As Much as Audiences Wanted Color TVs, the World Had Other Plans
Buying a TV means asking yourself what size screen you want, the type of display you can afford, and what kinds of little extras you crave. It doesn’t involve the choice between color and black and white. It’s been less than a century since color TVs were invented, but they’ve come a long way in a short time. The FCC approved CBS’s color system in 1950, and its commercial broadcasts and retail TV sets followed in 1951.. The future was rolling into the American living room…quite literally.
Today’s Trivia Question
What did CBS’s 1951 color television system actually use to create its first color picture?
Bonus points if you knew that the first color sets were advertised at a whopping $499.95 (in 2026 dollars, that is over $6,000 for a TV set).
| A Few More for Fun… |
Within a month of their September 1951 retail launch, federal defense officials asked CBS to halt their plans for mass production. Why? Mobilization for the Korean War had begun, and the materials had more important uses. CBS agreed to the request, and as fast as commercial color broadcasts had started and color TVs were available, it all came to an end…for a moment.
What made CBS’s color broadcasts incompatible with most existing black-and-white television sets?
What was CBS’s final commercial field-sequential color broadcast in October 1951?
| A Few More Trivia Questions Before You Go… |
CBS may have lost the color-TV battle, but the race to make it real kept right on going. It was a technology whose time had come, and audiences would eventually come to “see” a color TV as the norm.
What cells in the retina are primarily responsible for color vision?
What 1935 film became the first feature-length movie to use three-strip Technicolor from start to finish?
Answers
Today’s question Answer: A. A different scanning system. So the family that had just purchased a perfectly good TV couldn't also sit back and watch the new color broadcasts in black and white. An ordinary black-and-white set could not display CBS’s color broadcast without additional equipment. That was inconvenient, and it wasn’t just CBS trying to solve the problem. | |
| 01 | Answer: B. Three. CBS, RCA, and Color Television Incorporated each came to the table with a different idea for bringing color into American homes. CBS won the round, but not the war. |
| 02 | Answer: B. A college football game. North Carolina versus Maryland, and Maryland won the game 14-7. |
| 03 | Answer: B. Cones. CBS didn’t have to do ALL the work when your very own eyes could manage the heavy lifting. |
| 04 | Answer: A. NTSC. The National Television System Committee standards won and came with a tremendous advantage: they worked with existing black-and-white TV sets. |
| 05 | Answer: B. Princeton. RCA Laboratories became a major space for television research in the city. While CBS brought its color TV sets to market first, RCA was working in West Windsor, just a short way down the road, and made a system that would last. |
| 06 | Answer: A. Becky Sharp. Before color television was fighting its way into American living rooms, Hollywood had already wrestled with making color work on the big screen. Becky Sharp was the first to use three-strip Technicolor throughout. A historical drama based on Vanity Fair, it came out of Pioneer Pictures, following its Technicolor short La Cucaracha. |
| 07 | Answer: B. Far or distant. Television, quite literally, means seeing from far away, and seeing it in color initially meant seeing it through a rapidly spinning wheel. That seems like a lot of work for a bit of entertainment! That spinning wheel didn’t survive, but the color sure did. Color is no longer a novelty, but more like a technical race, with some modern displays producing billions of colors at levels those first CBS engineers could have barely imagined. |
How did you do? Score 1 point for each correct answer and 1 point for each bonus you knew. Perfect score: 10.
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