Why Inventing Color TV Was So Difficult

Many who read this will remem­ber watch­ing tele­vi­sion on a black-and-white set at some point in their lives. Few­er will remem­ber doing so because only black-and-white sets exist­ed. Of course, your own expe­ri­ence will depend upon your coun­try of ori­gin. The Unit­ed States began the tran­si­tion to col­or tele­vi­sion in 1953, and more than half of its pop­u­la­tion owned col­or sets less than twen­ty years there­after. France’s sta­tions start­ed to change over in 1967, and the last one did so in 1983. South Korea, where I live, start­ed its own reg­u­lar col­or broad­casts in 1980, though at that point, those from the Amer­i­can Forces Net­work, Japan, and even North Korea could already be tuned in for years.

Today we all take col­or TV for grant­ed, but as the Pri­mal Space video above explains, its inven­tion was no sim­ple mat­ter. Still, it occurred much ear­li­er than most of us would imag­ine. In 1925, Scot­tish inven­tor John Logie Baird came up with the first tele­vi­sion, which involved pass­ing light through holes in a spin­ning disc onto a pho­to­elec­tric cell for trans­mis­sion through cables or radio waves. This sys­tem could only reg­is­ter the bright­ness of the light, pro­duc­ing a black-and-white image. But the mech­a­nism itself sug­gest­ed a means of intro­duc­ing col­or: enlarge the disc, add sep­a­rate sets of holes for red, green, and blue, and repro­duce a frame of each in quick, cycli­cal suc­ces­sion at the oth­er end, tak­ing advan­tage of the human eye­’s ten­den­cy to col­lapse them into a sin­gle image.

Baird first demon­strat­ed his col­or tele­vi­sion sys­tem in 1928. Though impres­sive, it also looked unlike­ly to per­form at a scale that could pro­duce a sharp, smooth mov­ing pic­ture. Oth­er engi­neers saw more tele­vi­su­al promise in the tech­nol­o­gy of the cath­ode ray tube, or CRT, which Japan­ese inven­tor Ken­jiro Takayana­gi had already har­nessed for his own black-and-white mechan­i­cal tele­vi­sion in the year before. The key com­po­nent was the icono­scope invent­ed by Vladimir Zworykin in 1933. “Essen­tial­ly the world’s first video cam­era,” it employed an inter­nal elec­tron gun to “scan” a cap­tured image into a trans­mis­si­ble elec­tri­cal sig­nal. Still, the ques­tion remained: how to do it in col­or?

Enter the Radio Cor­po­ra­tion of Amer­i­ca, whose abbre­vi­at­ed

Enter the Radio Cor­po­ra­tion of Amer­i­ca, whose abbre­vi­at­ed name more than a few of us will remem­ber from our child­hood TV sets. Hav­ing devel­oped a video cam­era “that took the incom­ing light and fil­tered it through spe­cial prisms to sep­a­rate the red, green, and blue,” con­vert­ing each into its own sig­nal, RCA then faced the prob­lem of deliv­er­ing the result to view­ers at home. None of the more than five mil­lion black-and-white sets already extant in the U.S. could receive those three sig­nals at all. The solu­tion involved using one elec­tron gun per col­or, each of whose sig­nals would be encod­ed so as to be hid­den in the exist­ing black-and-white tele­vi­sion sig­nal and then decod­ed by col­or sets. Con­sumers may not have tak­en up the tech­nol­o­gy all at once, but those who did in time for The Wiz­ard of Oz’s first broad­cast in 1956 sure­ly under­stood that col­or TV had a future.

Watch a Tele­vi­sion Sta­tion Switch From Black & White to Col­or for First Time (1967)

How Tech­ni­col­or Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Cin­e­ma with Sur­re­al, Elec­tric Col­ors & Changed How We See Our World

Watch David Bowie Per­form Star­man on Top

Watch David Bowie Per­form “Star­man” on Top of the Pops: Vot­ed the Great­est Music Per­for­mance Ever on the BBC (1972)

Dis­cov­er the Lost Ear­ly Com­put­er Art of Telidon, Canada’s TV Pro­to-Inter­net from the 1970s

When Movies Came on Vinyl: The Ear­ly-80s Engi­neer­ing Mar­vel and Mar­ket­ing Dis­as­ter That Was RCA’s Selec­taVi­sion

The Great­est Shot in Tele­vi­sion: Sci­ence His­to­ri­an James

The Great­est Shot in Tele­vi­sion: Sci­ence His­to­ri­an James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene … and Nailed It

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Source: www.openculture.com