With the move to digital broadcast TV over the past decade, it's easy to forget the color TV standard that served viewers well for more than five decades.

It's a story of engineering and production innovation across many dimension; of extremely clever, all-analog signal encoding techniques; of spending millions R&D dollars; and, finally, of success and—ultimately—of obsolescence.

It’s also largely the story of one man – David Sarnoff –who was determined to make his vision a reality regardless of effort or cost. It's also a story of corporate dominance and eventual disappearance.

David Sarnoff ran RCA as a fiefdom, and experienced enviable success. Image source: Sarnoff library.Sarnoff was born in 1891 and came to the U.S. as an immigrant. He worked his way up through dedication, luck and self-promotion. He joined the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co. of America in 1906 and moved from office boy to commercial manager in 11 years. Along the way he gained hands-on experience installing "wireless" communication technology on ocean-going ships. He even spent on time some of those devices as a radio operator. (He may even have been one of the telegraph operators who received messages from the Titanic in 1912 as she sank, but this is unprovable.)

General Electric bought Marconi in 1919 and transformed it into the Radio Corporation of America (RCA); soon after, it was split off, and by 1930, Sarnoff was its president. He remained at RCA until his retirement in 1970 (he died a year later). Although a public company, RCA was run almost as a fiefdom by the autocratic Sarnoff.

Respect (and Fear)

Today, RCA is primarily a licensed marketing nameplate, but in the mid- and late-20^th century, it was one of the most respected (and even feared) names in electronics; think of it almost as Intel, IBM and Microsoft rolled into one at the peak of the PC business. The company was a major factor in recorded music and record players, military, aerospace and broadcast markets; indeed, in almost any area that required "electronics." The RCA logo, and that of RCA Victor, was as well-known as McDonald's is today.

RCA didn’t just design, manufacture and sell a breadth of products; it also designed and built many of the components used within them, such as vacuum tubes. It operated its own R&D labs and owned and operated factories to press records for their RCA Victor record label. It also owned NBC, the National Broadcasting Co., which began in radio and later moved into television.

Although not an engineer, Sarnoff was technically knowledgeable and smart enough to recognize good engineers. He hired R&D engineers such as Vladimir Zworykin, a leading innovator in photomultiplier tubes, which were a core element of TV cameras. He also was one of the earliest to recognize that radio could be a mass-broadcast medium for voice and music and not simply a point-to-point communications link for public safety.

By 1950, monochrome (black and white) TV based on the EIA RS-170 monochrome standard (first publically demonstrated in 1938) was starting to take hold in households. Visionaries dreamed of a full-color system, but no one knew how to create one. Perhaps the only thing everyone agreed on was that full-color images could be created by combining red, green and blue colors. Beyond that, there was no agreement on the path to color TV. Still, consumers assumed that because motion pictures went to color in the 1930s and 1940s, TV should be able to do the same. What they did not know, however, was that the problem and its solution were very different in nature.

The RCA logo was as well known in the mid-20th century as McDonalds’ is today.RCA and NBC also had a broadcasting rival: CBS, the Columbia Broadcasting System, which was headed by William S. Paley. Sarnoff viewed CBS as "just a broadcaster" (what we might call a "media” company) with little technical expertise, minimal engineering innovation, a small R&D effort and no manufacturing. “All” CBS did was produce or buy shows and broadcast them, in contrast to RCA and NBC's menu that included TV receivers, broadcast-studio equipment and components engineering, in addition to content.

Adding to the animosity was that Paley was from an upper-crust family, in contrast to Sarnoff’s immigrant roots. Paley was invited to all the "right" social events, and CBS prided itself as being the high-tone "Tiffany Network." The rivalry was both business and personal in nature.

In an age of the big-screen digital televisions, does analog color-TV matter? To be sure, many of the principles and characteristics of analog color TV are embedded (although not readily apparent) in our digital-TV world. CBS did, in fact, offer a prototype system that could produce color in the 1930s. It used a spinning wheel divided with red, green and blue filter segments, and the wheel’s rotation was synchronized with a similar wheel at the TV camera. In this way, a single monochrome camera and corresponding cathode ray tube (CRT) could display a moving color image. This approach had several mass-market shortcomings, although it was demonstrated ahead of the RCA version:

• The filter wheel had to be at least twice the size of the screen
• The receiver's filter wheel had to be precisely synchronized with the camera's wheel
• It was mechanical, and so made noise and had reliability issues.
• The format was incompatible with the millions of monochrome TV sets in use, although there was a scheme to make an add-on kit.

Nonetheless, the CBS system was ready by 1940, even as RCA's design had a long way to go. Indeed, the CBS-system picture looked better in early match-ups against RCA's first demonstration in the late 1940s. Even so, Sarnoff and RCA would have nothing to do with the CBS approach. They derided it for what it was: a stop-gap attempt to make color TV possible and a dead-end solution. Instead, Sarnoff vowed to develop an all-electronic color system that was compatible with the black and white units already in homes. Indeed, Sarnoff and RCA went after color TV with an open-ended budget. Although it is hard to put a solid number on the development cost, estimates are that RCA spent $150-$200 million of its own money on the project by 1960; and that was in mid-20^th century dollars.

This title card was used by NBC in the 1960s to promote the network’s color broadcasts. Image source: Wikipedia.The effort was orders of magnitude more complicated than just coming up with a viable scheme to do it, which would be marked "complete" with a basic feasibility demonstration. Instead, it would devise and build the needed technologies, the broadcast chain and end products. For new components, RCA engineers also developed new manufacturing techniques and built factories to produce them.

