RCA and Color Television

things tech. And before I jump into what is going to be the main focus pun intended for this episode, I want to mention something about our CIA, because we're continuing our story about our CIA and something that happened to our c A. That was the year that Howard Hughes would buy controlling steak in r k O Pictures, the motion picture company and also theater chain. Our Cier had purchased a theater chain and created r k OH specifically in order to get a foothold with its optical

on film sound system. So if you listen to the earlier episodes of Our Cia, you remember they went so far as to create an entirely new film company in order to establish this technology. Well that being done now in ninety they no longer sought necessary to keep this motion picture company around and sold off the controlling interest to Howard Hughes, someone that I should probably do in a full episode about in the future, but that is

one complicated cat right there. Anyway, In nineteen forty nine, David Sarnoff, the man who was the general manager and then the president of our CIA, would then become the chairman of the board of our CIA. He also remained on as president of the company, so he had unprecedented control of our CIA, and starting off, you may remember, had a bit of a reputation of being something of a control freak, someone who really wanted the company. He worked for two Excel and he greatly resented anyone who

appeared to stand in the way of that. Well. In the previous episode, the most recent one, I talked about how our c A was a pioneer in consumer electronic televisions and how the US government forced our c A to spin off one of its two NBC radio and television networks, which would become ABC. Also remember CBS, the third of those of the big three networks in the United States, actually grew out of a talent agent's failed attempts to get his clients booked on NBC radio shows.

So we are now in an era in which we have three broadcast giants, NBC, ABC and CBS. And NBC and ABC both came from the same company, CBS came out because no one at NBC would hire this guy's talent. Interestingly, so television is slowly starting to pick up, and as I mentioned at the end of the last episode, our c A would push a new innovation in the early nineteen fifties, which was color television. But our c A wasn't the only company working on color TV. CBS was

also very much in the game. Both companies have been experimenting with color TV strategies since the nineteen forties, and it was a CBS engineer who seemed to win, at least at first. Now I want to chat about this for a moment as well, because the system that this guy made was truly amazing, and it was dependent upon a peculiarity of human biology. We have what some people refer to as the persistence of vision. This is the same thing that makes animation work for us, animation or

or film. If you're looking at a real film, you know, like something that's actually posted to photographic film, it's just a series of still images. If we play those still images back at a fast enough speed, we perceive what appears to be movement, even though if you were to slow it down enough you'd see it's just a series of still images. There's no actual movement happening. The human eye and brain can process about ten to twelve separate images per second and can retain an image for about

a fifteen of a second. So if you have an image and you replace it with a new image faster than one fift of a second, you can create the illusion of continuity of movement from one image to the next. Now, a common term for this is the persistence of vision. And again a lot of the different illusions depend upon

this is it's this limitation of our faculties. And a guy named Peter Carl Goldmark, who was a Hungarian born engineer who immigrated to America and then would work for CBS, would rely upon this peculiarity to create an early form of color television. And his system was an electro mechanical system, and so I the television was a color wheel with red, green, and blue sections on it, and both the camera the television camera and the receiver or TV set had a

color wheel. The wheels positions and rotation would match precisely, and the wheels would spin at an incredible one thousand, four hundred forty times per minute. That was the speed of rotation. So the light coming into the camera would pass through this color wheel, which would kind of act like a filter. So remember earlier when I mentioned in the previous episode UH that an electron beam would make sixty passes over a screen in a second, but it would only hit the odd lines on one pass and

the even lines on the next pass. Those individual passes are called fields. So if you hit all the odd lines, that's one field. All the even lines that's the second field. Two fields make up a video frame because then you have all the lines, then you have all the lines that make up the entire picture, So that's a video frame. Now, that standard wouldn't work for the color images in gold Mark's system because there would be noticeable flicker from the

different colors. If you were only doing this at sixty really really thirty frames a second, it would actually end up being closer to twenty because you have to divide it by three one for each color. Instead, gold Mark would increase the field rate to one forty four fields per second instead of thirty. Each color would get scanned twice in a second, and the number of frames or complete images shown on screen would drop down to twenty four frames per second instead of thirty frames per second.

