Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot Com. Hey there, and welcome to Tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works, and I heart radio and love all
Speaker 1: things tech. And before I jump into what is going
Speaker 1: to be the main focus pun intended for this episode,
Speaker 1: I want to mention something about our CIA, because we're
Speaker 1: continuing our story about our CIA and something that happened
Speaker 1: to our c A. That was the year that Howard
Speaker 1: Hughes would buy controlling steak in r k O Pictures,
Speaker 1: the motion picture company and also theater chain. Our Cier
Speaker 1: had purchased a theater chain and created r k OH
Speaker 1: specifically in order to get a foothold with its optical
Speaker 1: on film sound system. So if you listen to the
Speaker 1: earlier episodes of Our Cia, you remember they went so
Speaker 1: far as to create an entirely new film company in
Speaker 1: order to establish this technology. Well that being done now
Speaker 1: in ninety they no longer sought necessary to keep this
Speaker 1: motion picture company around and sold off the controlling interest
Speaker 1: to Howard Hughes, someone that I should probably do in
Speaker 1: a full episode about in the future, but that is
Speaker 1: one complicated cat right there. Anyway, In nineteen forty nine,
Speaker 1: David Sarnoff, the man who was the general manager and
Speaker 1: then the president of our CIA, would then become the
Speaker 1: chairman of the board of our CIA. He also remained
Speaker 1: on as president of the company, so he had unprecedented
Speaker 1: control of our CIA, and starting off, you may remember,
Speaker 1: had a bit of a reputation of being something of
Speaker 1: a control freak, someone who really wanted the company. He
Speaker 1: worked for two Excel and he greatly resented anyone who
Speaker 1: appeared to stand in the way of that. Well. In
Speaker 1: the previous episode, the most recent one, I talked about
Speaker 1: how our c A was a pioneer in consumer electronic
Speaker 1: televisions and how the US government forced our c A
Speaker 1: to spin off one of its two NBC radio and
Speaker 1: television networks, which would become ABC. Also remember CBS, the
Speaker 1: third of those of the big three networks in the
Speaker 1: United States, actually grew out of a talent agent's failed
Speaker 1: attempts to get his clients booked on NBC radio shows.
Speaker 1: So we are now in an era in which we
Speaker 1: have three broadcast giants, NBC, ABC and CBS. And NBC
Speaker 1: and ABC both came from the same company, CBS came
Speaker 1: out because no one at NBC would hire this guy's talent. Interestingly,
Speaker 1: so television is slowly starting to pick up, and as
Speaker 1: I mentioned at the end of the last episode, our
Speaker 1: c A would push a new innovation in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties, which was color television. But our c A
Speaker 1: wasn't the only company working on color TV. CBS was
Speaker 1: also very much in the game. Both companies have been
Speaker 1: experimenting with color TV strategies since the nineteen forties, and
Speaker 1: it was a CBS engineer who seemed to win, at
Speaker 1: least at first. Now I want to chat about this
Speaker 1: for a moment as well, because the system that this
Speaker 1: guy made was truly amazing, and it was dependent upon
Speaker 1: a peculiarity of human biology. We have what some people
Speaker 1: refer to as the persistence of vision. This is the
Speaker 1: same thing that makes animation work for us, animation or
Speaker 1: or film. If you're looking at a real film, you know,
Speaker 1: like something that's actually posted to photographic film, it's just
Speaker 1: a series of still images. If we play those still
Speaker 1: images back at a fast enough speed, we perceive what
Speaker 1: appears to be movement, even though if you were to
Speaker 1: slow it down enough you'd see it's just a series
Speaker 1: of still images. There's no actual movement happening. The human
Speaker 1: eye and brain can process about ten to twelve separate
Speaker 1: images per second and can retain an image for about
Speaker 1: a fifteen of a second. So if you have an
Speaker 1: image and you replace it with a new image faster
Speaker 1: than one fift of a second, you can create the
Speaker 1: illusion of continuity of movement from one image to the next. Now,
Speaker 1: a common term for this is the persistence of vision.
Speaker 1: And again a lot of the different illusions depend upon
Speaker 1: this is it's this limitation of our faculties. And a
Speaker 1: guy named Peter Carl Goldmark, who was a Hungarian born
Speaker 1: engineer who immigrated to America and then would work for CBS,
Speaker 1: would rely upon this peculiarity to create an early form
Speaker 1: of color television. And his system was an electro mechanical system,
Speaker 1: and so I the television was a color wheel with red, green,
Speaker 1: and blue sections on it, and both the camera the
Speaker 1: television camera and the receiver or TV set had a
Speaker 1: color wheel. The wheels positions and rotation would match precisely,
Speaker 1: and the wheels would spin at an incredible one thousand,
Speaker 1: four hundred forty times per minute. That was the speed
Speaker 1: of rotation. So the light coming into the camera would
Speaker 1: pass through this color wheel, which would kind of act
Speaker 1: like a filter. So remember earlier when I mentioned in
Speaker 1: the previous episode UH that an electron beam would make
Speaker 1: sixty passes over a screen in a second, but it
Speaker 1: would only hit the odd lines on one pass and
Speaker 1: the even lines on the next pass. Those individual passes
Speaker 1: are called fields. So if you hit all the odd lines,
Speaker 1: that's one field. All the even lines that's the second field.
