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 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.
Related Content:
Watch a Television Station Switch From Black & White to Color for First Time (1967)
Discover the Lost Early Computer Art of Telidon, Canada’s TV Proto-Internet from the 1970s
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.
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