Gold Mark decreased the resolution of the image from five lines to four hundred five lines, which means you're you're making the picture smaller. Uh. And the reason he did this was because otherwise he would need a lot more bandwidth per channel to send that much information to a receiver. Anyway, because of that persistence of vision, these colors, while they're technically changing very very quickly, our eyes and our brains

can't keep up with that. They can't distinguish how those colors are changing so fast from red, green, and blue, so we perceive a mixture of those colors. And thus, with a combination of electronic and mechanical elements, gold marks approach allowed for color TV. And it gets way more technical and psychological really to describe exactly how this works so that you represent all the different colors, but this is the basics of how the system worked. By the way.

Side note, gold Mark was also in charge of the team that would develop the micro groove technology that would make thirty three and a third RPM long playing vinyl records possible. And since our c A had previously attempted to market thirty three and a third RPM records, though they did not do so with a micro groove. I sis be. Saranoff felt gold Mark was a thorn in

his side. After all, Goldmark had created a new standard for color TV and a new standard for records, and uh Sarnov wasn't really happy when other people took the lead, or other companies took the lead. R c A had its own version of this same sort of mechanical color television approach they had developed there's independently of gold Mark. But the CBS version provided a better picture, and so in nineteen fifty the f c C made the CBS

approach the standard for color televisions. Now temporarily it was only temporarily the standards. So if you've listened to my earlier episodes on our c A, you know that David Sarnoff wanted to be the leader in all things, and he was fiercely competitive, and I suspect he was very much infuriated that the FCC would choose the technology of

a rival company. Actually, I don't have to suspect he absolutely was, because Sarnoff led a crusade against CBS and the f c C. So r C A and another company called Color Television sought an injunction against the f CC's decision to go with the CBS standard. That actually put a temporary halt on Color Television's because while the matter was being decided, CBS couldn't accept any sort of sponsorship money for color television programming, so there was no

money coming in to support the programming. Uh, there was very little chance to make the programming in the first place. CBS wasn't going to invest in something without knowing for sure that it could go forward with it, so it kind of put the brakes on Color TV. Now, the

courts rejected this injunction. Our c A then appealed it, and this went up the court system, and in nineteen fifty one the matter got all the way up to the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Supreme Court also agreed with the FCC, or at least they said the FCC had not acted improperly in state that the CBS standards were fine. But Sarnov was not ready

to give up. Once it was clear that gold marks CBS approach was going to win out, our c A concentrated on moving away from this electro mechanical approach toward a purely electronic method of transmitting and displaying color television. Meanwhile, CBS was running into trouble of its own. The company was finding it hard to convince a public, a market, a consumer market to purchase a new, expensive television set. And not only is it new and expensive, it was

incompatible with existing black and white broadcasts. It was a different resolution, and it was a different methodology. And in the summer nineteen fifty the United States entered the Korean War, which disrupted CBSS manufacturing processes, which meant the company couldn't make sets for people to buy. Only a couple of hundred sets had been produced at that point. Color television had stalled out early, and that gave Sarnov some time to iss team into getting the all electronic approach ready

for display. So how did this electronic version work? Well, I talked in the last episode about how cathode ray tube TVs work, so I'm not gonna go over all that again because it's exactly the same thing up to a point. The cathode ray tube is like a giant light bulb, and it has special phosphors that glow when struck by electrons. The filament inside the cathode. Ray two gives off an electron stream that anodes are positively charged elements focus and direct towards specific points or pixels on

the back side of the screen. Service that creates television pictures. I guess I did go over it again. I never learned. So how does color television work? How is it different from this? Because this approach, really it just means that when electrons hit the phosphors, the phosphors get excited and they start to glow. If they get a lot of energy, they glow brighter. That they get a little energy, they don't grow glow as brightly, and if they don't get

any energy, they're dark. And that combination gives you the images of black and white pictures that move across your TV screen. This is happening lots of times per minute, right like, every every single pixel is being eliminated thirty times per second. So it's pretty amazing. Or at least the electron beam is passing over, maybe not activating, but passing over every phosphor thirty times a second, sixty times. For a second, the electron beam is actually crossing the