Speaker 1: Two fields make up a video frame because then you
Speaker 1: have all the lines, then you have all the lines
Speaker 1: that make up the entire picture, So that's a video frame. Now,
Speaker 1: that standard wouldn't work for the color images in gold
Speaker 1: Mark's system because there would be noticeable flicker from the
Speaker 1: different colors. If you were only doing this at sixty
Speaker 1: really really thirty frames a second, it would actually end
Speaker 1: up being closer to twenty because you have to divide
Speaker 1: it by three one for each color. Instead, gold Mark
Speaker 1: would increase the field rate to one forty four fields
Speaker 1: per second instead of thirty. Each color would get scanned
Speaker 1: twice in a second, and the number of frames or
Speaker 1: complete images shown on screen would drop down to twenty
Speaker 1: four frames per second instead of thirty frames per second.
Speaker 1: Gold Mark decreased the resolution of the image from five
Speaker 1: lines to four hundred five lines, which means you're you're
Speaker 1: making the picture smaller. Uh. And the reason he did
Speaker 1: this was because otherwise he would need a lot more
Speaker 1: bandwidth per channel to send that much information to a receiver. Anyway,
Speaker 1: because of that persistence of vision, these colors, while they're
Speaker 1: technically changing very very quickly, our eyes and our brains
Speaker 1: can't keep up with that. They can't distinguish how those
Speaker 1: colors are changing so fast from red, green, and blue,
Speaker 1: so we perceive a mixture of those colors. And thus,
Speaker 1: with a combination of electronic and mechanical elements, gold marks
Speaker 1: approach allowed for color TV. And it gets way more
Speaker 1: technical and psychological really to describe exactly how this works
Speaker 1: so that you represent all the different colors, but this
Speaker 1: is the basics of how the system worked. By the way.
Speaker 1: Side note, gold Mark was also in charge of the
Speaker 1: team that would develop the micro groove technology that would
Speaker 1: make thirty three and a third RPM long playing vinyl
Speaker 1: records possible. And since our c A had previously attempted
Speaker 1: to market thirty three and a third RPM records, though
Speaker 1: they did not do so with a micro groove. I
Speaker 1: sis be. Saranoff felt gold Mark was a thorn in
Speaker 1: his side. After all, Goldmark had created a new standard
Speaker 1: for color TV and a new standard for records, and
Speaker 1: uh Sarnov wasn't really happy when other people took the lead,
Speaker 1: or other companies took the lead. R c A had
Speaker 1: its own version of this same sort of mechanical color
Speaker 1: television approach they had developed there's independently of gold Mark.
Speaker 1: But the CBS version provided a better picture, and so
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty the f c C made the CBS
Speaker 1: approach the standard for color televisions. Now temporarily it was
Speaker 1: only temporarily the standards. So if you've listened to my
Speaker 1: earlier episodes on our c A, you know that David
Speaker 1: Sarnoff wanted to be the leader in all things, and
Speaker 1: he was fiercely competitive, and I suspect he was very
Speaker 1: much infuriated that the FCC would choose the technology of
Speaker 1: a rival company. Actually, I don't have to suspect he
Speaker 1: absolutely was, because Sarnoff led a crusade against CBS and
Speaker 1: the f c C. So r C A and another
Speaker 1: company called Color Television sought an injunction against the f
Speaker 1: CC's decision to go with the CBS standard. That actually
Speaker 1: put a temporary halt on Color Television's because while the
Speaker 1: matter was being decided, CBS couldn't accept any sort of
Speaker 1: sponsorship money for color television programming, so there was no
Speaker 1: money coming in to support the programming. Uh, there was
Speaker 1: very little chance to make the programming in the first place.
Speaker 1: CBS wasn't going to invest in something without knowing for
Speaker 1: sure that it could go forward with it, so it
Speaker 1: kind of put the brakes on Color TV. Now, the
Speaker 1: courts rejected this injunction. Our c A then appealed it,
Speaker 1: and this went up the court system, and in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty one the matter got all the way up to
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Supreme
Speaker 1: Court also agreed with the FCC, or at least they
Speaker 1: said the FCC had not acted improperly in state that
Speaker 1: the CBS standards were fine. But Sarnov was not ready
Speaker 1: to give up. Once it was clear that gold marks
Speaker 1: CBS approach was going to win out, our c A
Speaker 1: concentrated on moving away from this electro mechanical approach toward
Speaker 1: a purely electronic method of transmitting and displaying color television. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: CBS was running into trouble of its own. The company
Speaker 1: was finding it hard to convince a public, a market,
Speaker 1: a consumer market to purchase a new, expensive television set.
Speaker 1: And not only is it new and expensive, it was
Speaker 1: incompatible with existing black and white broadcasts. It was a
Speaker 1: different resolution, and it was a different methodology. And in
Speaker 1: the summer nineteen fifty the United States entered the Korean War,
Speaker 1: which disrupted CBSS manufacturing processes, which meant the company couldn't
Speaker 1: make sets for people to buy. Only a couple of
Speaker 1: hundred sets had been produced at that point. Color television
Speaker 1: had stalled out early, and that gave Sarnov some time
Speaker 1: to iss team into getting the all electronic approach ready
Speaker 1: for display. So how did this electronic version work? Well,
Speaker 1: I talked in the last episode about how cathode ray
Speaker 1: tube TVs work, so I'm not gonna go over all
Speaker 1: that again because it's exactly the same thing up to
Speaker 1: a point. The cathode ray tube is like a giant
Speaker 1: light bulb, and it has special phosphors that glow when
Speaker 1: struck by electrons. The filament inside the cathode. Ray two
Speaker 1: gives off an electron stream that anodes are positively charged
Speaker 1: elements focus and direct towards specific points or pixels on
Speaker 1: the back side of the screen. Service that creates television pictures.
