The Forgotten War for Color Television
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February 20, 2026
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"Harmony in Every Heartbeat
Consider supporting us on Patreon! http://patreon.com/FilmmakerIQ Today we know that 29.97 fps is a hallmark of NTSC video.
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If you came to the comment section to bitch about my line about "microwaves after WW2"… Yes, the microwave oven went on sale commercially in 1946 from Raytheon, the company that was heavily involved in making RADAR equipment for the warfront. It was massive and expensive for intended for restaurants and cooking food in airplanes. I used it because I thought it was a delicious demonstration of guns-to-butter switch in the economy. I didn't, however, realize how literal you all are, and it's true that the home counter microwave doesn't get out there till 1960s-70s. I seriously regret how much butthurt my comment has caused.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/space-age/a-brief-history-of-the-microwave-oven
https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/history-of-the-microwave-oven
The only way to write megahertz correctly is MHz. MHZ and Mhz are incorrect.
Kind SirKind Sir❤, of your "@FilmmakerIQ", to do this, "The Forgotten War for Color Television", I have tears of Nostalgia..
Because. I was an Employee in RCA: for 33 yrs (1954-1988); And I loved RCA; the whole time. And that icon "RCA" with you; caused me to go way back; of RCA things for me; all over America the Web says…
"Early NBC Living Color programs included An Evening with Fred Astaire. The CT-100 was created in 1954, before the NBC Peacock logo existed.[5] RCA CT-100 sets are extremely sought-after by electronics collectors and restorers, with restorers often spending thousands of dollars to obtain or repair a set."
It is believed that RCA only made 4000 CT-100 receivers. Around 150 survive, but only 30 are restored and working.
"Teaching of Technicians": of all kinds of Electronics, ETC! And I remember thy my heart thy Soul and thy Mind. Thus, thank you Kind Sir. And, I'm a Born Again Christian; so may Jesus bless You and Yours, Always, AMEN❤🙏😇
I remeber as 2 year old in 1874 watching black and white TV and I even then was like WTF??? caveman tv.
Color since 1953 😮
I can’t believe Guillermo Gonzalez Camarena is not even mentioned.
Australia didn’t get colour tv until 1975.. blew my mind! The Ernie Sigley show.
CRT technology died rather rapidly, with the advent of flat screens. A pity in a way, because the manufacturing process had become efficient and low cost, the deflection angles had increased
significantly and the last generation were a lot narrower, front to back, we could have expected
further progress.
Thank you for your masterful, crystal-clear explanation of color television's history! I enjoy your presentation style. AM & FM radio, AM stereo, FM stereo, stereo records, audio tape, video recording, etc. all went thru their own standardization agonies. Fascinating history!
When they turned on the color in the 1960's TV. Guide would indicate that a TV program was in color by simple saying COLOR. We bought a new guide every week to plan our color viewing. On Sunday we went to my Uncle Lloyd's house because he was the first to purchase a color set. This worked good till Aunt Dot got her vacuum cleaner too close to the set a scrambled the color, they had ta TV technician come out and degause the screen. Later sets did need regausing due to new technologies. My friend Terry N. Collected every early TV guide. He had lots of weird collections. 😂
if pal wasnt backwards compatible then did they convert all older content into pal or did they only show new content?
I witnessed its social effects as a microcosm when we moved to a rural Australian town just before TVs introduction there. After school there used to be a giant cricket or touch football game at the oval adjacent the school.
After TV began broadcasting, it emptied at 5pm when daily transmission commenced.
Tangental but of interest? from a ~recent Johnny Carson show, was that in the early days of his show, they had to redo the entire show hours later, for re-transmission to the west coast. Recording arrived quite late.
I remember we bought a new color TV in 1982. The chassis looked like it was designed in the 1950’s as it was all wire wrap connections!
PAL pay another licence, lol. I don't mind paying a licence tbh, that way I avoid all the crappy ads.
The reason for PAL being a 625-line system is that other countries than Britain (a majority) had already been using a 625-line black&white standard, and had become the majority of the European continent already; and, for these viewers, PAL was backward compatible. To make switch from 405 to 625 lines simultaneously with the introduction of color was a smart practical choice to make.
Nice work John!
Clear, funny and and didact video. Congratulations. Henry de France is not a beautitiful guy certainly. 😂😂😂😂
Believe it or not, when the TV show Combat! switched to color, a lot of people weren't happy about it. They wanted their Combat! in black & white.
The 1936 summer Olympics Berlin was televised which was before the bbc crystal palace event.
In the UK if you had a UHF black and white television then it could receive colour broadcasts and show them in black and white. I used to own such a set. The original idea of taking the regular black and white signal and combining it with a low definition colour signal to produce a full definition colour picture all within the standard bandwidth, and backward compatible, was a genius invention. The shadow mask colour cathode ray was also a brilliant invention making analogue colour television one of the cleverest things to be developed in the 20th century
My great-grandfather owned many small businesses in the 50s, one including introducing color TV to their town for the very first time… kind of. He made sheets of blue, green and beige that you would stick to your screen. Green on the bottom for the ground, blue on the top for sky and beige in the middle for the character’s skin tones. It wasn’t perfect, but my grandfather admitted that when you look at it long enough it kind of blends together and feels like it’s working.
in 1970 in England i was 5 but older sister was 17 & worked as Nanny for folk in large home at top end of our village. on a rare visit to this house i saw my first colour tv which was switched on & showing a test card. i remember being impressed by the novelty of seeing colour on a tv but really confused as i couldn’t understand how folks thought this picture of colourful stripes & boxes was better than watching High Chapperell or Dr Who even though they were just black , grey & white ….😁👍
It should be mentioned that neither of those "Great Men" actually discovered anything. Philo T. Farnsworth invented the Television.
