“Television Pioneer’s Notebook”
On Track To Color Television
The excited anticipation on the train was palpable. It was June 1951, and RCA is transporting a group of journalists from New York to Washington, DC. Gen. David Sarnoff, Chairman of RCA and founder of NBC, has scheduled a press conference to unveil and demonstrate his new color television system.
But why the excitement? Most of us covering TV have already seen the CBS system which displays brilliant color, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has authorized it for use. The problem, in a word, is “compatibility.”
CBS uses a mechanical spinning disk, field sequence, system which cannot be seen at all on the millions of monochromatic sets in homes and being manufactured.
The modified RCA system, that we were traveling to see, is an all-electronic, dot sequential, system compatible with the existing black and white television standard. One wouldn’t have to rush out and buy color to continue getting a television signal. We all felt it would fly, and the medium could take off with it, if the pictures looked good, and RCA/NBC could get the CBS decision reversed and overcome other competitors. Allen B. DuMont Laboratories, Philco Corp., Hazeltine Corp., Color Television Inc., and General Electric had proposed all-electronic systems of their own.
The man most associated with the CBS color system is Dr. Peter C. Goldmark, born in Budapest, Hungary in 1906. He had a long and fruitful career with the company. Some of his inventions, like the long-playing record, altered entire industries. But his color TV field sequential system was flawed.
Scenes are shot though red, blue and green filters on a rotating disk behind the camera lens. Full-frame images in each of these primary colors are transmitted separately using a lot of scarce broadband space. The viewer at home sees the images through a small section of a large synchronized disk. The size ratio of the disk limits the practical size of the TV screen. It is driven by a separate electric motor. The eye retains the three color images long enough for the brain to blend them into full color — like the still images of a movie projector are seen as a motion picture.
The “persistence of vision” trait is still in play, but RCA sets it up with no mechanically moving parts and needing far less of the broadband spectrum. Their cameras contain three picture tubes, each having a color filter to obtain just one of the primary colors. Images are transmitted, not in full frames. but as a series of discreet color dots which scan the receiver tube with 525 horizontal lines creating 60 frames a second with each line containing all the colors.
David Sarnoff opened the press conference by emphasizing what we were about to see was still a work in progress that would take some time to sufficiently perfect. He was also strongly dismissive of the CBS approach to color television. “Staying with it would be like going back to the horse and buggy when a self-propelled vehicle exists.” Then we got to see that vehicle.
The colors were not as bright as CBS offered. CBS colors were gorgeous, particularly on outdoor nature shots, but I felt they were a little over the top on skin tones and indoor scenes. It was like comparing the colors of Big Sky Montana with the canyons of Manhattan – so to me, the RCA picture looked more “real.”
NBC Peacock Logo © NBC
Nevertheless, the consensus of the TV press corps was that CBS had the superior picture. But RCA’s “Wow!” factor was not in the brilliance of its colors but in the brilliance of its technical triumph.
Sarnoff challenged the FCC’s approval of the CBS system in the courts. Although the appeals to set aside the FCC decision were denied, time was gained to work within the industry-wide National Television System Committee (NTSC) to utilize their combined expertise to come up with a system all could support. If they were to continue to make and sell TV sets, new studio equipment, buy and build additional TV stations, the mechanical color system that was not compatible had to be replaced with an all-electronic one that was. It was the NTSC that set the American standard on black and white TV, so their recommendation on color carried a lot of weight.
On July 21, 1953, the NTSC approved a modified version of RCA’s system and petitioned the FCC for adoption. On December 17th of that year, the FCC officially adopted that standard in place of the CBS system.
RCA’s successful petition for the American color standard stated that the corporation had spent $21 million in research and promised it would expedite equipment production in its manufacturing division and would promptly begin colorcasting over its NBC network.
Finally there was agreement. Color television was on the right track.
The Father of Modern Television
Dr. Vladimir K. Zworykin (1889-1982) Russian-born, American inventor, developed the Iconoscope and a workable cathode-ray tube he called the Kinescope , the two key components of all-electronic television. The Iconoscope camera tube was the eye of television and the Kinescope the prototype of modern television receivers.
Before there were video rebroadcasts, live shows were filmed off the Kinescope tubes and the copied programs were called Kinescopes, an important element of early TV scheduling, networking and archiving.