Speaker 1: I guess I did go over it again. I never learned.
Speaker 1: So how does color television work? How is it different
Speaker 1: from this? Because this approach, really it just means that
Speaker 1: when electrons hit the phosphors, the phosphors get excited and
Speaker 1: they start to glow. If they get a lot of energy,
Speaker 1: they glow brighter. That they get a little energy, they
Speaker 1: don't grow glow as brightly, and if they don't get
Speaker 1: any energy, they're dark. And that combination gives you the
Speaker 1: images of black and white pictures that move across your
Speaker 1: TV screen. This is happening lots of times per minute,
Speaker 1: right like, every every single pixel is being eliminated thirty
Speaker 1: times per second. So it's pretty amazing. Or at least
Speaker 1: the electron beam is passing over, maybe not activating, but
Speaker 1: passing over every phosphor thirty times a second, sixty times.
Speaker 1: For a second, the electron beam is actually crossing the
Speaker 1: entire screen. It's only but it only concentrates on the
Speaker 1: odd lines or the even lines. So how does the
Speaker 1: color television work in comparison, Well, the basics are the same.
Speaker 1: You still have the filament that generates the electrons. You
Speaker 1: still have the phosphors, You still have the positively charged
Speaker 1: elements directing the stream of electrons. You still direct the
Speaker 1: beam across the screen line by line from the upper
Speaker 1: left to the lower right, sixty times per second, at
Speaker 1: least in the United States. But there are three ways
Speaker 1: a color TV screen differs from a black and white screen. First,
Speaker 1: you have three electron beams, not just one, and each
Speaker 1: of those beams is responsible for one of the three
Speaker 1: main colors from which all other color on screen originates.
Speaker 1: So they're called the red, green, and blue streams. Now,
Speaker 1: let me get that clear. The electron streams themselves are
Speaker 1: not red, green, and blue. They are electrons you don't see,
Speaker 1: like a red laser, a blue laser, and a green laser.
Speaker 1: We could call them streams one, two, and three and
Speaker 1: it would be just the same. But they are responsible
Speaker 1: for specific groups of phosphor dots, and the phosphor dots
Speaker 1: are what are red, green, or blue. So one stream
Speaker 1: will only activate the green dots. One will only activate
Speaker 1: the red dots and one will only activate the blue dots.
Speaker 1: So if you have a black and white screen, you
Speaker 1: have that whole sheet of phosphor, that substance that gives
Speaker 1: off light when electrons excited to a higher energy state.
Speaker 1: With a CRT color TV set, you have three different
Speaker 1: kinds of phosphors that correspond with those colors imagined earlier, red, green,
Speaker 1: and blue. Now explain how this works in greater detail
Speaker 1: in just a moment, but first let's take a quick
Speaker 1: break to thank our sponsor. All Right, The phosphors in
Speaker 1: a color CRT television are either in dots or stripes
Speaker 1: on the back side of the screen. The screen that's
Speaker 1: on the inside of the TV from where you are
Speaker 1: and between the phosphors and the electron beams is another
Speaker 1: layer that you don't find in black and white televisions.
Speaker 1: It's a metal screen. It's called a shadow mask, and
Speaker 1: the shadow mask has timing perforations that line up precisely
Speaker 1: with the phosphor positions on the back side of the
Speaker 1: screen to create the pixels that will create your television
Speaker 1: screen picture. So you turn on your color TV and
Speaker 1: you change the channel to something that's in color. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's Kurmit the frog singing rainbow connection, which is pretty sweet.
Speaker 1: So Kurment is green. So everywhere Kermit is on the screen,
Speaker 1: you have the green electron beam hitting those green phosphors
Speaker 1: to create green pixels. Uh. You also have the other
Speaker 1: beams hitting the other phosphors to change that color green
Speaker 1: to just the right hue. The red and blue beams
Speaker 1: excite phosphors to make colors red and blue. So how
Speaker 1: do you get all the other colors, Well, it's by
Speaker 1: that combination that was just talking about. The combining the phosphors, uh,
Speaker 1: and combining them at different intensities creates all the different colors.
Speaker 1: So if you were to excite the red, green, and
Speaker 1: blue phosphors at a single pixel with the same energy,
Speaker 1: you would create a dot of white light. Those colors
Speaker 1: would combine, you would get white. If you want it black,
Speaker 1: then you would just not have any of the electron
Speaker 1: beams hitting any of the phosphors at that pixel. Every
Speaker 1: other color is some combination of those phosphor is getting
Speaker 1: lifted to that excited state by these electron beams. So
Speaker 1: in these old CRT TV sets, every single point of
Speaker 1: light on a screen. Every single dot has three smaller
Speaker 1: phosphor dots behind it, and the color you see on
Speaker 1: screen depends upon which electron beams are active at that
Speaker 1: specific point in any given instant. And all of this
Speaker 1: is happening all across all the dots on the screen
Speaker 1: thirty times a second, so pretty phenomenal. So I still
Speaker 1: find this an amazing thing that's happening so fast that
Speaker 1: we perceive it as motion. We perceived the color as
Speaker 1: being a solid color instead of a combination of different colors,
Speaker 1: and uh, it's it appears to be seamless to us.
