Color Television

Television was in black and white until about 1951. Up until then, even cable TV was fairly new to the public.

I’m Peter Goldmark, and I invented the first color television.

Peter Goldmark developed field-sequential color technology for color television while at CBS. The system, first demonstrated on August 29, 1940, and shown to the press on September 3, used a rapidly rotating color wheel that alternated transmission in red, green and blue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Carl_Goldmark#Work

RCA researchers, replicating CBS's mechanical color television in their own labs, discovered its limitations for themselves. Television sets built around it would need to contain a wheel with red, green, and blue color filters, and would need to be very large -- three times the displayed image, or a three-foot wheel for a 12-inch display, plus the motor to drive the wheel. RCA researchers also considered mechanical color television to be a step backwards. "They already had an electronic black and white television," says Magoun. "They said, `if it's going to be color, it should be electronic. "Another reason RCA was against adopting CBS's mechanical system was economical. The company had just spent a great deal of money developing black and white television, and didn't want to see that investment go for naught.

CBS began color programming on a five-station East Coast network in June of 1951. But black and white televisions could not receive the programs. This would not have been a major obstacle for CBS in 1950, when few homes had a television of any kind, but by the time the first color programs were cleared for broadcast, 10.5 million black and white televisions had been sold, about half of them by RCA. Consumers were not about to buy a separate television to receive the few color programs available, and so few were sold.

On June 25, 1951, CBS broadcast the very first commercial color TV program. Unfortunately, nearly no one could watch it on their black-and-white televisions. This first color program was a variety show called, "Premiere. "Premiere" aired from 4:35 to 5:34 p.m. but only reached four cities: Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Although the colors were not quite true to life, the first program was a success.

This will be the first color commercial! It’s sad that only a few people will be able to see it.

Another early commercial television program on color film was an episode of Dragnet that aired in December, 1953.

The first RCA color sets cost $995, that would be the equivalent of $6,186 today. So, the Color Television wasn’t very affordable when it first came out. Color Television started to become popular around 1965, but most people had Color TV by the mid-1970s.

In 1963, most TV broadcasts were in color. In 1972, more than half of television sets in homes are in color. In 1973, giant screen projection was marketed.

The Wizard of Oz was first telecast on television on Saturday, November 3, 1956. Until 1999, the film had been telecast in the U.S. only on commercial broadcast television. After the film went to cable that year, TV showings of it became more frequent, and the tradition of televising it only once a year was abandoned, at least in the U.S. The film starts in black and white, and gradually goes into color.

There’s no place like home!

THE END