How Color Got Into Your TV: A Tale of Ego and RCA

It's interesting that the earliest electronic color televisions were so finicky that when you bought one, an engineer would set it up for you in your living room. Even after they became common, there were controls for contrast, tint, and saturation that you had to mess with to get skin color to look right.

LCD TVs still have those adjustments, but the controls are buried in the layers of menus and almost no one adjusts them, or needs to.

One of my first jobs was working at a company that supplied specialty CRT displays for industrial and automotive euipment. Every so often, someone working inside an engineering unit would get too close to the anode cap and you'd hear a nice Crack! as he got a 17KV jolt. It was also fun to sneak up behind a guy who had his hands inside a unit and twist a roll of bubble wrap to make a nice cracking sound. That would scare the daylights out of the guy.

I found a fascinating weblink for early, analog Colour TV here, for anyone interested:-

Color_television

Enjoy!

Ah yes - our first color TV, and it was an RCA. We finally got one about 1968. My Grandfather had one about 4 years earlier. I used to go to his house on Sundays to watch AFL football, until we bought ours. The Jets looked swell in green and white.

Most of us, who went to college in the late 60's, had portable black and white sets, and we appreciated having them. Color portables were a bit pricey for a college bound student. My one friend had a black and white floor model from the early 50's with a screen smaller than my 12" portable, but it took up 15 cu ft of valuable dorm room space. Not too popular with his room mate.

We had an early experimental color TV, we were told, obtained at a garage sale in Downers Grove, IL. You had to fiddle from the back with magnets on the CRT while watching the screen in a mirror on a chair in front of it. This was probably the early 1960s.

I can remember a demonstration of an RCA color receiver that used a spinning 3-color wheel. That was in the early 50's in NYC.