Speaker 1: It really says one something interesting about the limitations of
Speaker 1: human biology that we are not able to see these
Speaker 1: differences because actual limitations on on us as as bags
Speaker 1: of meat, and to the lack of limitations on human ingenuity,
Speaker 1: that we can actually create systems that depend upon these
Speaker 1: limitations and do so in a way that's not predatory,
Speaker 1: but is is beneficial or at least entertaining. Now, color
Speaker 1: television only works if you have something capturing an image
Speaker 1: and color to begin with. Obviously, you couldn't send a
Speaker 1: black and white feed from a camera that can only
Speaker 1: capture images in black and white and expect it to
Speaker 1: come out in color. So r c A introduced the
Speaker 1: world's first commercially available color television camera in nineteen fifty two.
Speaker 1: This was called the r c A t K forty.
Speaker 1: There had been previous cameras in the t K line,
Speaker 1: but those are black and white cameras. The company would
Speaker 1: then introduce the r c A t K forty A
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty four, and that camera would become the
Speaker 1: first mass produced color television camera in the world. This
Speaker 1: was the culmination of many years of work. The company
Speaker 1: had largely made the move toward developing an all electronic
Speaker 1: approach starting around nine That's when they began to see
Speaker 1: that they needed to to abandon the electro mechanical approach
Speaker 1: that CBS was developing because CBS was just way too
Speaker 1: far ahead. The first few cameras were all meant as
Speaker 1: prototypes and sort of developmental steps toward the t K forty.
Speaker 1: So r c A did make some color cameras before
Speaker 1: the t K forty, but they were all prototypes, experiments,
Speaker 1: internal things. The first two cameras that the company developed
Speaker 1: were often referred to as the Wardman Park cameras because
Speaker 1: they were used in a Special Color Studio and the
Speaker 1: Wardman Park neighborhood in Washington, d C. R c A
Speaker 1: operated the studio there in part because it was close
Speaker 1: to the seat of government and therefore the f c C.
Speaker 1: So this was our CIA's attempt at making a system
Speaker 1: that would be easy to show off to the f
Speaker 1: c C and then hopefully persuade the FCC to choose
Speaker 1: our CIA's approach as the standard for color television. Next
Speaker 1: came a couple of cameras that were still prototypes that
Speaker 1: were referred to as coffin cameras. They were called that
Speaker 1: because the operators would joke that the cameras were large
Speaker 1: enough to bury a man inside of them. These were
Speaker 1: mainly used in our CIA's New York studios at thirty
Speaker 1: Rockefeller Center. You remember the show thirty Rock where NBC
Speaker 1: is centered. That that's our CIA's old studios. Often the
Speaker 1: tests were broadcast to the r c A exhibition hall,
Speaker 1: which was right across from thirty Rock, and the demonstrations
Speaker 1: were public, really public, and this was another one of
Speaker 1: Starnoff's ideas. He was determined to bring as much attention
Speaker 1: to our CIA's efforts as possible, which would create added
Speaker 1: pressure on the f c C as the public got
Speaker 1: a chance to see a color set, and more importantly,
Speaker 1: it was a color television that could still show black
Speaker 1: white programming because unlike the mechanical one that CBS was developing,
Speaker 1: this one had the same number of lines of resolution
Speaker 1: as a black and white set. You could send black
Speaker 1: and white content to a color set, it would be
Speaker 1: displayed in black and white, but you could actually still
Speaker 1: watch older programming. Very important unless you're planning on changing
Speaker 1: the entire format of broadcast overnight, which is a pretty
Speaker 1: tough thing to do once you've already established a standard.
Speaker 1: During this prototyping, the camera crews noted that the cameras
Speaker 1: would tend to get real hot, not just from the
Speaker 1: internal operations going on inside the camera, but also from
Speaker 1: soaking up energy. So one of the limitations of color
Speaker 1: television UH in the early days was that you needed
Speaker 1: a really brightly lit studio. It's very similar to color film.
Speaker 1: You needed to have a lot of light, and those
Speaker 1: lights would get really hot and that would heat up
Speaker 1: the cameras. Also, if you were shooting on Look Paian,
Speaker 1: you would soak up sunlight and get really hot, and
Speaker 1: electronics and heat are not there. They don't go well
Speaker 1: together typically, so in order to avoid overheating, our c
Speaker 1: chose to make the t K forty cameras silver that
Speaker 1: would reflect some of that light away from the camera.
Speaker 1: This was after some enterprising camera crews had done a
Speaker 1: d I Y approach and taken silver paint and coded
Speaker 1: earlier prototype cameras in silver paint to deflect some of
Speaker 1: that light to to make sure that it didn't get
Speaker 1: too hot, and our c A took a note and
Speaker 1: decided to make that an official design point. These cameras
Speaker 1: also had what are called lens turrets. If you take
Speaker 1: a look at old school television cameras, you'll see that
Speaker 1: they appear to have four lenses poking out of the
Speaker 1: front of them. That's actually a lens turret. It's kind
Speaker 1: of a disc that has different lenses mounted on it,
Speaker 1: and then you can turn the disc so that a
Speaker 1: different lens is actually active. So the the whole purpose
Speaker 1: of this is to create different focal lengths of of lenses.
