How It Was: Seeing my first color television

1/31/2012 2:11 PM EST

If I had told my parents that one day there would be a color television in almost every room of my house, and that the one in the front room would be 46 inches in its diagonal dimension, and that there would be hundreds of television channels and that there would be such a thing as high-definition and surround sound … they would have said I was an idiot (well, my mother did say that a lot, but in a different context and only with love :-)

1/31/2012 2:36 PM EST

I bet the first thing you said to your folks was "Why can't we get one of those?"??

1/31/2012 3:51 PM EST

We were also a "very humble" family, and came late to the Color TV revolution. In fact, as late as 1979 (in my early bachelor days) I still had a B&W television. There is just something special about B&W images (and watching old B&W movies on a color TV) that is just not possible with a color TV. Perhaps the realism and clarity of digital color images these days are so similar to the world that surrounds us, it's just not "unique anymore". And to escape the colorful world we live in, you just need to sit down in front of a B&W movie and transport yourself back to those good-old-days.

1/31/2012 5:08 PM EST

I umbly apologize.... :-)

2/2/2012 4:52 AM EST

How things change?! When we viewed our current house before buying it ten years ago, the first thing we did was carefully lever up the corner of the carpet in the lounge to see what was underneath. Delighted, we discovered a beautiful wooden floor, over which a previous occupant had nailed and glued a wall-to-wall carpet. We spent the first few months after buying the house carefully scraping and restoring the floor. Very nice it looks too!

And, yes, I remember getting out first colour television in I guess around 1975. Before that, we had to watch the snooker (like pool only more complex, for our American readers) in black and white!

2/2/2012 8:08 AM EST

The very same for me: it was 1972, Munich Olympic Games. I was walking (actually: reluctantly dragged by my parents) along a shopping street and there was a display window with a row of color TV sets. They were showing swimming competitions, and the pool water was blue!

2/2/2012 11:17 AM EST

I'm abit late to jump on to the color TV bus, but as I read Max's rememberance of seeing his first color TV, it made me think of when I saw mine. Although it's so many years ago, the bet I can recollect is mid to later '50s (yea I'm an oldER guy). We had family friends in Seattle, Washington, that were about the most financially secure folks I knew at a very young age. During one of the visits, there it was my first color TV. Well they called is a color TV, but it was actually a B&W television that had either three (RGB) or four (CMYK) (don't recall which) thin, colored screens that you literally pulled down in front of the B&W feed. You could get some real interesting color schemes if you choose to pull down only one or two down in front of the picture. I can just imagine what fun this would have been when I reached the mid-1960s...wow!

2/2/2012 4:18 PM EST

NTSC Color TV was standardized for the US in 1953. The first color TV's were manufactured in 1955 (prior there were prototypes, but nothing that could be bought), although widespread availability didn't really occur for another year or two.

My family lived in an apartment building n Cleveland at the time, and in 1957 one of our neighbors bought a color set. By 1958, Disney had begun broadcasting their weekly show in color, so every week all the children in the building would march down to our neighbor's apartment to watch Walt Disney in color.

Of course, this was among the very first color TV's, so every five minutes you had to get up and adjust the tint and hue to fix the color. Also, color TV signals were very susceptible to ghosting and multipath effects, so the antenna needed to be readjusted every few minutes as well.

And then there was the need to get the repairman out every few weeks or so to degauss the picture tube and realign the electron beams in the CRT.

One of my favorite tasks was to take the tubes out of the set and bring them to our local electronics store to be checked. Tubes were fragile, and rarely lasted more than a couple of years.

Years later, I went to work at RCA designing embedded controllers for televisions. During that time, I had the privilege of meeting Dalton Pritchard at RCA Laboratories in Princeton. He was one of the principals involved in inventing the NTSC standard. He taught an occasional 3 day class on the inner workings of NTSC and why the various frequency bands and modulations were chosen. He had his own laboratory inside RCA labs, and could pretty much decide for himself what he was going to work on. At the time I met him, he was doing phosphor research.

Those were the glory days of engineering I guess. It always amazed me just how many tasks some of those old vacuum tube circuits did within the TV. The tasks we now employ millions of transistors to perform were once done by a hand full of vacuum tubes.

george vernon

2/7/2012 9:51 AM EST

I was as shocked as anyone to learn that Big Bird was actually yellow. Later on, I took apart junked TVs. Once I built a VHF oscillator with a sweep tube, introducing me to my first RF burn.

2/7/2012 2:55 PM EST

I was completely unimpressed. We were visiting friends and the "man of the house" was excitedly demonstrating their new color TV. He turned a knob one way and the picture was all purple. Then he turned it the opposite way and everything was green. Finally, he settled on "purplish". Big deal, I thought, I could do that with pieces of colored plastic for much less money.

When the kids were young and were looking at old photos, I used to tell them that colors hadn't been invented yet and that trees were really gray. They bought it for a while....

2/7/2012 4:10 PM EST

Before my parents bought our very first color set in the early 70's, my brother and I were obsessed with getting color out of a B/W TV. There were a series of articles, I forget the publication (maybe Popular Science?) that discussed a device with a vertical flat rectangular semi-transparent frame that could be placed in front of a small (9") B/W TV and yield a color picture. It differed from the synchronized spinning color wheel ideas of the time by instead employing a transparent tri-colored sheet stretched between two synchronized rollers at the top and bottom of the frame. I won't go into details here but the reviewers claimed that the picture was a bit dim but quite watchable. Noted was the fact that the picture was sharp and free of convergence issues which plagued color sets of the time.

When we finally went out to buy that color set, my dad splurged and bought a Motorola 21-inch "works in a drawer" set with remote control. It had the best picture of any of the TVs in the store, well worth the (dear) $475 he paid for it. I remember getting it home and finally watching all my favorite shows in glorious color. There was an indescribable feeing to that, like I had developed a new sense.

2/9/2012 10:26 AM EST

I remember the very first program I watched on our brand new color TV. It was "I Dream of Jeanie"... wow! The color was great too :-)