Hi - John Hess here from Filmmaker IQ.
Every time I talk about where we derive the
odd number NTSC frame rate of 29.97 I brush
up against the story of the adoption of Color
Television and just as quickly move on to
another technical topic regarding frame rates.
But that’s really a missed opportunity to
tell a really juicy story that literally shaped
the way the entire world handled color television
signals.
Well today that changes Ladies and Gentlemen
and we’re going to explore this somewhat
forgotten battle ground in the history of
moving pictures.
So if you’ll indulge me, let’s me set
the stage and go back to the beginning of
this new professional medium called television.
Let’s go back, Not to the early 50's or
the late 40's but further still to the mid
1930's.
Back to November 2, 1936 at 3PM - when the
very first official regular television broadcast
service began from Alexandra Palace in London
England - That’s right the Brits take this
first milestone.
The BBC began it all with the first regular
TV service.
It was only broadcast twice a day Monday through
Saturday at first and officially only had
a range of 40 km...
As for numbers, Britain's Radio Manufacturers
Association estimated that 19,000 television
sets had been manufactured from 1936 to September
1939…
Three years of regular television operation
and then the BBC shut down.
Why?
You see there was this little nastly bit of
business called World War II.
The last thing broadcast was a Mickey Mouse
Cartoon: Mickey's Gala Premiere followed by
test patterns.
After 6 years of bloody fighting the United
Kingdom and Europe were left in tatters from
the savagery of war.
The BBC picked up Television service again
in 1946 and picked up right where they left
off playing the same Mickey Mouse Cartoon.
But let’s be honest, Television was still
a very limited luxury item at the time.
If you wanted news and entertainment there
was always radio and the movies, the concept
of plopping down on a sofa and binging a season
of The Office was alien to people of the mid
1940s.
And looking around, it was clear that the
UK and Europe there were more pressing issues
than television to worry about - things like
rebuilding their economies and infrastructure.
But you know which major wartime participant
went rather unscathed during WW2?
Uncle Sam.
Manufacturers on the North American continent
quickly pivoted from guns to butter: to borrow
an old economic phrase.
Instead of building Sherman tanks and P-38s,
factories pumped out refrigerators, microwaves
and this new fangled device called television
now boosted by the tremendous advances made
in radio technology during the War.
Just after the close of the War in 1946 there
was an estimated 6,000 TV sets in North America,
one year later in 1947 that number had gone
up to 40,000.
Four years later in 1951 there were 12 million
across the nation.
This post war industrial explosion is the
background to what’s about to happen in
the war for Color Television.
England may have birthed TV but it was raised
on the continent-spanning United States amidst
a huge economic boom that gave Television
not only the manufacturing capability but
the economic excess to invest in this new
medium.
To tell the story of Television in the States,
Let’s again back up, this time to 1939 and
the World’s Fair in New York City.
The BBC was, as we mentioned already in limited
service, and one American company was showcasing
the marvels of Television to a new audience
- the Radio Corporation of America, RCA.
Again I have to remind you that we’re dealing
with an infant industry.
We use terms like first regular service but
that's glorifying the scale because of our
modern associations.
There were a handful of manufacturers but
no real TV networks… just about 10 experimental
TV stations across the nation testing broadcasting
ranges and receptions.
And being they were experimental meant they
were prohibited from broadcasting commercial
messages which meant there was no funding
for programming - these operators just ate
the costs as R&D.
Research and Development.
What the industry was waiting on was the FCC
to settle on a television standard and regulate
the airwaves so stations could begin commercial
broadcasting and become a profitable industry.
Now why do we need standards and conventions?
Basically to make the marketplace more fair
and efficient.
Imagine if every grocery store had their own
way of measuring the weight of produce - there
would be mass confusion.
From a consumer perspective, a shopper ought
to know that the television they buy now will
be able to receive the broadcasts in their
area and in the future.
You don’t want to have major manufacturers
designing a TV system that would be able to
receive only one channel and not the others.
From a broadcaster standpoint, you want fairness
in how the airwaves are partitioned.
The radio band is limited and considered a
public good.
So if you’re cleared to broadcast on one
channel which is a range of frequencies you
don’t want a competitor throwing up an antenna
and creating interference on that same channel.
So standards are essential, especially in
a growing telecommunications industry.
But when there’s no standard yet in place,
every company wants to get their pet system
adopted as the standard and not just for bragging
rights, but for profits from being able to
license that technology.
And now to introduce the major combatants
in the War for Color TV - the aforementioned
Radio Corporation of American, RCA headed
by David Sarnoff.
RCA had been the major developer in Television
as we saw in the 1939 World’s Fair.