Speaker 1: Rather than having to physically remove them and swap them out,
Speaker 1: they were all mounted on the camera. You could just
Speaker 1: change whichever one was active at a given time, so
Speaker 1: the commons set up on one of these lens turrets
Speaker 1: was to have one eight and a half inch lens,
Speaker 1: one million meter lens, one nine millimeter lens, and one
Speaker 1: fifty millimeter lens. And I gave the camera operator and
Speaker 1: director some options to choose the focal point for specific cameras.
Speaker 1: You know, whether it was going to be a close
Speaker 1: up or a wide shot, they could choose whichever lens
Speaker 1: they wanted to use. Now, it was possible to change
Speaker 1: lenses during a live show. Typically you would do so
Speaker 1: by switching to a different camera and then changing the
Speaker 1: lens on camera one while camera two is active, but
Speaker 1: this was pretty uncommon. Usually they would just set the
Speaker 1: lenses for whatever shot they wanted and that was it
Speaker 1: was gonna stay as our c A had introduced lens
Speaker 1: turrets with the older black and white television cameras, so
Speaker 1: this was kind of a holdover from those days. Now,
Speaker 1: once light passed through the lens of one of these
Speaker 1: color cameras, it would hit a beam splitter and that
Speaker 1: would divide the light into three beams. Each of those
Speaker 1: beams of light would then hit an individual orthocon tube. Now,
Speaker 1: in the previous episode, when I was talking about black
Speaker 1: and white TVs. I talked about a special component called
Speaker 1: the iconoscope, which was in charge of taking light, having
Speaker 1: it hit a photo electric base, and then using an
Speaker 1: electron beam to scan it, and that would send out
Speaker 1: the signal. The orthocon was the successor to the iconoscope.
Speaker 1: It used a low velocity electron beam instead of a
Speaker 1: high velocity electron beam. The econoscope used the high velocity ones,
Speaker 1: but the problem with that was that it would sometimes
Speaker 1: produce secondary electrons and so you would get quote unquote
Speaker 1: noise in the signal. The orthocon used low velocity electron
Speaker 1: beams which would not create these secondary electrons, and again
Speaker 1: it would use it to scan a photoelectric mosaic on
Speaker 1: a special plate inside the tubes. The lights hitting that plate,
Speaker 1: the electron beam is scanning the plate, and that's what's
Speaker 1: creating the signal. So in this case, the light comes
Speaker 1: into the camera, it splits into three beams, and each
Speaker 1: beam goes into a separate orthocon and you can guess
Speaker 1: each of those orthocns was dedicated for a specific representation
Speaker 1: of color red, green, or blue, and these cameras would
Speaker 1: then send that signal out to be transit transmitted over
Speaker 1: to the color televisions. They were large cameras, they're relatively primitive.
Speaker 1: They required lots of adjustments and tweaking to keep them
Speaker 1: tuned to the proper colors. But they worked. And the
Speaker 1: most important aspect of this whole approach was one of practicality.
Speaker 1: That was how our c A was really leaning into
Speaker 1: this technology. The CBS color television was incompatible with the
Speaker 1: older black and white sets, as I mentioned, So the
Speaker 1: CBS approach meant that you were going to have to
Speaker 1: go out and buy a brand new, very expensive television
Speaker 1: set if you wanted to watch this new programming, and
Speaker 1: you would have to have an older black and white
Speaker 1: set if you wanted to continue to watch all the
Speaker 1: programming that was made just for black and white televisions.
Speaker 1: So it was not a very attractive technology to consumers.
Speaker 1: You weren't. It wasn't backwards compatible, as we would say
Speaker 1: in the in the video game console age, So uh,
Speaker 1: this was not something a lot of people were excited about.
Speaker 1: The r c A approach was different. It would allow
Speaker 1: people with monochromatic televisions to still view color broadcasts, they
Speaker 1: just wouldn't be in color. You could tune into a
Speaker 1: color program on a black and white set, you would
Speaker 1: just get the black and white representation of that. CBS
Speaker 1: found itself stuck. There was a manufacturing issue with building
Speaker 1: out TV sets, especially during the Korean War. There was
Speaker 1: a programming issue of creating material for those sets. There
Speaker 1: was the market issue with people getting to buy new,
Speaker 1: expensive technology. So ultimately Sarnov was able to win the
Speaker 1: battle for the color television format. The FCC would ultimately
Speaker 1: drop the standards that they had adopted that had come
Speaker 1: from CBS. Instead the National Television System Committee, which was
Speaker 1: the second entity to have that name. Previously, the first
Speaker 1: version was formed to develop the standard for black and
Speaker 1: white TV transmissions. So this version was this new organization
Speaker 1: with the same name essentially was reformed with the purpose
Speaker 1: of creating the new color television broadcast standard. It did
Speaker 1: so and published the standard to nineteen fifty three, and
Speaker 1: it was pretty much the same as r c a's standard.