entire screen. It's only but it only concentrates on the odd lines or the even lines. So how does the color television work in comparison, Well, the basics are the same. You still have the filament that generates the electrons. You still have the phosphors, You still have the positively charged elements directing the stream of electrons. You still direct the beam across the screen line by line from the upper left to the lower right, sixty times per second, at

least in the United States. But there are three ways a color TV screen differs from a black and white screen. First, you have three electron beams, not just one, and each of those beams is responsible for one of the three main colors from which all other color on screen originates. So they're called the red, green, and blue streams. Now, let me get that clear. The electron streams themselves are

not red, green, and blue. They are electrons you don't see, like a red laser, a blue laser, and a green laser. We could call them streams one, two, and three and it would be just the same. But they are responsible for specific groups of phosphor dots, and the phosphor dots are what are red, green, or blue. So one stream will only activate the green dots. One will only activate the red dots and one will only activate the blue dots.

So if you have a black and white screen, you have that whole sheet of phosphor, that substance that gives off light when electrons excited to a higher energy state. With a CRT color TV set, you have three different kinds of phosphors that correspond with those colors imagined earlier, red, green, and blue. Now explain how this works in greater detail in just a moment, but first let's take a quick

break to thank our sponsor. All Right, The phosphors in a color CRT television are either in dots or stripes on the back side of the screen. The screen that's on the inside of the TV from where you are and between the phosphors and the electron beams is another layer that you don't find in black and white televisions.

It's a metal screen. It's called a shadow mask, and the shadow mask has timing perforations that line up precisely with the phosphor positions on the back side of the screen to create the pixels that will create your television screen picture. So you turn on your color TV and you change the channel to something that's in color. Maybe it's Kurmit the frog singing rainbow connection, which is pretty sweet.

So Kurment is green. So everywhere Kermit is on the screen, you have the green electron beam hitting those green phosphors to create green pixels. Uh. You also have the other beams hitting the other phosphors to change that color green to just the right hue. The red and blue beams excite phosphors to make colors red and blue. So how do you get all the other colors, Well, it's by

that combination that was just talking about. The combining the phosphors, uh, and combining them at different intensities creates all the different colors. So if you were to excite the red, green, and blue phosphors at a single pixel with the same energy, you would create a dot of white light. Those colors would combine, you would get white. If you want it black, then you would just not have any of the electron

beams hitting any of the phosphors at that pixel. Every other color is some combination of those phosphor is getting lifted to that excited state by these electron beams. So in these old CRT TV sets, every single point of light on a screen. Every single dot has three smaller phosphor dots behind it, and the color you see on screen depends upon which electron beams are active at that specific point in any given instant. And all of this is happening all across all the dots on the screen

thirty times a second, so pretty phenomenal. So I still find this an amazing thing that's happening so fast that we perceive it as motion. We perceived the color as being a solid color instead of a combination of different colors, and uh, it's it appears to be seamless to us.

It really says one something interesting about the limitations of human biology that we are not able to see these differences because actual limitations on on us as as bags of meat, and to the lack of limitations on human ingenuity, that we can actually create systems that depend upon these limitations and do so in a way that's not predatory, but is is beneficial or at least entertaining. Now, color television only works if you have something capturing an image

and color to begin with. Obviously, you couldn't send a black and white feed from a camera that can only capture images in black and white and expect it to come out in color. So r c A introduced the world's first commercially available color television camera in nineteen fifty two. This was called the r c A t K forty. There had been previous cameras in the t K line,

but those are black and white cameras. The company would then introduce the r c A t K forty A in nineteen fifty four, and that camera would become the first mass produced color television camera in the world. This

was the culmination of many years of work. The company had largely made the move toward developing an all electronic approach starting around nine That's when they began to see that they needed to to abandon the electro mechanical approach that CBS was developing because CBS was just way too far ahead. The first few cameras were all meant as prototypes and sort of developmental steps toward the t K forty.