And in the other corner, the Columbia Broadcasting
System - CBS headed by William S. Paley, a
radio giant who in 1940 had yet to get their
first experimental TV station online.
These weren’t the only two in the war, there
was also DuMont and Zenith but for the purposes
of this story, we’ll stick with RCA and
CBS
So here we are in 1940.
RCA’s black and white standard for television
demonstrated at the World’s Fair the year
before is in front of the FCC as a possible
standard.
But here comes little CBS, … On August 29,
1940 they announced that they had been secretly
developing a sequential color system developed
by Dr Peter C. Goldmark which used standard
monochrome CRT display behind a synchronized
rotating color wheel.
Each scan of the screen would correspond to
a different color on the color wheel - spin
the wheel fast enough and the primary colors
blended together for color television.
This announcement of sequential or mechanical
color raised two important questions - first
was in regards to the allocation of the radio
spectrum.
This first version of CBS color required a
broadcast using radio band of 16 megahertz
- almost three times as wide as the 6 Mhz
system the FCC was considering adopting.
16 megahertz per channel meant that the chunk
of Low band VHF spectrum between 54MHz and
84MHz would only fit 2 channels instead of
the proposed 6.
CBS argued that perhaps, Low band VHF wasn’t
where TV broadcasts should be, but in the
UHF spectrum from 470Mhz to 890Mhz where there
was room for 26 16MHz wide channels.
Next was the question - why settle on a black
and white convention now when Color Television
was only just around the corner.
In fact CBS hammered the point home running
its “Color Now!” ad campaign - calling
the CBS color system the kind of “TV worth
waiting for” - In fact, the more cynical
could be led to believe that delaying the
process was the real goal...
CBS was trying to buy time to get itself set
up.
But if it could win the color standard, CBS
would go from a late player in Black and White
to the leader in Color.
Well this caught RCA off guard.
They too were working on a color system but
at the time it was hardly more than a laboratory
curiosity - instead trying to perfect their
black and white delivery.
But in the end, the pressure on the FCC to
act was just too great.
Even though CBS had a prototype, they had
yet to demonstrate a live camera broadcast
- all their experiments came from broadcasting
already shot color film.
So in June of 1941, the FCC announced their
black and white NTSC television standard of
525 lines with FM sound and 60 hz refresh
rate with each channel slotted to 6 megahertz
- a compromise between RCA 441 line system
and DuMont's 625 system.
And on July 1, 1941, commercial television
in the United States officially began.
CBS had lost the first round but they didn’t
go away - but World War II kept everybody
preoccupied and there wasn’t that much to
our story during the war years - though the
FCC was keen on seeing what CBS could do with
sequential color.
Flash forward to December 9-13, 1946, CBS
along with manufacturer Zenith were back at
it this time trying to convince the FCC to
adopt their system for color this time in
the UHF channels and freeze the old black
and white standard for the 13 channels that
the FCC had allocated to VHF (which they opened
up a second set of channels in the high band
VHF in the meantime).
But this time RCA was prepared.
They argued that they could produce color
simultaneously with the use of three UHF signals
crammed into a 12 Mhz channel.
But CBS was looking like a clear winner.
Charles Denny the new FCC chairman was vocal
in how impressive CBS’s system was.
Later in January of 1947, RCA demonstrates
it’s idea for simultaneous color - No one
was impressed and CBS looked like a shoe in...
But when it came time to vote in March of
1947, the FCC said CBS’s color was still
premature and Color would go back to the drawing
board.
Six months later the FCC chairman Denny accepted
a new job as the vice-president of NBC - which
was owned by RCA.
From CBS’s perspective it looked the head
of a government organization just took a job
at the rival company!
The folks at CBS felt slighted and lobbied
a Congressional investigation that would lead
to an amendment that prevents that from happening
again.
So here we are in mid 1947, still no color
standard, but a big nasty problem began to
rear its ugly head.
When the Broadcast frequency allotment was
originally laid out in 1941, experimental
broadcasts were done with relatively little
power and televisions were rather primitive.
With high power broadcasts and more sophisticated
sets (thanks to the improvements in radio
technology developed during World War II),
people that happened to live between stations
of the same channel or adjacent channels would
receive a scrambled mess as the signals fought
each other on their television screens.
Something had to be done quickly or else chaos
was going to reign.
On September 30, 1948, FCC halts all new TV
station licenses for six months to study the
problem.
Six months turned to 12 months.
12 months would turn into 30...
RCA’s response to all this was to pour its
R&D into exploring the UHF spectrum with black
and white - after all there were a lot of
stations and a lot of channels that could
be had once the FCC unfroze licences and RCA
wanted to have the best technology and experience
once UHF was open for TV.