Zworykin was a man of vision. As a young student in Russia, he first experimented on a very early cathode-ray tube with his professor Boris Rosing. He recognized its huge potential, perhaps more than Rosing and the inventor of the tube, Karl Braun in Germany. He made it his life’s work to perfect it for television.
In Russia he could not get the funding needed for research and development. He moved to the United States in 1919 to work at Westinghouse. Executives there were not overwhelmed with his early television experiments and wanted him to focus on more “practical projects”. When RCA broke away from Westinghouse and GE, he went to work for RCA with the encouragement of its leader David Sarnoff. He was offered a position as director of electronic research where he would have the time and money to realize his dream.
Utah-born, 14-year-old inventor Philo T. Farnsworth sketched out a rudimentary system in 1922 and patented his vision of TV. He developed what he called an Image Dissector tube — elements of which influenced Zworykin’s work on his Iconoscope. RCA, after some legal challenges, eventually signed a patent-licensing agreement with Farnsworth, to achieve commercial implementation of Zworykin’s fully workable, momentous inventions. It was the first time they agreed to pay royalties to another company.
Zworykin’s visionary thinking was evident in a talk he gave at the 1950 Television Institute and Industry Trade Show at the Hotel New Yorker where I met him and was honored to share the speakers roster. He spoke not of engineering problems but of the increasing recognition of television’s possibilities as an instrument of social value. We excerpted his remarks in our publication Televiser.
He said, “The fundamental meaning of television is the extension of human sight…as radio is the extension of human hearing. If we realize this meaning, we will utilize television’s great possibilities more widely for visual education in many fields: medicine, astronomy, in acquainting citizens with the functioning of their government, with international relationships.” He cited examples he foresaw, “In the Armed Forces and industry, when it is desirable to shift the point of observation…for instance, if the process to be observed takes place in an environment that is too dangerous.” One such example making headlines today is the use of drones.
Toward the end of his life, sadly, he said about broadcast television, “I hate what they’ve done to my child…I would never let my own children watch it.” He died on his 94th birthday in Princeton, NJ.
Vladimir Kosma Zworykin – Courtesy of Westinghouse
How Two “ Movie Stars” Helped Pioneering Television Research
Strange as it seems, two toys, replicas of celebrated cartoon characters, Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse, had much to do with the quality television image we now enjoy. They helped RCA scientists and engineers gather priceless information.
Choice of the pair was no accident. Their crisply modeled black-and-white bodies were ideal targets for the primitive television cameras. The sharp contrast they provided was easy to observe on experimental kinescopes. As they trained their cameras on the two toys, the technicians were studying the effects of changes and improvements in their instruments and telecasting techniques.
Historical RCA photo from Televiser. Photocopy Bob Harris
Would living actors have done as well? Not according to the RCA techs who say, “With living actors it could never have been absolutely certain that an improvement in the televised image came from an improvement in equipment and techniques—or from some unnoticed change in an actor’s appearance, clothing, makeup.
RCA engineers haven’t forgotten the help the got from Felix and Mickey. “During television’s experimental period, they were the most frequently televised actors on the air. They were our leading ‘TV’ stars.”
They were toys, but this was a cat and mouse game that set the table for an international industry estimated to now be worth more than $324 billion.
Guest Author Bio
Bob Harris
Brooklyn native and television pioneer Bob Harris began his career in the
media arts as a political cartoonist and columnist for the Hollywood Sun in
1940 in Florida at the age of 14. Back in New York he joined the highly prestigious pioneering publication Televiser, later becoming Managing Editor. From 1952 to 1955 he was with the Radio (later Broadcast) Advertising Bureau writing sales presentations, ad copy and handling publicity. He then moved on to the New York World-Telegram & Sun, until 1958, to create advertising promotion presentations. There he got a call from producer Eli Landau inviting him to join WNTA-TV channel 13 to promote The Play of the Week and the other ground breaking program series they were launching. In 1960, Harris, his wife Sheila and their two children moved to California where Bob joined the CBS O&O station in San Francisco followed by KLAC in Los Angeles as promotion director of the stations. In 1970 Harris opened the Bob Harris Agency where, in addition to his broadcast clients, he represented three national television publications – Back Stage, Shoot, and Emmy Magazine and the London-based international trade publication, TV World. After closing the agency in 1993, Harris went freelance as an entertainment writer as well as becoming an art docent for the Getty Center and gallery guide for the Los Angeles Museum of Art.
Contact Bob Harris at: bharris7@pacbell.net
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