It also needed a color-TV ecosystem. Because RCA owned NBC, Sarnoff was able to force an answer to the innovator's "which comes first?" dilemma: why upgrade broadcast facilities at major expense if no one has a color TV set at home, but why buy a color TV set if no stations are broadcasting in color?

Problems Met and Solved

One apparently intractable issue that RCA had to solve was what we now call "encoding." The monochrome signal was defined within a 6-MHz bandwidth, with a complex analog shape. This both carried the video information and also provided the horizontal and vertical synchronization signals. The TV receiver stripped these out and used them to keep the displayed image lines and frame aligned with the TV camera's image.

How do you add complex color information within this fixed bandwidth? And how do you do so in way that is both backward and forward compatible, so that monochrome TV sets are able to render a color-encoded signal in proper gray-scale equivalent, while color receivers will display the conventional monochrome signal also in correct grey scale? That way, everyone will be happy, regardless of the TV they have or the signal being broadcast.

RCA scientists and engineers solved this problem with some clever interleaving of signals within the band. They made use of understanding how the eye and brain perceive color, detail and motion.

That was only one step, but a big one. A second challenge was to conceive, design, build and test the components to bring the concept into reality. Here, they faced the dilemma of all communications systems: the components, topology and circuitry of the transmitter side are different than those of the receiver side, yet you can't test one without the other. You have to have both ends working to verify that either one is working. As a result, figuring out what's working on a radically new system design is very difficult.

Among the color-TV transmitter-side innovations RCA pioneered were these:

•The image orthicon, an RGB scanning camera

•Electronic filters which shaped, passed or attenuated signals so only desired parts of the spectrum (with the desired bandwidth and envelope) would be passed to the transmitter

•New techniques for modulating the image information onto the carrier signal by combining AM, FM, and PM, using an understanding of why and where each modulation type was to be used (related to both electronic considerations as well as eye and ear tolerance for visual, color and audio distortion)

•A technique to interlace the color information in alternate images frames, to reduce the bandwidth needed; again, knowledge of how color and detail are perceived was critical

•New broadcast-studio equipment, control panels and cameras (each weighing several hundred pounds and mounted on dollies) along with techniques for powering these units, and then keeping them cool

•New techniques for studio lighting and cast makeup, to better mesh with the subtleties of color-camera sensitivities and characteristics.

And for the color-TV receiver, RCA also developed:

•A radically new cathode ray tube, which used the black and white design as a starting point, but added several important innovations

•Circuitry to demodulate the complex received AM/FM/PM signal, including stripping away the sync-signal portions

•Extra circuitry to ensure backward compatibility, so a color TV receiving a monochrome-encoded signal would present a clean gray-scale image without an inadvertent color tint

•A greatly improved channel-tuner design, which had to have more consistent frequency/phase performance and stability over time and temperature (this was an electromechanical device with dozens of inductors and capacitors; you had to get up and turn the knob to change channels).

The Battle Ends

In 1953, both RCA and CBS presented their color-TV approaches to the Federal Communications Commission for approval. One presumed virtue of the spinning color-wheel approach that CBS demonstrated was that it was less costly to build since it had far fewer components; it appeared at first glance to be more reliable and easier to repair. The RCA unit had more than 100 vacuum tubes and dissipated several hundred watts. By contrast, the CBS unit was a modified black and white TV with an added wheel, small motor and some synchronization circuitry. It could in theory be retrofitted to existing sets. There were valid arguments for both approaches, and both RCA/NBC and CBS were also well-connected politically.

The final FCC decision was in favor of RCA's all-electronic approach, since it offered a long-term roadmap, among other reasons. This vindicated Sarnoff's vision and RCA's investment. The inherent, transparent backward/forward compatibility of the RCA approach with the 53 million monochrome sets already in homes was a big advantage. With the decision, the National Television System Committee standard was set as the definition of color TV in the U.S. (and soon Canada and Mexico). Europe followed later with its own color systems, called PAL and SECAM, which were incompatible with the U.S. standard.

The first color TVs went on sale in 1955 at a price of $700, roughly a month's salary for an average worker. Those sets didn't sell well, due to the cost and novelty, and they had performance and reliability issues. RCA cut the price to $500, boosted marketing, and stayed the course. Within a few years, the TV sets and sales improved, and having a color TV at home became the mark of "you've made it."

The end the story of color TV battle is a complicated affair. Driven by the dream that some form of 1 + 1 = 3 synergy would occur, RCA became swept up in the conglomerate mania of the 1960s. They became involved with selling carpets, car rental and many other businesses with little or no electronics connection. Within a few years, executives were consumed with managing these disparate businesses, and cut back on technology investment. General Electric bought RCA in 1986 but sold it off in pieces.

Of course, it was not just missteps that accounted for RCA's misfortune. The development of semiconductors, both transistors and ICs, changed the entire nature of the design and manufacturing of electronic products and their constituent components. RCA made several attempts to become a semiconductor supplier beginning in 1950. (Note that RCA was not the only failure, as none of the leading vacuum-tube vendors of the 1950s made a successful transition to becoming a major semiconductor vendor).

Today, we have the legacy of analog color TV which still permeates many aspects of digital imaging. RCA itself is now just a trademark owned by Technicolor. The company has gone from a position of worldwide name recognition that was probably as close to universal as a company can avhieve, to a "huh, who were they?" side note—surely a humbling lesson for every market leader.

References

1. David E. Fisher and Marshall Jon Fisher, "Tube: The Invention of Television"
2. Eugene Lyons, "David Sarnoff, a Biography"
3. Ken Burns, "Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio," (PBS Video)
4. Tom Lewis, Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio," (companion to PBS video)
5. Kenneth W. Bilby, "The General: David Sarnoff and the rise of the communications industry"