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September 7, 2027, will mark 100 years from the day when electronic television made its first appearance on Earth.  To generate interest in the Centennial,  this website and accompanying podcast are going to Count Down the Top 100 Milestones from the First 100 Years of Television over 100 weeks until September 7, 2027.
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By the start of 1954, the United States was home to about 160 million people living in 48 million households. Some 27 million of those households  – roughly 55% – had at least one television set.

What none of them had, however, was any kind of color TV. 

That anybody would even think that television could be anything other than black-and-white came from the movies. Color had been part of the motion picture experience as early as the 1890s, when individual film frames were hand-painted or dipped in colored dye baths. Prints of Georges Méliès’ landmark 1902 film A Trip to the Moon were often colorized this way.

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George Méliès’ Le Voyage Dan La Lune in restored color
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Early attempts at actual color film date back to the 1910s, but the first process that really worked was Technicolor’s “Process 4,” ^⁠1 which used three separate strips of film to produce rich, realistic hues.  When Walt Disney used the process for his short film, Flowers and Trees in 1932, it was an immediate hit and won an Oscar. Technicolor reached its pre-war zenith with the release of The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind in late 1939. 

By the mid 1950s, nearly half of the feature films coming out of Hollywood were in color. That gave the film industry a temporary advantage over the new kid on every block, but also raised expectations that television, too, would eventually be delivered in something other than shades of grey.  But the process of delivering television in color would prove to be one of the most daunting engineering challenges of the mid-century. 

The First Attempts 

Experiments with color television date back to the first successful experiments with mechanical scanning.  As early as 1928, Britain’s John Logie Baird demonstrated a color system that used a Nipkow disc with with red, green, and blue filters.  In the U.S., Bell Labs pioneer Dr. Herbert Ives conducted experiments in the late 1920s and early 1930s with a system that used three photoelectric cells for the red, green, and blue signals. 

These early experiments illustrate the first challenge of color TV: In much the same way that television required breaking an image into individual elements, the spectrum of colors also needed to be separated into its three primary hues – red, green, and blue. But once the standards for monochrome television were set, colorizing video had to overcome at least three further obstacles. 

First, a whole new kind of television camera would have to be invented.  From the advent of Farnsworth’s Image Dissector in the 1920s and 30s through the adoption of the Image Orthicon in the 1940s and 50s, television cameras required only a single tube to convert an image into an electrical signal.^⁠2 Color would require at least three – one each for the red, green, and blue primary colors.  In the 1940s, engineers at RCA, GE and Philco experimented with prisms and mirrors to separate the light into three separate tubes. The first such cameras were bulky, finicky, and demanded intense lighting, but established the principle that color television began at the lens.  

Second, if cameras could be engineered to generate a color signal, then receivers had to be reinvented to display it. Black-and-white requires only a single phosphor coating on the picture tube; color requires three – for the red, green, and blue – and a way to aim the electron beams so they strike only their intended color target.  

Back to Spinning Wheels 

At CBS in the 1940s, engineer and inventor Peter Goldmark tried to clear this hurdle with a throwback to the mechanical systems of the 1920s. Called the “field-sequential” color system, Goldmark placed a spinning wheel of color filters in front of an ordinary black-and-white picture tube, and the electron beam alternated color elements in sequence according to the synchronized color filter. 

Goldmark’s system was innovative and relatively successful, but was hampered by the third issue facing any approach to color television: compatibility.  Any system that offered color was going to have to work with the millions of televisions consumers had already spent billions of dollars (and pounds, and francs and marks and yen) on.  

Goldmark’s system produced images that were sharp and vivid in color, but could not be replicated at all on existing receivers. Novel and effective as it was, Goldmark’s system was doomed while the industry looked for a system that could weave color into the signal in a way that existing television sets would continue to show a normal picture. ^⁠3

While experimenting continued apace, Goldmark’s system was perfected to the point that the FCC adopted it as the U.S. color television standard on October 11, 1950. ^⁠4 

Not So Fast! 

But at RCA, David Sarnoff did not accept that decision as any kind of final. He immediately declared that “RCA will never allow this counterfeit scheme to be foisted on the American people.” Given the vast corporate resources at its command, it comes as no surprise that RCA made good on Sarnoff’s promise. 

RCA spent several million dollars per year on color R&D at its laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey.  By 1952, the investment paid off with an all-electronic system that wove color information into the existing black-and-white signal so seamlessly that older sets without color simply ignored it.