But then in 1949, the FCC reopens the question
on UHF AND color television.
The big wigs at RCA rush back into the color
game, putting their engineers and designers
on major overtime to come up with something
- anything to broadcast color.
This time they fabricate a set using three
vacuum tubes each projecting an image onto
frosted glass.
The entire set weighed close to a ton.
This last minute effort in color was a public
embarrassment for RCA.
CBS lead engineer Goldman in a testimony to
the FCC suggested RCA’s system to be dropped
immediately without even field testing it.
That was a biting blow - something RCA president
would take personally.
But one thing RCA’s system had going for
it - it was compatible with the black and
white system at the time and used the same
6 Mhz band.
But RCA had one more card to play.
Back February 24, 1947 RCA's engineer Alfred
Schroeder had patented a color display that
worked using a single tube - engineers racked
up the overtime hours and developed this system
which used colored phosphors and a shadow
mask and presented it in March of 1950.
It was about the same size as TV sets out
there, but unlike CBS color system - it was
backwards compatible.
But it was still way too premature.
Then on May 26, 1950 after 8 months and 62
exhaustive hearings and 265 exhibits on color
television, the FCC ruled in favor of the
CBS mechanical color system - approving it
on September 1, 1950.
The unfreezing of new broadcast licenses would
wait until 1952.
The approval of color came with two conditions.
The industry was given 90 days to produce
a superior system.
Otherwise the CBS system would be adopted
and number 2, all manufacturers had to agree
that future TV sets would come with a switch
that could receive both black and white and
the new CBS color even if showing the signal
in black and white - if they all agreed to
doing that then the FCC wouldn’t adopt color
as the standard.
If they didn’t agree, then the CBS color
system would be adopted.
Lots of people were PISSED off, least surprisingly
RCA.
First they sued just a week after the FCC
adopted CBS color, delaying the adoption until
May 28, 1951 when the Supreme Court reaffirmed
the FCC decision.
RCA’s David Sarnoff flung everything at
improving shadow mask concept and marshalled
others in the industry to convene - formally
establishing the “second NTSC” on June
18, 1951
CBS announced that it would commence color
broadcasting with Premiere on Monday, June
25, 1951 on a five city network that included
New York City, Washington, D.C., Baltimore,
Philadelphia, and Boston
This would be the beginning of CBS's initial
plan to broadcast twenty hours of color a
week a minimum by autumn.
Thing was few people had bought converters
and there were no sequential color sets out
there -so for those watching, the CBS signal
just turned to trash for that one hour of
color broadcast
So CBS, which wasn’t a manufacturer themselves,
had to get some TVs out there.
After some marshalling The first CBS sequential
color television went on sale on September
20, 1951 the CBS-Columbia Model 12CC2.
Catchy name...
It sold for $500, or about 5,000 in 2019 dollars
and according to Allen B. DuMont, 200 of these
sets were shipped and 100 were sold.
The public largely ignored this overpriced
gizmo - remember this was a time when TVs
were selling millions a year and here CBS
could only sell a hundred.
In winning this battle for Color TV, CBS lost
the war.
But let’s be real here, the whole idea of
sequential mechanical color is just, not very
good.
Just the practicality - the larger the screen,
the larger the color wheel - there was no
future in this design at all.
And when people moved, because the color was
captured sequentially, their faces would change
colors - sequential color was simply a terrible
idea to begin with.
Now during all this, another real war was
brewing on the Korean Peninsula.
Exactly who called who changes depending on
who’s telling the story but Senator Charlie
E. Wilson of the Defense Production Administration,
not to be confused with these other Charlie
Wilsons, issues order M-90 on November 20,
1951, instructing CBS to abandon production
and development of color television because
it might lead to a shortage of vital electronic
components needed on the war front.
No such ask was made of black and white tv
set manufacturers.
And that was the unofficial end of CBS sequential
mechanical color.
Perhaps Sarnoff’s connections from RCA made
the call, perhaps Paley of CBS used it as
a way to get off the hook on a product that
was bombing in the figurative sense.
Speaking of David Sarnoff at RCA - he’s
hadn’t been taking the loss lightly.
While CBS color was failing, he’d poured
tons of resources to develop his single tube
system.
And slowly but surely it begins to take shape.
CBS officially rescinded their color standard
in March of 1953 and second NTSC committee
submits their new color standard to the FCC
in a petition on July 22, 1953 - this time
with RCA leading the way with their electronic
color system that separates luminance and
chrominance and a CRT screen with Red Green
Blue colored phosphors - the concept that
we are familiar with today.
And of course that frame rate is adjusted
down ever so slightly to keep the audio subcarrier
from interfering with the color subcarrier.
