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In The Beginning…

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Eyes Of A Generation.com

In The Beginning…

In 1953 when the first RCA TK40 color cameras were arriving at NBC in New York, there was almost around the clock closed circuit testing with signals being sent from The Colonial Theater in NYC to RCA Labs in Princeton, NJ and Rockefeller Center. With no color patterns available, flower arrangements, fruit, color cloths and more were used to make a colorful picture.

The Colonial Theater was the main location for this but later, there were public demonstrations at the RCA Exhibition Hall in Rockefeller Center. During the day, a budding starlet named Nanette Fabre did a 90 minute Broadway musical type show from the Colonial Theater. Only the Colonial crew and the staff in Princeton and at 30 Rock saw it. She did it for two years till the monotony drove her to move on. This is probably an overnight set shot feed.

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5 responses to “In The Beginning…”

  1. Tom Thornton

    I went to TCR-100 school in Camden in the early ’80s. Our instructor told us about one of the early color tests where someone walked up to the bowl of fruit, and replaced a banana with one painted blue. It took quite a while before the engineers made a comment, as they were trying to figure out why every other color was correct, but the banana wasn’t.

  2. Charles MacDonald

    Kodak used to provide a “Shirley” test negative, an Original studio shot of a female model surrounded by test charts on the then current Kodak Professional Portrait Colour Negative film in their Colour Darkroom handbook, so that photographers could calibrate their printing settings. (Much the same idea)

  3. Dave Dillman

    This lead to the “color girl” era if setup.

  4. Bobby Reyes

    …here in San Antonio, around 1953 or 54, my Dad took myself and my brother to a Southwestern Bell ( now AT&T ) building on the southside of town to view a demonstartion of color television ..I’m sure that NBC had a hand in it since they were the only game around back then ..it was truly fascinating ! !

  5. Steve Byrd

    Not only was the only Colonial used for that Nanette Fabray [actual spelling] special, but I think it might have also been used for nighttime color episodes of “The [original] Price is Right” with Bill Cullen on NBC from about 1957-63.

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