Speaker 1: Sarnoff had one, at least for the time being. I've
Speaker 1: got a lot more to say about what r c
Speaker 1: A did during this age, but before I get to that,
Speaker 1: let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Our
Speaker 1: c A begins to manufacture color television sets. Now. Now
Speaker 1: they've set the standard. Now they're going to make the
Speaker 1: actual products. Originally, the early sets had either fifteen inch
Speaker 1: or nineteen inch screens, but by n all r c
Speaker 1: A sets were twenty one inches in screen size, and
Speaker 1: you measure that on the diagonal. Other companies would continue
Speaker 1: to manufacture the smaller screen sets, but our CI A
Speaker 1: focused on twenty one is the standard now. Interestingly, r
Speaker 1: c A was not the first manufacturer to offer a
Speaker 1: consumer color television set that was running on what was
Speaker 1: effectively our CIA's color television transmission standards. Westinghouse would introduce
Speaker 1: a color television ahead of our CIA in nineteen fifty four.
Speaker 1: It's sold for one thousand two dollars princely, some petcularly
Speaker 1: when you factor in inflation. If you were to do that,
Speaker 1: you would see that in today's cash, that would cost
Speaker 1: you about twelve thousand dollars. R c A would follow
Speaker 1: this up in less than a month with its own
Speaker 1: first television set, color television set called the c T
Speaker 1: one hundred. That one had a price tag of one
Speaker 1: thousand dollars, so about ten grand in today's cash. Pretty
Speaker 1: expensive to watch some color TV. Now it may come
Speaker 1: as a little surprised that not many people picked up
Speaker 1: a new CT one hundred at that price tag. Our
Speaker 1: c A pursued some pretty enthusiastic marketing strategies. In other words,
Speaker 1: they held a very expensive advertising campaign trying to get
Speaker 1: interest up, but at that price it just wasn't going
Speaker 1: to happen. By August of nine, not even two months
Speaker 1: after its debut, r c A would drop the price
Speaker 1: tag to four dollars, which was still a huge chunk
Speaker 1: of change. But at that price, r c A was
Speaker 1: actually losing money on every sale because the sets were
Speaker 1: so expensive to make. Even so, if the company had
Speaker 1: failed to sell its sets, that would have cost our
Speaker 1: c A even more money in the long run. So
Speaker 1: this was a way to get early adopters on board
Speaker 1: and pave the way for future less expensive television's. Color
Speaker 1: television wouldn't really pick up steam in the consumer marketplace
Speaker 1: until the nineteen sixties. That's when the quality really improved,
Speaker 1: the price dropped, and there was more programming available to
Speaker 1: watch as well. Shows like Disney's Wonderful World of Color,
Speaker 1: which debuted in nineteen sixty one, helped a lot, but
Speaker 1: color television sales wouldn't overtake black and white TV sales
Speaker 1: until nineteen seventy. Meanwhile, our c A and CBS did
Speaker 1: battle over which company would define the future of television.
Speaker 1: At that same time, Sarnov was waging a separate war
Speaker 1: about radio waves. His adversary was someone who used to
Speaker 1: be a close friend of his, a guy named Edwin
Speaker 1: Howard Armstrong. Armstrong was an electrical engineer. He had attended
Speaker 1: Columbia University. Brilliant guy, apparently one of those people who
Speaker 1: really was only interested in studying anything that directly appealed
Speaker 1: to him and had no interest whatsoever in any other subjects.
Speaker 1: Armstrong had already achieved a great deal by the late
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties. But we're concerned specifically with his work in
Speaker 1: FM radio. FM stands for frequency modulation, as opposed to
Speaker 1: AM radio, which stands for amplitude modulation. In both cases,
Speaker 1: we're talking about changing a radio wave in some way
Speaker 1: to transmit information. So it's all about varying something some
Speaker 1: aspect of the radio wave. And with a M or
Speaker 1: amplitude modulation, it's all in the name. It's all about
Speaker 1: the amplitude, the strength of a radio signal by varying
Speaker 1: that modulating the strength of the signal. You can encode
Speaker 1: audio onto a radio wave, and you have a receiver
Speaker 1: and it has a device to decode that modulation, essentially
Speaker 1: to reverse this process so that whatever information was laid
Speaker 1: on top of that radio wave can to be played back.
Speaker 1: You can convert it into an audio signal, uh an
Speaker 1: electrical signal really that represents an audio signal. Send that
Speaker 1: to an amplifier and then onto speakers. But a M
Speaker 1: has some drawbacks, and a big one is that it
Speaker 1: is interference really can come into a M transmissions quite easily.
Speaker 1: Stuff like electrical equipment can introduce interference or thunderstorms, and
Speaker 1: you get static and other noise that gets introduced into
Speaker 1: the signal, so you don't get a clean signal start off.
Speaker 1: Want to eliminate all of that static that noise. Armstrong
Speaker 1: wanted to experiment with frequency modulation, which was already a
Speaker 1: known method at that time but had yet to reduced
Speaker 1: results that were remarkably better than a M broadcasts. And
Speaker 1: as the name suggests, instead of messing with the strength
Speaker 1: of a radio wave, you mess with its frequency. You
Speaker 1: increase or decrease its frequency to encode audio. On top
Speaker 1: of that radio wave. Otherwise it's a very similar system.
