Today’s post is written by Timothy Wilcox, an Archivist at the National Archives at Kansas City.
Many born in the 1980s and after cannot recall a life without electronic visual media in vibrant hues. Few of us know the history that brought it to the masses. The advent of color television was a gradual process that started with mechanical systems, which were first developed by John Logie Baird in 1928. Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) demonstrated their improved mechanical system in 1940. By 1950, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) invented the world’s first electronic color television system. Competition between CBS, RCA, and many others, heated up with each vying to get adopted as the national standardized system by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Early in 1950, the FCC tested and investigated the merits of the industry leading CBS and RCA systems. CBS campaigned, in part, by giving the first public demonstrations of this technology by showing programs in color. Ultimately, the FCC adopted the CBS system as the US standard in October 1950 due to the inferior quality of RCA’s system.
Despite the adoption, RCA, and countless individuals and organizations, continued to improve on their design because the CBS system had many known drawbacks. Primarily, it was not compatible with black and white broadcasting and few programs were transmitted in color. At the time, broadcasts in color were shown less than five hours per week. As a result, many manufacturers were unwilling to manufacture CBS system televisions. The National Archives holdings offer a glimpse of the competing systems and designs during this pivotal time in color television history. The General Correspondence (National Archives Identifier 594483) series from Record Group 173 reveals that several established and aspiring inventors wrote to the FCC offering novel inventions, concepts, and design improvements. Many of them addressed the weaknesses of the CBS system.
Inventor James V. Gray wrote to the FCC asking them to consider his improvement to the CBS system. Unlike the CBS system that created color images by using a mechanical red, green, and blue color wheel that spun in front of a picture tube, the design shown above, used a belt. Gray’s design allowed for a more compact TV console design.
Below: Pete J. B. Jr. offered his improvement on the CBS system that placed the color wheel on top of the set instead of within the console.
In 1951, television and radio repairman, Frank Robinson, had a futuristic slim TV console design called the View Plate. As stated below, it would operate without a picture tube. The first commercially available television without a picture tube was not released until 1997, when Fujitsu introduced the world’s first full-color plasma display.
By 1953, RCA had improved their picture quality and created the first complete electronic color television system, which was compatible with black and white and color broadcasting. The FCC abandoned the CBS system and adopted the RCA system as the national standard. It is still in use today. In 1954, the first color television sets were produced and sold by RCA.
Full adoption of color television, for various reasons, took many years. The first color TV sets, RCA model CT-100, fetched twelve thousand dollars, adjusting for inflation. Advertisers had to pay broadcasters an exorbitant fee to promote in color and many balked at the price. Fewer shows in color equaled fewer incentives for the public to purchase expensive color television sets. It would take eighteen years before most households had a color TV. By the early 1980s, black and white sets were a thing of the past.