the greatest revolution in food since...sliced bread.

Thomas remembers the instant he knew his TV Dinner would make it. A grocery-chain manager in Oakland quickly agreed to take 100 cases. "The ladies may not go for the food," he said. "But they'll have to have those trays--it's a perfect place to store buttons."