Today in History: First color TV set manufactured
Today we probably have a difficult time imagining life without our screens. While color TV's had been around for quite a while by the time I have any memory of being alive, there was a time where one of our TV's was black and white. Prior to RCA manufacturing the color television, everyone who was fortunate enough to have a television at all, did so in black and white.
Things would start to change on this day
The year was 1954
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It sported a 12.5 inch (31.75cm) screen and weighed hundreds of pounds. It took several deliverymen (it was ok to call them that back in '54) and once it got sat down in a particular place, that is likely where it was going to stay forever.
Most of the broadcasting at this time was not in color and it was RCA's backwards compatibility that appealed to the market so much. In fact, RCA was not the first to have a product ready for market, that honor went to Admiral and Westinghouse but it never saw any sort of mass production because it would only display in color, cost over $10,000 in today's money, and even rich people didn't like the idea of needing 2 televisions in their living rooms depending on if the broadcast was going to be in B&W or color.
The fact that RCA could display both formats, made it the market leader for many years to follow. It was still well out of reach for most, financially speaking, as the initial offering was for nearly $8,000 of today's money.
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It would be many years before shows were actually filmed or much less broadcast live in full color, until the early 60's. Even then the sales of color TV's didn't surpass black and white sets until the mid 70's. At this point the price of color televisions was a bit more in reach of the average person. New black and white televisions continued to be made until the 80's, which is probably where my memory of owning one as a child comes from.
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For anyone born after say, 1985, it probably seems like a crazy notion that color TV wasn't just something everyone had but as late as the mid 80's I recall motels advertising, ironically, that they had did in-fact have color tv's in every room... wow!
I sit here now typing this with a computer that has 3 color (obviously) monitors and a 50 inch LED (i think that's what it is) on the other side of the room, all of which probably weigh 1/10 what the original RCA television weighed.
This bizarre commercial was actually from the 60's but it's still kind of funny.
So it all had to start somewhere, and full market penetration is estimated to not have occurred until as late as the mid 70's. But it all began somewhere, at the hands of a company that was considered a pioneer on many fronts a mere 66 years ago.
makes me think of that movie Blast From The Past have you seen it?
when they're watching that antique tv & he says "People will never get tired of watching these"🍿
the Brendan Frasier film yeah? I think i have seen it.
yup that's the one, not his best but I enjoy anything with Christopher Walken pretty much!😊
i think one of my favorite lines in any movie is when Brendan goes up on the surface and then sees an African American postal worker or meter-cop and says "lucky stars! A Negro!" because when they closed the bunker it was ok to say that.
We had quite a few black and white TV's when I was a kid. It was crazy to think that it was almost the normal thing to have. We had one bigger color TV in a wooden cabinet. I remember the first time we got a TV that had the cable tuner built in. It was mind blowing. Along with the first TV that had a remote. That was nuts too!
I remember my childhood television. Those cabinets were meant to be beutiful. I think ours was made of some sort of fine timber and mom kept it polished. It weighed as much as a mini-cooper so it stayed exactly where it was in that house for the entire time we lived there. I think when we moved to another city we just left it in the house.
I was the remote and the beast only had 12 channels unless you count those strange UHF ones. I don't remember if we had cable but thinking about how frugal my family was in those times, I seriously doubt it.