P.H.I.L.C.O.

ith

ds

Not just color TV. In the mid-Sixties, a friend of my mother's bought a spacious new house. Thanks to the discount her husband, a manager at Ford got, they had an all-Philco home: refrigerator, stove, washer- dryer, built-in intercom system that could pipe music through the house, hifi, and of course a color TV in the rec room.

>

From NY Times, Oct 23, 1950:

. .

--

I wish these advertisements were readable. (Any chance you could scan them in sections?) But I can guess what they say.

The FCC has largely been run by technical idiots. One of its most-idiotic decisions was to approve the CBS system of field-sequential color. Although the CBS system could have been implemented electronically, the natural desire to save money by converting existing B&W cameras, and the lack of practical polychrome display devices, lead to the use of spinning color wheels in front of the camera and CRT.

David Sarnoff, NBC's pit-bull-in-residence and one of the nastiest businessmen in American history (he makes Snidely Whiplash look like Mother Teresa, and his career is a strong case for "moregovt"), hammered at the CBS system's obvious weak spot -- where are you going to put the spinning wheel? And in the event of an accident -- how do you keep it from decapitating the dog? A 21" CRT would require a wheel almost 4' in diameter!

The CBS defense that an all-electronic system would eventually be possible * fell on Sarnoff-deafened ears, and RCA ramped up research on an all-electronic /compatible/ system, that would allow existing sets to display color programs in B&W, without modification. And, of course, RCA didn't want to see the hundreds of millions of dollars it had invested in electronic television ** blown away by CBS.

The compatibility issue was even more-fundamental than the spinning disks. The idiot inventor of the CBS system, one Peter Goldmark -- generally given credit for the CBS long-playing phonograph record -- apparently assumed that the CBS system would drive everything else off the market, an absolute necessity for its success, as its video format was incompatible with the

480i, 60Hz standard already in use. The possibility of CBS winning a race it had entered late was not altogether implausible, though, as even in 1950, commercial TV did not have much market penetration.

One way to win this race was to hold out the possibility of converting B&W sets to color. Some B&W sets had a "color converter" jack on the back, which delivered the undetected IF to a converter box. (I saw such a set in high-school electronics shop.)

Of course, no one (that I know of) ever demonstrated a working converter system (imagine the difficulty of installing the spinning color disk!), and -- more to the point -- without the converter, there was still no way to watch a color broadcast! The "color converter" jack /looked/ nice, but it did nothing to make the CBS system "compatible" with B&W sets. ***

The lack of compatibility also dissuaded people from buying /any/ TV. RCA's promise of an all-electronic, compatible color system (which it eventually delivered) allowed it (and other TV manufacturers) to sell increasing numbers of B&W sets that had no provision whatever for CBS color. Once there was sufficient household "penetration" (I don't know what the percentage would have been, but something around 5% seems reasonable), the CBS color system was, in practice, dead. As one writer said, "Every B&W TV RCA sold was another nail in the CBS system's coffin."

The CBS color-TV system is an object lesson in how /not/ to design something. It isn't just that it was incompatible -- it was inelegant, the engineering equivalent of taping wings on a pig to give it flight. It is, on many levels, the video equivalent of Emory Cook's dual-arm stereo LP.

• It isn't clear whether CBS was working on anything better. Someone ought to write a history of the development of the shadow-mask tube. (Before someone rushes to post, the Sony Trinitron is a shadow-mask tube.) What (to me) makes it such a fascinating piece of invention is that it isn't obvious it will work with a "practical" gun spacing. This makes it an excellent example of why experimentation should focus on "seeing what will happen", rather than trying to prove or disprove theories.

** As opposed to the Baird and similar systems. *** Starting in 1960, many FM tuners had a jack for a multiplex-stereo adapter. This actually worked, because, due to some unforeseen stroke of intelligence, the FCC required that any stereo system be backwards- and forwards-compatible.

m

gh

er

CBS

el?

he

e *

.

en

hat

it

W

ich

to

's

y

ere

e

on

t

to

us

In 1955-56, when I was a junior at the Univeristy of Florida in Gainesville, FL, the UF electrical engineering dept had a color tv set using the RCA principle of interleaving the color and the B+W signals. That set had been built by CBS when they were evaluating the RCA system. From the vacuum tubes it used, I would say the set was built about 1951-2. It had a 12" metal CRT with a flat 10" color screen mounted inside. You could see all the support mechanism for the screen. The set was actually two cabinets, one just for the power supplies and one for the actual receiver and display itself. We were lucky to get one hour of color tv programming each week from the NBC affiliate in Jacksonville F, the nearest city with any tv. Remeber this was WAAAAAAY back when, when only Jacksonville, Miami and Tampa had transmitters. We were even luckier if we could keep the color set running for an hour. This was in the days before air conditioning was common, and the engineering labs had nice open windows to let the humid breezes in. It would kill paper/wax capacitors just about as fast as we could replace them (with other paper/wax capacitors).

My home was in Ft Pierce on the east coast, 125 miles from Miami and

225 miles from Jax. Both cities transmitted NBC on channel 4, and being in almost opposite directions, we frequently had interference from Jax coming in on the back lobes of the antennas when we were trying to watch Miami. Antennas were mounted on 40ft tall collapsible pipe antenna masts with vacuum tube signal boosters on the top reight at the antenna. Collapsible so they could come down quickly before hurricanes hit. Worked ok except during lightning season, which was when I worked at a tv repair show during summers off from school. The insurance companies hated that season as the lightning would strike the towers and blow the amplifiers up, and frequently then travel down the twinlead into the tv blowing out at least the tuner if not the entire tv set. We would only do antenna work before lunch, as the lightning started up every day about 1 pm. Learned a lot way back then.

Speaking of no air conditioning: My uncle's late 50s RCA color set used as much power as a toaster.

Are you certain? My memory is that they pulled about 500W.

I think some of the earliest sets used about 750 W. The first 21" round tube RCA color sets, CTC 5 and earlier used so much power you couldn't run them and air conditioning at the same time. I still have some of the old Sam's Photofact Folders of that era, may put them up for auction some day.

I swear it was rated at 1100 W.

Google is useless for finding things like that any more. Every google search I do reminds me of my mother trying to find something in her purse. Gum wrappers come out, then used Kleenexes, finally something that may be useful.

At this point in my life, I want knowledge to be arranged, put in order, not presented as a grab bag or lucky dip.

You might very well be right. The earliest top-of-the-line RCA sets had full-bandwidth demodulation, and an awful lot of tubes.

If one had nothing better to do with their time, one might find the tube complement and add up the heater draws, as a starting estimate.

My point was that I doubted they pulled as much as a toaster. (~1kW). I could be wrong. The later $500 sets didn't, though.

And ironically we watched a color sequential (color wheel) TV from

2003 until 2010 in the form of a Samsung DLP. Looked pretty good at a little over 200 Watts for 50" until the 55" LG LED LCD set replaced it. It runs 78 Watts (via Kill-a-Watt) and is brighter that the old one. BTW it cost 1/3 what the DLP did.

G=B2

You are correct. I pulled the Sam's on the RCA CT-100 (Photofact 252). That source says the set draws 4.4 amps at 117 volts in my book that is

515 Watts. That is less than half a toaster.

Bill - N9MHT

1100 watts at 120 volts is around 9 amps. Seems a bit unusual. I'd go for the 500 watts since I remember seeing somewhere a 21" B&W using around 350 watts. It was an old Stromberg-Carlson chassis in one of my high school electronics books from 1970.

--
Live Fast Die Young, Leave A Pretty Corpse