Much of the individual credit for developing the RCA color system has been attributed to George H. Brown, who, along with Albert Rose and Richard C. Webb, figured out how to fit the color information into the same 6-MHz channel used for monochrome broadcasts.  That meant that the color signal could be seen as black-and-white on the millions of receivers already sitting in living rooms around the country (and the world). 

The New Color Standard… 

Once the technical hurdles were cleared, RCA took its case to the National Television System Committee – the same industry consortium that approved the 525-line / 30-frame standard that consolidated the industry in 1941.^⁠5  In July 1953, The NTSC submitted its recommendations – based entirely on RCA’s system – to the FCC.  Just three years after approving it, the Commission set aside Goldmark/CBS standard, and adopted the RCA-developed NTSC Color Standard on December 17, 1953.

Two weeks later, on New Year’s Day 1954, the RCA-owned NBC network broadcast the Tournament of Roses Parade in what was promoted as the first coast-to-coast color broadcast. From Pasadena, California, NBC’s cameras captured the flower-festooned floats in hues never before seen on a television screen. 

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To have color footage of the Rose Parade telecast, NBC would have needed to make a color “kinescope” 16mm from a studio monitor. If such footage exists, it is not to be found on the Internet. Here instead is what appears to be direct 16mm color film of the actual event.
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But for the most part, all those vivid colors were still seen only in shades of grey. 

RCA’s first color television – the RCA CT-100 – did not even go on sale until December 31, 1953 – the day before the Rose Parade broadcast.  The new color unit was priced at $1,000 (about $12,000 in 2026 dollars) and trade reports from the period suggest that there were none in private use prior to the New Year’s parade.  The actual color was available only on demonstration sets at NBC affiliates, department stores, and showrooms were people could view the colorcast. In fact, RCA didn’t really start manufacturing the CT-100 until March, 1954. 

…But Still Mostly Shades of Grey

Programming on all the networks remained mostly black-and-white for another decade, and even by the mid 1960s color sets were found in fewer than 10% of American households. 

Nevertheless, David Sarnoff took credit for introducing color television in 1954 just as he had taken credit for introducing black-and-white television at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Sarnoff himself famously described RCA’s color initiative as the company’s “second invention of television” – a corporate conceit that neatly sidestepped who really invented it the first time. 

NBC promoted the Rose Parade as a broadcast “brought to you in color.” RCA and NBC were mainly focused on selling RCA color TV sets, so the ads emphasized “See it on RCA Victor Color Television.”

In 1957, NBC began introducing its color programs with the slogan “The following program is brought to you in living color,” accompanied by an animated peacock logo spreading its tail feathers in a rainbow of colors.  The peacock remained part of NBCs logo for decades to come, and “Peacock” is the name that NBC – by then owned by the Comcast cable TV conglomerate – adopted for its video streaming service when it went online in 2020. 

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¹ Called Technicolor #4 because there were three prior iterations of Technicolor first tested in 1916, 1922 and 1925. The process used to shoot The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind employed three separate strips of black-and-white film that were simultaneously exposed through red, green, and blue filters and then combined in printing to produce the final color image. It was an expensive and cumbersome process requiring a massive, proprietary camera, but the results were lush and vivid in a way that made both films showcases for the technology.

² The provenance of the Image Orthicon camera tube – and its origins in Farnsworth’s patents – was discussed in Milestone #89, Eye Can See Clearly Now.

³ Peter Goldmark’s approach to color TV was ultimately consigned to the dustbin of tech history, but he is remembered for one far more lasting contribution to technology and culture. In the 1940s he developed the Long Playing (LP) 33-1/3 recording, which introduced high fidelity sound and became a staple of the recording industry in the 1950s and 60s. He also invented a record player for automobiles which was considerably less successful.

⁴ Goldmark’s sequential color system was not the only early attempt at color TV.  

In Mexico, the engineer and inventor Guillermo González Camarena received U.S. Patent #2,296,019 in 1942 for a color television system he called the “Chromascope.”  Using a field-sequential approach similar to the Goldmark/CBS system, González Camarena demonstrated his system with the first color transmission in Mexico in 1946 – years before color broadcasting became a commercial reality in the U.S. 

And in the U.S., no less a luminary than Ernest O. Lawrence – Nobel Laureate, veteran of The Manhattan Project and inventor of the first cyclotron atom-smasher –  patented a color system in 1951 called the Chromatron.  Also known at “the Lawrence Tube” the Chromatron was never commercially viable, but aspects of its technology found their way in to the Sony Trinitron, one of the most popular consumer electronics products ever manufactured.

⁵ The process of arriving at national signal standards for television broadcasting was addressed in Milestone #91, “Standards. “

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