So r c A did make some color cameras before the t K forty, but they were all prototypes, experiments,

internal things. The first two cameras that the company developed were often referred to as the Wardman Park cameras because they were used in a Special Color Studio and the Wardman Park neighborhood in Washington, d C. R c A operated the studio there in part because it was close to the seat of government and therefore the f c C. So this was our CIA's attempt at making a system that would be easy to show off to the f c C and then hopefully persuade the FCC to choose

our CIA's approach as the standard for color television. Next came a couple of cameras that were still prototypes that were referred to as coffin cameras. They were called that because the operators would joke that the cameras were large enough to bury a man inside of them. These were mainly used in our CIA's New York studios at thirty Rockefeller Center. You remember the show thirty Rock where NBC

is centered. That that's our CIA's old studios. Often the tests were broadcast to the r c A exhibition hall, which was right across from thirty Rock, and the demonstrations were public, really public, and this was another one of

Starnoff's ideas. He was determined to bring as much attention to our CIA's efforts as possible, which would create added pressure on the f c C as the public got a chance to see a color set, and more importantly, it was a color television that could still show black white programming because unlike the mechanical one that CBS was developing, this one had the same number of lines of resolution

as a black and white set. You could send black and white content to a color set, it would be displayed in black and white, but you could actually still watch older programming. Very important unless you're planning on changing the entire format of broadcast overnight, which is a pretty tough thing to do once you've already established a standard.

During this prototyping, the camera crews noted that the cameras would tend to get real hot, not just from the internal operations going on inside the camera, but also from soaking up energy. So one of the limitations of color television UH in the early days was that you needed a really brightly lit studio. It's very similar to color film. You needed to have a lot of light, and those lights would get really hot and that would heat up

the cameras. Also, if you were shooting on Look Paian, you would soak up sunlight and get really hot, and electronics and heat are not there. They don't go well together typically, so in order to avoid overheating, our c chose to make the t K forty cameras silver that would reflect some of that light away from the camera.

This was after some enterprising camera crews had done a d I Y approach and taken silver paint and coded earlier prototype cameras in silver paint to deflect some of that light to to make sure that it didn't get too hot, and our c A took a note and decided to make that an official design point. These cameras also had what are called lens turrets. If you take a look at old school television cameras, you'll see that they appear to have four lenses poking out of the

front of them. That's actually a lens turret. It's kind of a disc that has different lenses mounted on it, and then you can turn the disc so that a different lens is actually active. So the the whole purpose of this is to create different focal lengths of of lenses. Rather than having to physically remove them and swap them out,

they were all mounted on the camera. You could just change whichever one was active at a given time, so the commons set up on one of these lens turrets was to have one eight and a half inch lens, one million meter lens, one nine millimeter lens, and one fifty millimeter lens. And I gave the camera operator and director some options to choose the focal point for specific cameras. You know, whether it was going to be a close up or a wide shot, they could choose whichever lens

they wanted to use. Now, it was possible to change lenses during a live show. Typically you would do so by switching to a different camera and then changing the lens on camera one while camera two is active, but this was pretty uncommon. Usually they would just set the lenses for whatever shot they wanted and that was it was gonna stay as our c A had introduced lens turrets with the older black and white television cameras, so

this was kind of a holdover from those days. Now, once light passed through the lens of one of these color cameras, it would hit a beam splitter and that would divide the light into three beams. Each of those beams of light would then hit an individual orthocon tube. Now, in the previous episode, when I was talking about black

and white TVs. I talked about a special component called the iconoscope, which was in charge of taking light, having it hit a photo electric base, and then using an electron beam to scan it, and that would send out the signal. The orthocon was the successor to the iconoscope. It used a low velocity electron beam instead of a

high velocity electron beam. The econoscope used the high velocity ones, but the problem with that was that it would sometimes produce secondary electrons and so you would get quote unquote noise in the signal. The orthocon used low velocity electron beams which would not create these secondary electrons, and again it would use it to scan a photoelectric mosaic on a special plate inside the tubes. The lights hitting that plate, the electron beam is scanning the plate, and that's what's

creating the signal. So in this case, the light comes into the camera, it splits into three beams, and each beam goes into a separate orthocon and you can guess each of those orthocns was dedicated for a specific representation of color red, green, or blue, and these cameras would then send that signal out to be transit transmitted over to the color televisions. They were large cameras, they're relatively primitive. They required lots of adjustments and tweaking to keep them

tuned to the proper colors. But they worked. And the most important aspect of this whole approach was one of practicality. That was how our c A was really leaning into

this technology. The CBS color television was incompatible with the older black and white sets, as I mentioned, So the CBS approach meant that you were going to have to go out and buy a brand new, very expensive television set if you wanted to watch this new programming, and you would have to have an older black and white set if you wanted to continue to watch all the programming that was made just for black and white televisions. So it was not a very attractive technology to consumers.

