We have often wondered if people dreamed in black and white before the advent of photography. While color pictures eventually became the norm, black and white TV was common for many years. After all, a TV set was a big investment, so people didn’t run out and buy the latest TV every year. Even if you did buy a new or used TV, a black and white model was much less expensive and, for many years, some shows were in black and white anyway. RCA, of course, wanted you to buy a color set. [PeriscopeFilm] has a 1963 promotional film from RCA extolling the virtues of a color set. The video also shows something about how the sets were made, as you can see below.
We aren’t sure we’d have led with the idea that color could save your life in this context, but we have to salute the melodrama. There is a good bit of footage of picture tube manufacturing, although the technical detail is — understandably — aimed at the general public.
You do get a look at the shadow mask and piles of colored phosphor. The manufacturing process seems oddly manual, although there is some automation involved. If you ever wondered how each little dot of phosphor gets placed precisely, the film answers that question.
The spectrometers the operators use in the electron gun build lack computer interfaces, so they have many discrete controls. We wondered if a modern assembly line could have that open flame, too.
It is amazing to think how many of these tubes were built worldwide in, say, the 1970s. Our guess is there are very few CRTs made today, although surely someone somewhere is turning out a few for some reason. We wonder how today’s factory compares to the one in the film.
RCA was a pioneer in bringing color TV to the United States and the world. Who remembers degaussing a color TV?
Featured image: “Tricolour television close up” by [Martin Howard].
i still have a degaussing coil floating around somewhere :-)
One Vo-Tech instructor told us we could make our own by wrapping a pound of wire around the bottom of an office sized trash can. And attach a line cord and a momentary switch to it.
Exactly what my dad did, except he used WAAYYY more than a pound of 12-14 guage wire😉) He even built his own Heathkit TV! Enjoyed bragging to my buddies that ‘My Dad’ built his own TV 👍🎉
“We have often wondered if people dreamed in black and white before the advent of photography”
Why? I would think for most people seeing the world with an absence of color would be the more shocking thing. Its not like color didnt exist before the advent of color photography
This is not what I have been led to believe: https://imgur.com/all-time-favorite-calvin-hobbes-color-photos-of-black-white-world-4rPGp
Thanks for the refressher!
Wooohoo. It must have been 30 years since I last read that one, from a friend’s C&H collection.
I mean. Human vision existed for long, long before black and white photography came around. I see no reason anyone would dream in B&W for millennia then become color after the advent of color photography. Maybe it was .. a joke? dunno
I think it would make more sense interpreted in the opposite way: nowadays you may see the occasional B&W dream, and it might have been more common in the B&W photo era.
But before B&W photos, there would have been little reason to see a B&W dream.
There’s a current theory that humanity has only slowly developed an awareness of colour, starting with descriptions of light and dark, then red followed by green, while blue only started to be described as such a couple of thousand years ago.
We can see the same phenomena more recently. For example, most people normally talk about the most basic colours: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Pink, Black, White, Brown. And these colours aren’t even spread reasonably around the available hues, because they’re missing Magenta (which isn’t purple) and Cyan (which isn’t blue). Most people describe Cyan as blue and Magenta as Red which is why they think Red, Yellow and Blue are primary colours; when in fact either Magenta, Yellow and Cyan are (subtractive) or Red, Green and Blue are (additive). When people want to extend their description of colour they then add a bunch of seemingly unrelated words: Beige, Grey, Turquoise, Teal etc. But it’s still all just a finite set and most people would be pushed to say how close each colour is to another.
For software developers though, colour is a 3-D space where we think of it most commonly as RGB or HSV. We think about millions of colours (24-bit, ignoring alpha) – a continuum along any of the three axes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHPs0TsSXd0
I’m fascinated by all the complex analog technology used in manufacturing these TVs. The 130 billion in 1963 dollars investment in color TV sounds very wrong, considering the entire US federal government budget was 92 billion that year.
Never Twice the Same Colour.
PAL Deluxe dissagrees!
Color. No “u”, ’cause Merica! :-)
The first assignment in my Signals course was to analyze and explain the NTSC signal.
Many movies from my childhood are black and white, gowning up with a black and white television. I was surprised many times, later in life, when I saw them in color (predates Turner Classic Movies recoloring; not fooled by that)
I can remember all the fuss about the Wonderful World of Disney episode when they went color. Just daffy about color. We had B/W and I wondered why we didn’t have color and I got a EE lesson.
I can’t tell if the thumbnail is Max Headroom or Dr. Billy Graham. I also don’t know why this bothers me.
Daniel Craig from Layer Cake DVD…
On April 1 1962 they aired a April Fools joke on national TV in Sweden that if you put a nylon stocking in front of your black-and-white TV-screen you get color TV. A lot of people fell for it. You can watch it here (in Swedish, but auto-translation is available): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZa3Xrc1eqU
“Some” shows were in B&W?