Colors, on your TV! (1954, and photo of a consumer TV with colors on it)

[enmebaraguesser@piefed.ca]

There was a very complex history of color TV, with many separate developments. There were purely mechanical systems with moving color wheels clear back into the late 1920's, but just demonstrations that never made it to the public at scale.

There was a desire in the US FCC to have a color broadcast system that would be backward compatible with the large base of existing B&W TVs, using a purely electronic system, and needing as little broadcast bandwidth as possible so more stations could fit on the air, which ruled out earlier approaches that merged 3 monochrome channels.

Candidates were in labs in the 1940s, and got rolled out to the public around 1953/4. This RCA CT-100 was not the first purely electronic color TV (Westinghouse had an earlier model but only ever sold 30 units), but was the first to be mass produced. It had an 11.5 inch screen. Here is a photo of one, showing colors on a consumer TV screen!

Of course it was superseded by better models later the same year, but they are still prized and maintained by collectors.