Something I love about these old 50's and 60's console sets is that some dad way back in the late 70's would have used one as a "glass teletype" for their new "personal computer".
It got the cost of getting into computers back then somewhat cheaper.
Hi from Aust . PAL here was backwards compatable here with our black and white when we went colour here iin 1975.
Great summary of a complicated story. Noticed one little typo in the graphic at 10:19. It's claiming channel 5 occupied 72-82 MHz. It's actually 76-82, with a 4 MHz gap between channels 4 and 5 (for aircraft navigation, as I recall).
Me aguanté todo el maldito video, sólo para corroborar lo de siempre, los yankees creen y nos quieren hacer creer al resto del mundo, que TODO fué inventado por ellos…no habló de González Camarena en México, quien patentó en EEUU su sistema tri cromático, con el cual la NASA transmitió TV color desde el espacio. Tampoco habló de los experimentos de la primera TV en Uruguay…..sigan mirándose el ombligo…así les va
Well, Australia adopted the PAL system in 75 with out first colour broadcasting…it took off like an explosion…colour sets went off the shelves very quickly. Australia had come of age in TV. Then the digital age took over. The rest as they say, was history.
Let's not forget Farnsworth had the first patent of a television. And fortunately in the US, he is recognized as the father of television there, regardless of what the RCA boss did.
I worked for the engineer who patented the demodulator for color TV. He is still alive…age 96.
Damn this is more intense than the Schism of 1054. 😂
I had no idea that they were available in the 1930s. My neighbor has an incredible collection of 1930's and early 1940's televisions. He is picky about the design and appearance of the cabinets preferring art deco, all of televisions work, and he trades amongst other antique television collectors.
Im glad i didn't have to buy a tv back in the early 1950's…what a standardization mess!
As a small child in the 1960s, the first Color TV Show I saw broadcast on NBC was Bonanza!
You said that the first official regular TV broadcast started November 2nd, 1936 operated by the BBC. The Germans started regular TV programming about 1 1/2 years earlier. The quality wasn't very good as the introduced it prematurely to be ahead of the BBC and they operated only three days a week but it was on a "regular TV service".
The Fernsehsender "Paul Nipkow" (TV Station Paul Nipkow) in Berlin, Germany, was the first public television station in the world. Carrying programming from Deutscher Fernseh-Rundfunk, it was on the air from 22 March 1935, until it was shut down in 1944. (Wikipedia)
PAL colour system was backwards compatible with B/W, not sure why you said it wasn't.
I'm not sure if your excellent presentation over or underplayed the political influence of David Sarnoff. I had never seen in one place the development timeline of NTSC > SECAM > PAL. I was pretty well acquainted in a general way of the differences, having sold and engineered video systems in Hollywood CA in the late 80's > early 90's. I only dealt with NTSC. But Sarnoff was worshipped as a near god in the early 50's and all prior accounts I have read of the general history of the time and the introduction of color portrayed him as a pretty ruthless political string-puller. He certainly threw Edwin Armstrong under the bus. Indeed, I seem to remember many articles in the Radio-TV magazines I read as a kid referring to him as "General" Sarnoff. He was, indeed, a Brig general in the Signal Corps. He was definitely the biggest of big cheeses in the industry at the time.
Computer and smartphone and smartwatch ( with hologram display ) projector and 3d projector will be choice of future because it save material and use less power and mobility possible
That would interfer with parallel universe base on time bandwidth
Maybe PAL was not retro compatible for UK, but in other Europe country (I from Italy) was fine and not second licence need because standard 625 lines was already adopted in b and w television!
Thank you for posting on one of my favorite subjects. Do you have any more technical posts, such as the defects on PAL (Chroma noise, Hannover Bars and the dreaded ABBA in Post) the defects of NTSC ( limited chroma space and reduced blue chroma detail based on chroma perception) or SECAM ( impossible in Post)?
Would also love a story on Analog vs Digital HD; ATSC, DVB vs MUSE (in Japan)?
Lastly we should not forget the CBS idea lives on! Nowadays the spinning disk is replaced with an electronic sequencing, called DLP which is popular in cheaper home projectors and with a higher field rate the standard in movie theaters. What comes around goes around….
I was stationed (US Navy) in England in the 1950's. There were two channels. One was BBC and the consumer had to pay a license fee for it. The other was ITV and it was commercial. The BBC programming controlled the broadcast and program breaks were varied by the length of the program whereas the program breaks were like in the US on the half hour. This made switching from one channel to the other meant that you would lose part of the other channels program.
Did America have a Teletext service? I heard that it never took off there? It wasn't popular?
In Europe Teletext services came from the broadcaster; Teletext was kind of like the internet before the internet, if that makes sense?
In the UK, they were created on the BBC Micro B computers back in their heyday.
NRK in Norway still has Teletext; the service is too popular to shut down.
In the UK, Teletext from both ITV (Ceefax, as ITV called it) and the BBC (Teletext) died in 2012. Every channel had its own Teletext service back in the day.
Two TV shows sold more Color Televisions than anything else:
The World Series was first broadcast in color in 1955. People really wanted to see baseball in full color. Every year when the World Series was on, sales of color televisions boomed.
The NBC/RCA television show BONANZA was broadcast in full color starting in 1959. The show did not start out with huge popularity, but RCA used the full-color show to promote and sell color Televisions. As the show became more popular, millions of people purchased color televisions to watch the show.
PAL was backwards compatible according to my TV technology book and our B&W TV of those days.