Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round they all laughed when Edison recorded sound they all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly they told Marconi Wireless was a phony it's the same old cry welcome back
[00:00:21] Speaker B: to 100 Years of Television.
This is episode 42 Countdown 65, brought to you in living color for 100 weeks that started in October 2025.
This podcast is going to recall the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027, the 100th anniversary of the day television as we know it first appeared on Earth.
I'm Paul Schatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In the last episode, television became interactive with a magic screen and crayons that encouraged kids to help a cartoon character called Winky Dink through his adventures.
Today, television goes over the rainbow by the start of 1954, the United States was home to about 160 million people living in 48 million households.
Some 27 million of those households, roughly 55%, had at least one television set.
What none of them had, however, was any kind of color tv.
That anybody would even think that television could be anything other than black and white came from the movies.
Color had been part of the motion picture experience since the early 1890s, when individual film frames were hand painted or dipped in colored dyes.
Prints of Georges Melies landmark 1902 film A Trip to the Moon were often colorized this way.
Early attempts at actual color film date back to the 1910s, but the first process that really worked was Technicolor's Process 4, which used three separate strips of film.
When Walt Disney used the process for his short film Flowers and trees in 1932, the rich, realistic hues produced an immediate hit and won an Oscar.
Technicolor reached its pre war zenith with the release of the wizard of Oz and Gone with the wind in late 1939.
By the mid-1950s, nearly half of the feature films coming out of Hollywood were in color. That gave the film industry a temporary advantage over the electronic new kid on every block, but also raised expectations that television, too, would eventually be delivered in something other than shades of gray.
But the process of delivering television in color would prove to be one of the most daunting engineering challenges of the mid 20th century.
Experiments with color television actually date back to the first successful experiments with mechanical scanning.
As early as 1928, Britain's John Logie Baird Demonstrated a color system that used a nipkoff disc with red, green, and blue filters.
In the United States, bell Labs pioneer Dr. Herbert Ives conducted experiments in the late 1920s and early 1930s with a system that used three photoelectric cells for the red, green, and blue signals.
In much the same way that television required breaking an image into its individual light and dark elements, the spectrum of colors also needed to be separated into into its three primary hues, red, green, and blue.
But once the standards for monochrome television were set, Colorizing video had to overcome at least three further obstacles.
First, a whole new kind of television camera would have to be invented.
From the advent of Farnsworth's image Dissector in the 1920s and 30s through the adoption of the Image Orthicon in the 1940s and 50s, television cameras required only a single tube to convert an image into an electrical signal.
Color would require at least three tubes, One each for the red, green, and blue primary colors.
In the 1940s, engineers at RCA, GE, and Filco experimented with prisms and mirrors to separate the colors and project the light into three separate tubes.
The first, such cameras were bulky, finicky, and demanded intense lighting. But they established the principle that color television began as the lens.
Second, if cameras could be engineered to generate a color signal, Then receivers also had to be reinvented to display it.
Black and white requires only a single phosphor coating on the picture tube. Color requires three again for red, green, and blue, and a way to aim the electron beam so they strike only their intended color target.
At CBS in the 1940s, engineer and inventor Peter Goldmark Tried to clear this hurdle With a throwback to the mechanical systems Called the field sequential color system. Goldmark placed a spinning wheel of color filters in front of an ordinary black and white picture tube, and the electron beam alternated color elements in sequence according to the synchronized color filter.
Goldmark's system was innovative and relatively successful, but was hampered by the third issue facing any approach to color compatibility.
Any system that offered color Was going to have to work with the millions of televisions. Consumers had already spent billions of dollars and pounds and francs and marks and yen on.
Goldmark's system produced images that were sharp and vivid in color, but could not be replicated at all on existing rece.
Novel and effective as it was, Goldmark's system was doomed. While the industry looked for a system that could weave color into the signal in a way that would allow existing television sets to show a normal picture while experimenting continued apace. Goldmark's system was perfected to the point that the FCC adopted it as the US color television standard on October 11, 19, 1950.
But at RCA, David Sarnoff did not accept that decision as any kind of final.
He immediately declared that RCA will never allow this counterfeit scheme to be foisted on the American people.
Given the vast resources at his command, it comes as no surprise that RCA made good on Sarnoff's promise.
RCA spent several million dollars per year on color TV research and development at its laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. By 1953, the investment paid off with an all electronic system that wove color information into the existing black and white signal so seamlessly that older sets without color simply ignored it.
Much of the individual credit for developing the RCA color system has been attributed to George H. Brown, who, along with Albert Rose and Richard C. Webb, solved the difficult problem of fitting the color information into the same 6 MHz channel used for monochrome broadcasts.
That meant that the color signal could be seen as black and white on the millions of receivers already sitting in living rooms around the country and the world.
Once the technical hurdles were cleared, RCA took its case to the National Television Systems Committee, the same industry consortium that approved the 525 line 30 frame standard that consolidated the industry back in 1941.
In July 1953, the NTSC submitted its recommendations based entirely on the RCA system to the fcc.
Just three years after approving the Goldmark CBS standard, the commission set that aside and adopted the RCA developed NTSC color standard on December 17, 1953.
Two weeks later, on New Year's Day 1954, the RCA owned NBC network broadcast the Tournament of Roses parade in what was promoted as the first coast to coast color television broadcast from Pasadena, California. NBC's cameras captured the flower festooned floats in hues never before seen on a television screen.
But for the most part, all those vivid colors were still seen only in shades of gray.
RCA's first color television, the RCA CT100, did not even go on sale until December 31, 1953, the day before the Rose Parade broadcast.
The new color unit was priced at $1,000, about 12,000 in $2026, and trade reports from the period suggest that there were none in private use prior to the New Year's parade.
The actual color broadcast was available only on demonstration sets at NBC affiliates, department stores and showrooms where people color cast.
In fact, RCA didn't really start manufacturing the CT100 until March 1954.
Programming on all the networks remained mostly black and white for another decade, and Even by the mid-1960s, color sets were found in fewer than 10% of American households.
Nevertheless, David Sarnoff took credit for introducing color television in 1954, just as he had taken credit for introducing black and white television at the New York World's Fair in 1939.
Sarnoff himself famously described RCA's Color Initiative as the company's second invention of television, a corporate conceit that neatly sidestepped who really invented it in the first place.
NBC promoted the Rose Parade as a broadcast Brought to youo in Color.
RCA and NBC were mainly focused on selling RCA color TV sets, so the ads emphasized See it on RCA color television.
In 1957, NBC began introducing its color programs with the slogan the following program is brought to you in living color, accompanied by an animated peacock logo spreading its tail feathers in a rainbow of colors.
The peacock remained part of NBC's logo for decades to come, and peacock is the name that NBC, by then owned by the Comcast cable TV conglomerate, adopted for its video streaming service when it went online in 2020.
This brings us to the end of number 65 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when TV goes gavel to gavel with coverage of the US Senate hearings into the army versus Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown to the centennial of television on September 7th, 2027.
For more aim your gizmo to onehundredyearstv.com this podcast was written, recorded, edited, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Schatzkin, and is a production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, then why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:12:48] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy. They laughed at us and ha.
But how we got the laughs right now.