Speaker 1: You would have a receiver that would pick up the
Speaker 1: radio wave and a decoder that would take that modulation
Speaker 1: of frequency and convert it back into an electrical signal
Speaker 1: that would represent audio. So Armstrong believed that the reason
Speaker 1: why FM had not really shown to be better than
Speaker 1: a M was because earlier attempts had focused on two
Speaker 1: narrow arrange for modulation. People were not changing the frequency enough, essentially,
Speaker 1: so Armstrong began to experiment with wide band FM. He
Speaker 1: filed and received five patents for his approach, and he
Speaker 1: had an agreement with our c A that said the come,
Speaker 1: but he was going to have the right of first
Speaker 1: refusal on any patents that Armstrong was able to secure.
Speaker 1: While working in FM, he demonstrated his system to our
Speaker 1: c A. R c A would actually test it out
Speaker 1: fairly extensively in the mid nineteen thirties, and it was
Speaker 1: pretty clear that the system was superior to a M
Speaker 1: for the purposes of radio broadcasts within a given region.
Speaker 1: A M signals could be picked up further away than
Speaker 1: FM in most cases, but our c A was so
Speaker 1: focused on developing television that relatively little attention was given
Speaker 1: to the FM developments, and ultimately Armstrong wasn't presented with
Speaker 1: any sort of deal for his work. A short while later,
Speaker 1: Armstrong brought his ideas to some other companies. Our CIA
Speaker 1: wasn't doing anything with them, and his intent was partnering
Speaker 1: with those other companies and licensing his patents in order
Speaker 1: to start changing radio stations over from a M to FM,
Speaker 1: which would actually require lots of work that would require, uh,
Speaker 1: not just a format switch, but new equipment. FM and
Speaker 1: AM transmitters and receivers are not compatible. You can't have
Speaker 1: both in the same radio set. If you have a receiver,
Speaker 1: it may have an FM receiver and an a M receiver,
Speaker 1: but they are two separate receivers. They're not it's it's
Speaker 1: it's not a compatible technology again, because you're looking at
Speaker 1: different modulations and you're looking at different sizes of radio
Speaker 1: waves as well. So in nine r c A says,
Speaker 1: you know what, this FM thing makes a lot of
Speaker 1: sense to us now now that we're really looking at it,
Speaker 1: that we've got a deal to make with you, and
Speaker 1: they present their Armstrong with a really attractive contract. He
Speaker 1: would get a cool one million dollars which in today's
Speaker 1: money is around eighteen million dollars. In return, our c
Speaker 1: A would get a royalty free license to use his
Speaker 1: FM patents. It was supposed to be a non exclusive deal, however,
Speaker 1: so our CIA would not get the exclusive rights to
Speaker 1: use this. They just wouldn't pay any royalties on anything
Speaker 1: they earned, and in return Armstrong would get this one
Speaker 1: million dollar fee. However, Armstrong had already made arrangements with
Speaker 1: other companies to license his patents and they had to
Speaker 1: pay royalties on everything they sold. Anything that made use
Speaker 1: of one of his patents, he would get a little
Speaker 1: cut of it. And he felt like if he signed
Speaker 1: this agreement with our CIA, it wouldn't be fair to
Speaker 1: these other companies that had to pay him every time
Speaker 1: they sold something. If our CIA didn't have to do
Speaker 1: the same thing, how is that fair? So he refused.
Speaker 1: He said, I'm sorry, the steel is not gonna work
Speaker 1: with me, and that ticked off Sarnoff to no end.
Speaker 1: So who sar Enough directs his engineers to work on
Speaker 1: FM tech of their own rather than license Armstrong's work
Speaker 1: and give him royalties. He says, forget it, Let's just
Speaker 1: make our own FM tech and the company starts to
Speaker 1: develop systems that they claim do not infringe upon Armstrong's patents.
Speaker 1: R c A then took another step because Sarnov isn't
Speaker 1: pleased with just trying to sidestep Armstrong. He wants to
Speaker 1: punish Armstrong, and the company begins to encourage other companies
Speaker 1: to not license Armstrong's patents, in other words, cutting off
Speaker 1: Armstrong's source of revenue. Because Armstrong is not making radios himself,
Speaker 1: he's licensing his designs to other companies, and now r
Speaker 1: c A saying, oh, don't do that. He know, we've
Speaker 1: come up with our own FM transmission stuff. Don't bother
Speaker 1: paying him for this stuff. So Armstrong goes and sues
Speaker 1: our c A and NBC, and he's pretty confident and
Speaker 1: he's gonna win right off the bat. But the legal
Speaker 1: proceedings lasted much longer than he anticipated, and the expense
Speaker 1: drained his personal finances by some of his patents had
Speaker 1: actually fired, so he couldn't even really leverage those anymore,
Speaker 1: and the lawsuits were continuing. Meanwhile, his mental health was deteriorating.
Speaker 1: He felt strongly that he was being cheated out of
Speaker 1: his money and the credit for his work, and what's worse,
Speaker 1: this mirrored something that had happened to Armstrong earlier in
Speaker 1: his life. He had worked on an invention that he
Speaker 1: felt he was responsible for, but ultimately the credit went
Speaker 1: to a different engineer, so he felt like this was
Speaker 1: happening all over again. In the winter of nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 1: after having driven away his own wife, he actually hit
Speaker 1: her during an argument, and she had left him to
Speaker 1: leave and uh and live with her sister. Armstrong decided
Speaker 1: to end his own life. He jumped out of the
Speaker 1: window of his thirteenth floor apartment and uh landed on
Speaker 1: a on a balcony tend stories below and died. He
Speaker 1: had a suicide note in his pocket that expressed his
Speaker 1: deep regret for hit his wife and for his actions,
Speaker 1: and Sarnoff would shrug off any responsibility he might have
Speaker 1: played in Armstrong's deterioration. He said, I didn't kill Armstrong.