You weren't. It wasn't backwards compatible, as we would say in the in the video game console age, So uh, this was not something a lot of people were excited about. The r c A approach was different. It would allow people with monochromatic televisions to still view color broadcasts, they just wouldn't be in color. You could tune into a color program on a black and white set, you would just get the black and white representation of that. CBS

found itself stuck. There was a manufacturing issue with building out TV sets, especially during the Korean War. There was a programming issue of creating material for those sets. There was the market issue with people getting to buy new, expensive technology. So ultimately Sarnov was able to win the battle for the color television format. The FCC would ultimately drop the standards that they had adopted that had come from CBS. Instead the National Television System Committee, which was

the second entity to have that name. Previously, the first version was formed to develop the standard for black and white TV transmissions. So this version was this new organization with the same name essentially was reformed with the purpose of creating the new color television broadcast standard. It did so and published the standard to nineteen fifty three, and it was pretty much the same as r c a's standard.

Sarnoff had one, at least for the time being. I've got a lot more to say about what r c A did during this age, but before I get to that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Our c A begins to manufacture color television sets. Now. Now they've set the standard. Now they're going to make the actual products. Originally, the early sets had either fifteen inch or nineteen inch screens, but by n all r c A sets were twenty one inches in screen size, and

you measure that on the diagonal. Other companies would continue to manufacture the smaller screen sets, but our CI A focused on twenty one is the standard now. Interestingly, r c A was not the first manufacturer to offer a consumer color television set that was running on what was effectively our CIA's color television transmission standards. Westinghouse would introduce a color television ahead of our CIA in nineteen fifty four. It's sold for one thousand two dollars princely, some petcularly

when you factor in inflation. If you were to do that, you would see that in today's cash, that would cost you about twelve thousand dollars. R c A would follow this up in less than a month with its own first television set, color television set called the c T one hundred. That one had a price tag of one thousand dollars, so about ten grand in today's cash. Pretty expensive to watch some color TV. Now it may come as a little surprised that not many people picked up

a new CT one hundred at that price tag. Our c A pursued some pretty enthusiastic marketing strategies. In other words, they held a very expensive advertising campaign trying to get interest up, but at that price it just wasn't going to happen. By August of nine, not even two months after its debut, r c A would drop the price tag to four dollars, which was still a huge chunk of change. But at that price, r c A was actually losing money on every sale because the sets were

so expensive to make. Even so, if the company had failed to sell its sets, that would have cost our c A even more money in the long run. So this was a way to get early adopters on board and pave the way for future less expensive television's. Color television wouldn't really pick up steam in the consumer marketplace until the nineteen sixties. That's when the quality really improved, the price dropped, and there was more programming available to

watch as well. Shows like Disney's Wonderful World of Color, which debuted in nineteen sixty one, helped a lot, but color television sales wouldn't overtake black and white TV sales until nineteen seventy. Meanwhile, our c A and CBS did battle over which company would define the future of television. At that same time, Sarnov was waging a separate war about radio waves. His adversary was someone who used to be a close friend of his, a guy named Edwin

Howard Armstrong. Armstrong was an electrical engineer. He had attended Columbia University. Brilliant guy, apparently one of those people who really was only interested in studying anything that directly appealed to him and had no interest whatsoever in any other subjects. Armstrong had already achieved a great deal by the late nineteen twenties. But we're concerned specifically with his work in FM radio. FM stands for frequency modulation, as opposed to

AM radio, which stands for amplitude modulation. In both cases, we're talking about changing a radio wave in some way to transmit information. So it's all about varying something some aspect of the radio wave. And with a M or amplitude modulation, it's all in the name. It's all about the amplitude, the strength of a radio signal by varying

that modulating the strength of the signal. You can encode audio onto a radio wave, and you have a receiver and it has a device to decode that modulation, essentially to reverse this process so that whatever information was laid on top of that radio wave can to be played back. You can convert it into an audio signal, uh an electrical signal really that represents an audio signal. Send that

to an amplifier and then onto speakers. But a M has some drawbacks, and a big one is that it is interference really can come into a M transmissions quite easily. Stuff like electrical equipment can introduce interference or thunderstorms, and you get static and other noise that gets introduced into the signal, so you don't get a clean signal start off.

