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October 19, 1951…The CBS Color System Comes To An End

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Eyes Of A Generation.com

October 19, 1951…The CBS Color System Comes To An End

The CBS field sequential color cameras broadcast 111 hours of live color over a 17 week period between June 24, 1951 and October 20, 1951.

On October 19, less than a month after sales of the first CBS made color receivers began, Charles E. Wilson of the Defense Production Administration asked CBS to suspend mass production of color receivers “to conserve material for defense” for the duration of the Korean emergency.

CBS announces (almost too quickly) that it agrees and will also drop color broadcasts; color receivers are recalled and destroyed. Strangely, monochrome receiver production is not affected, and the only “end item” product ever prohibited by the Defense Production Administration was color television sets. The ban lasted until early 1953 and applied to RCA as well.

According to Allan B. DuMont, this was, “a move to take Columbia and it’s color system off the hook.”

The next day, October 20, 1951, the last commercial CBS color system broadcast came with the North Carolina – Maryland Football Game. Eleven stations, as far West as Chicago, had carried the CBS color system broadcasts.

On December 6,1951 the first transcontinental color broadcast was done via closed circuit as USC doctors preformed surgery with new Smith, French & Kline instruments. It was viewed by surgeons in New York. After that, the CBS color system became the Industrial Color System and was manufactured in limited numbers by Dumont and CBS Labs. -Bobby Ellerbee

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11 responses to “October 19, 1951…The CBS Color System Comes To An End”

  1. Jay Dubin

    The camera in the picture is a RCA TK11. A monochrome device.

  2. John Bolin

    The CBS color camera was an adapted TK-10 with the spinning wheel located between the lens and the 5820 tube.

  3. Charlie Huntley

    Not with that RCA TK11!!

  4. Chuck McKibben

    The illustration is clearly a fake, of course, created just to make a point.

  5. Steve Dichter

    Color monitor is a Gray Research 1101 Field Sequential Monitor.

  6. John Coleman

    What’s also often forgotten is that every major TV set manufacturer came out publicly against the CBS system except for Zenith, who took no public position on it. General Electric later walked back their opposition when they revealed they were working on a three phosphor layer CRT that would receive the CBS color signal without a color wheel. They only achieved a two color CRT and never did get a three color one. Charles E. Wilson, head of the Defense Mobilization Board, was known as “Electric Charlie” because he was the former President of General Electric. The Chairman of the NTSC at the time was Dr. WRG Baker, who was a Vice President at GE. I’ve always felt that Wilson didn’t do it to take CBS off the hook as much as he did to take the NTSC off the hook.

  7. David Fell

    http://www.earlytelevision.org/dumont_industrial_color.html

  8. Joey Schwartz

    Westinghouse developed the Apollo Color TV Camera using a modified version of this system. It was the only way to make a compact color camera that didn’t need registration in the days before CCDs. First used on Apollo 10, it would be on every Apollo flight thereafter. It made its debut on the lunar surface with the Apollo 12 mission, but astronaut Al Bean accidentally aimed it at the sun and destroyed the pickup tube.

    Ironically this failure allowed RCA to pitch a new camera that used the field sequential color method, and their cameras were used on the lunar surface starting with Apollo 15 and ending with Apollo 17. Their camera was also mountable on the Lunar Rover and it actually had gamma controls, something the Westinghouse camera lacked.

  9. John Marston

    My father repaired televisions (and most other home electronics) from 1949-1987. When I was a boy he would tell me sometimes about the weird incompatible CBS color system with the spinning wheel four times the screen size.

  10. Dennis Degan

    Often not mentioned in this discussion of CBS color is that notably, it is the color wheel system that was used to originate the first color video from the surface of the moon during NASA’s Apollo 12.

  11. John Mainelli

    It’s interesting that DLP (digital light processing) rear-projection HDTVs also had color wheels for a while, albeit much smaller — and faster. That low-cost, underrated technology bit the dust about five years ago when LCDs got a lot cheaper in large sizes. DLP is still in movie theaters, though, but without the wheel.

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