Speaker 1: Now Armstrong's wife, Marian, took over the case on behalf
Speaker 1: of her deceased husband, and she pursued it with determination.
Speaker 1: At the end of nineteen fifty our Cier and Marion
Speaker 1: Armstrong reached a settlement. The amount was said to be
Speaker 1: around a million dollars, which was the r CIER had
Speaker 1: proposed to Armstrong in return for the royalty free use
Speaker 1: of the patents. Pretty tragic story. Now, before I sign off,
Speaker 1: I should also mention that at the same time, our
Speaker 1: Cier was working on technology that was not meant for
Speaker 1: your average consumer. I've been focusing on the consumer tech
Speaker 1: because that's the stuff most of us are familiar with,
Speaker 1: the things we come in contact with. Radio's, television, that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. But the company had become an important
Speaker 1: partner with the U. S Military during World War Two.
Speaker 1: They had developed a lot of components that were used
Speaker 1: in radar systems, but that relationship the military continued after
Speaker 1: World War Two was over. In the late nineteen forties,
Speaker 1: r c A developed a system called Typhoon to help
Speaker 1: the Navy test missile designs. Typhoon was a guided missile simulator,
Speaker 1: So the idea was that would let Navy engineers test
Speaker 1: out different ideas, different designs under different test conditions, all
Speaker 1: in a computer simulated environment, which meant they didn't have
Speaker 1: to go out and actually build rockets and then seek
Speaker 1: out those conditions and test them for real. That gets
Speaker 1: really expensive. It's a logistic nightmare. This way they could
Speaker 1: do it in a simulated environment and test out these
Speaker 1: different ideas before ever committing to a specific design. Typhoon
Speaker 1: debut in Princeton at r c AS R and D facility.
Speaker 1: It had more than four thousand electron tubes and it
Speaker 1: took up fifty three computer racks. The room it was
Speaker 1: in had to be air conditioned to keep everything at
Speaker 1: the right operating temperature. It was not common to find
Speaker 1: air conditioning in a lot of Princeton buildings at that
Speaker 1: time before this, so our c A also developed electron
Speaker 1: microscopes and the television microscope during these years, but I
Speaker 1: don't really have enough time in today's episode to go
Speaker 1: into detail on those. We'll pick up with a little
Speaker 1: bit of that in the next episode, but we're really
Speaker 1: going to try and focus on wrapping up our CIA's history,
Speaker 1: uh at least up to present day in our next episode,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna skip over a lot of stuff to
Speaker 1: hit the highlights. Anyway. Our CIA's work also branched out
Speaker 1: beyond electronics. I think this is something worth commenting on.
Speaker 1: The company developed reading aids for people with impaired vision,
Speaker 1: and they also had come up with a new way
Speaker 1: of producing penicillin, which seems kind of crazy, but no,
Speaker 1: it's absolutely true. Our Cia was producing penicillin. They used
Speaker 1: radio frequency heating during the process. So one of the
Speaker 1: stages of penicillin production requires you to remove water from
Speaker 1: penicillin shortly after you've separated in penicillin out from the
Speaker 1: solution you develop it in. So you develop penicilla in
Speaker 1: a solution you separated out from the solution, you then
Speaker 1: have to remove as much water as you can efficiently
Speaker 1: and safely. So our CIA's approach, you used radio frequency
Speaker 1: heating to dry the penicillin more efficiently and economically to
Speaker 1: make it viable. But before our Cia could even take
Speaker 1: advantage of this discovery, before they could go to market
Speaker 1: with it, the researchers who are working on this project
Speaker 1: at our ci A discovered that they can use a
Speaker 1: chemical approach that was even more effective and more efficient,
Speaker 1: producing more purified penicillin more efficiently. So our Cia was
Speaker 1: able to help doctors secure sources of penicillin to treat
Speaker 1: infections around the world, which is pretty incredible. Now, in
Speaker 1: our next episode, like I said, we're gonna wrap up
Speaker 1: the history of our Cia, We're gonna hit the highlights,
Speaker 1: which is going to be a lot of highlights in
Speaker 1: a short amount of time, because we're leaving off in
Speaker 1: the mid fifties, so we've got fifty years to cover. However,
Speaker 1: that being said, a lot of those years involve a
Speaker 1: lot of big general steps that can be summarized much
Speaker 1: more effectively than a deep discussion of how color TV
Speaker 1: works or FM radio. So we won't dive so much
Speaker 1: into the technical detail, but I look forward to covering
Speaker 1: that with you guys in the next episode. If you
Speaker 1: have suggestions for future episodes, send me a message. The
Speaker 1: email is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: or pop on over to our website that's tech Stuff
Speaker 1: podcast dot com. You'll find different ways to contact me
Speaker 1: there in the archive of the episodes. Also, don't forget
Speaker 1: to head over to t public dot com slash tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: That's our merchandise store. Everything you purchase goes to help
Speaker 1: the show, and we greatly appreciate it. We're gonna be
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