Want to eliminate all of that static that noise. Armstrong wanted to experiment with frequency modulation, which was already a known method at that time but had yet to reduced results that were remarkably better than a M broadcasts. And as the name suggests, instead of messing with the strength of a radio wave, you mess with its frequency. You increase or decrease its frequency to encode audio. On top of that radio wave. Otherwise it's a very similar system.

You would have a receiver that would pick up the radio wave and a decoder that would take that modulation of frequency and convert it back into an electrical signal that would represent audio. So Armstrong believed that the reason why FM had not really shown to be better than a M was because earlier attempts had focused on two narrow arrange for modulation. People were not changing the frequency enough, essentially,

so Armstrong began to experiment with wide band FM. He filed and received five patents for his approach, and he had an agreement with our c A that said the come, but he was going to have the right of first refusal on any patents that Armstrong was able to secure.

While working in FM, he demonstrated his system to our c A. R c A would actually test it out fairly extensively in the mid nineteen thirties, and it was pretty clear that the system was superior to a M for the purposes of radio broadcasts within a given region. A M signals could be picked up further away than FM in most cases, but our c A was so focused on developing television that relatively little attention was given to the FM developments, and ultimately Armstrong wasn't presented with

any sort of deal for his work. A short while later, Armstrong brought his ideas to some other companies. Our CIA wasn't doing anything with them, and his intent was partnering with those other companies and licensing his patents in order to start changing radio stations over from a M to FM, which would actually require lots of work that would require, uh, not just a format switch, but new equipment. FM and AM transmitters and receivers are not compatible. You can't have

both in the same radio set. If you have a receiver, it may have an FM receiver and an a M receiver, but they are two separate receivers. They're not it's it's it's not a compatible technology again, because you're looking at different modulations and you're looking at different sizes of radio waves as well. So in nine r c A says, you know what, this FM thing makes a lot of sense to us now now that we're really looking at it, that we've got a deal to make with you, and

they present their Armstrong with a really attractive contract. He would get a cool one million dollars which in today's money is around eighteen million dollars. In return, our c A would get a royalty free license to use his FM patents. It was supposed to be a non exclusive deal, however, so our CIA would not get the exclusive rights to use this. They just wouldn't pay any royalties on anything they earned, and in return Armstrong would get this one

million dollar fee. However, Armstrong had already made arrangements with other companies to license his patents and they had to pay royalties on everything they sold. Anything that made use of one of his patents, he would get a little cut of it. And he felt like if he signed this agreement with our CIA, it wouldn't be fair to these other companies that had to pay him every time they sold something. If our CIA didn't have to do the same thing, how is that fair? So he refused.

He said, I'm sorry, the steel is not gonna work with me, and that ticked off Sarnoff to no end. So who sar Enough directs his engineers to work on FM tech of their own rather than license Armstrong's work and give him royalties. He says, forget it, Let's just make our own FM tech and the company starts to develop systems that they claim do not infringe upon Armstrong's patents. R c A then took another step because Sarnov isn't

pleased with just trying to sidestep Armstrong. He wants to punish Armstrong, and the company begins to encourage other companies to not license Armstrong's patents, in other words, cutting off Armstrong's source of revenue. Because Armstrong is not making radios himself, he's licensing his designs to other companies, and now r c A saying, oh, don't do that. He know, we've come up with our own FM transmission stuff. Don't bother

paying him for this stuff. So Armstrong goes and sues our c A and NBC, and he's pretty confident and he's gonna win right off the bat. But the legal proceedings lasted much longer than he anticipated, and the expense drained his personal finances by some of his patents had actually fired, so he couldn't even really leverage those anymore, and the lawsuits were continuing. Meanwhile, his mental health was deteriorating.