And in December of 1953, the new NTSC Color
standard which was backwards compatibility
was unanimously adopted.
1953 would close out with over 7 million television
sets built that year BEFORE this standard,
bringing the total number of TVs in the United
States to something like 23 million with a
marketplace value 228 million dollars.
That’s a $2.2 billion dollar production
when adjusted for inflation.
But the good news, those sets wouldn’t be
destined for the garbage dump or need some
clunky adapter to pick new color broadcasts.
Backwards compatibility was no joke.
The first coast to coast color broadcast took
place on January 1, 1954 with the Tournament
of Roses Parade by NBC a subsidiary of RCA.
Because so many of these manufacturers were
part of this second NTSC board, even new black
and white television sets were tuned to 59.94i
instead of straight 60i.
Ironically, or perhaps because the compatibility,
Color Broadcast was slow on the uptick.
It would take another 13 years before NBC
would announce the first all color Prime Time
line-up in 1966.
In fact black and white TVs continued to outsell
color TVs for yet another decade after that
all the way up to 1972 when Color Sets started
taking over.
Just to round out the story, let’s go back
to our friends in Europe.
By the mid fifties Television was making its
way to European homes.
In 1956, the first alternative color system
was being developed in France by Henri France
that would later become SECAM - it was a politically
motivated color system, to counter the Americans
and protect French Television industries.
Thing is SECAM is the same principle of NTSC
- the idea of separating luminance from chrominance
and building that into the same signal was
the same as the American counterpart but SECAM
dealt with a phase problem that plagued NTSC.
The way the color was encoded in NTSC could
potentially lead to phase distortions over
very long distances which could make the colors
go wonky - turning green to blue.
This is the reason you have a hue control
on your NTSC television.
France took the color information and split
it over two lines sequentially - hence where
the term SECAM comes from.
Then in 1959 Walter Bruch, working at Telefunken
in Germany, looked at NTSC and the French
proto SECAM version and all their inherent
problems and weakness sort of developed a
hybrid of two.
Instead of sequential chrominance signals,
he decided to alternate the chrominance signal
on each line that way any distortion would
be canceled out when the receiver summed up
the chrominance signal.
His system which he didn’t want to name
after himself because Bruch sounds like the
German word for broken - would become PAL
- which sported 625 lines image and displayed
at an even 50hz - no fractional frame rate
needed.
But unlike NTSC and SECAM, it would not be
backwards compatible.
Getting Europe to adopt a German system 20
some years after WW2 was kind of hard, but
the robustness of the system eventually won
over Western Bloc countries with the UK being
the first to implement it in 1967 with BBC2,
the second and more high brow flagship channel
of British Broadcaster.
While BBC requires viewers to pay a license
fee, getting BBC2 required viewers to purchase
an additional color license and a new set
or a complicated dual standard receiver.
Color adoption in Britain was slow too as
the number of color licenses didn’t reach
a million subscribers for 5 years until 1972
and didn’t outpace monochrome television
until 1977.
That’s 5 years after the Americans had started
buying more Color TVs than Black and White
ones.
BBC1 and ITV kept broadcasting in the old
monochrome VHF 405 line system until November
15, 1969 when both started broadcasting in
PAL while rebroadcasting in the 405 monochrome
format all the way up until 1985.
So where as the Europeans like to mock the
American system, saying NTSC stands for Never
the Same Color, the Americans can just shoot
back that PAL stood for Pay Another Licensing
fee.
But in reality the color issues of NTSC were
ultimately improved with better designed tv
sets and using the S-Video standard, NTSC
actually delivers a slightly higher resolution
on the horizontal and higher frame rate than
PAL or SECAM.
But for as much hubub as which was better
- they’re all pretty close when you come
down to it and it wasn’t like you have a
choice anyways.
It's where you live.
But now that things have moved to digital,
NTSC and PAL have both been abandoned for
digital broadcast with ATSC and DVB-2.
But the spoils of the war of Color Television
still mark the way we make television and
video today - including those little odd ball
frame rate numbers that still induce a serious
amount of illogical anger among those that
don’t know any better.
Thanks for indulging me in telling this story.
Most of the research from this came from an
exhaustive article on EarlyTelevision.org
by Bob Cooper - I’ll provide a link below
if you want to get really really deep into.
If you would like more of these pleasure cruises
into the science and history of filmmaking,
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If you hated this video and the whole notion
of tri-color television, buy a shirt in red
green and blue, attach them to a wheel and
create your very own sequential color system.
Why?
I don’t know, it might look cool.
Send me a video!Go out there friends and make
something great.
I’m John Hess and I’ll see you at Filmmaker
IQ.