He felt strongly that he was being cheated out of his money and the credit for his work, and what's worse, this mirrored something that had happened to Armstrong earlier in his life. He had worked on an invention that he felt he was responsible for, but ultimately the credit went to a different engineer, so he felt like this was happening all over again. In the winter of nineteen fifty four, after having driven away his own wife, he actually hit her during an argument, and she had left him to

leave and uh and live with her sister. Armstrong decided to end his own life. He jumped out of the window of his thirteenth floor apartment and uh landed on a on a balcony tend stories below and died. He had a suicide note in his pocket that expressed his deep regret for hit his wife and for his actions, and Sarnoff would shrug off any responsibility he might have played in Armstrong's deterioration. He said, I didn't kill Armstrong.

Now Armstrong's wife, Marian, took over the case on behalf of her deceased husband, and she pursued it with determination. At the end of nineteen fifty our Cier and Marion Armstrong reached a settlement. The amount was said to be around a million dollars, which was the r CIER had proposed to Armstrong in return for the royalty free use

of the patents. Pretty tragic story. Now, before I sign off, I should also mention that at the same time, our Cier was working on technology that was not meant for your average consumer. I've been focusing on the consumer tech because that's the stuff most of us are familiar with, the things we come in contact with. Radio's, television, that kind of thing. But the company had become an important partner with the U. S Military during World War Two.

They had developed a lot of components that were used in radar systems, but that relationship the military continued after World War Two was over. In the late nineteen forties, r c A developed a system called Typhoon to help

the Navy test missile designs. Typhoon was a guided missile simulator, So the idea was that would let Navy engineers test out different ideas, different designs under different test conditions, all in a computer simulated environment, which meant they didn't have to go out and actually build rockets and then seek out those conditions and test them for real. That gets really expensive. It's a logistic nightmare. This way they could do it in a simulated environment and test out these

different ideas before ever committing to a specific design. Typhoon debut in Princeton at r c AS R and D facility. It had more than four thousand electron tubes and it took up fifty three computer racks. The room it was in had to be air conditioned to keep everything at

the right operating temperature. It was not common to find air conditioning in a lot of Princeton buildings at that time before this, so our c A also developed electron microscopes and the television microscope during these years, but I don't really have enough time in today's episode to go

into detail on those. We'll pick up with a little bit of that in the next episode, but we're really going to try and focus on wrapping up our CIA's history, uh at least up to present day in our next episode, so we're gonna skip over a lot of stuff to hit the highlights. Anyway. Our CIA's work also branched out beyond electronics. I think this is something worth commenting on.

The company developed reading aids for people with impaired vision, and they also had come up with a new way of producing penicillin, which seems kind of crazy, but no, it's absolutely true. Our Cia was producing penicillin. They used radio frequency heating during the process. So one of the stages of penicillin production requires you to remove water from penicillin shortly after you've separated in penicillin out from the

solution you develop it in. So you develop penicilla in a solution you separated out from the solution, you then have to remove as much water as you can efficiently and safely. So our CIA's approach, you used radio frequency heating to dry the penicillin more efficiently and economically to

make it viable. But before our Cia could even take advantage of this discovery, before they could go to market with it, the researchers who are working on this project at our ci A discovered that they can use a chemical approach that was even more effective and more efficient, producing more purified penicillin more efficiently. So our Cia was able to help doctors secure sources of penicillin to treat

infections around the world, which is pretty incredible. Now, in our next episode, like I said, we're gonna wrap up the history of our Cia, We're gonna hit the highlights, which is going to be a lot of highlights in a short amount of time, because we're leaving off in the mid fifties, so we've got fifty years to cover. However, that being said, a lot of those years involve a lot of big general steps that can be summarized much more effectively than a deep discussion of how color TV

works or FM radio. So we won't dive so much into the technical detail, but I look forward to covering that with you guys in the next episode. If you have suggestions for future episodes, send me a message. The email is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or pop on over to our website that's tech Stuff podcast dot com. You'll find different ways to contact me there in the archive of the episodes. Also, don't forget to head over to t public dot com slash tech Stuff.

That's our merchandise store. Everything you purchase goes to help the show, and we greatly appreciate it. We're gonna be putting up some new designs there pretty soon. Look forward to seeing those, and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com