The TV Story Part 2

and how they work. So if you don't remember our last episode, we spent a lot of time establishing the basic science that the inventors of television depended upon when they were making their stuff, and we also looked at the curious world of mechanical televisions, which were the first attempt to bring movie moving pictures to the average home

and actually had moving parts inside the TV. But now it's time to transition over to electronic televisions and the insane drama and betrayals that went along with the launch of those electronic televisions. And there are a lot of arguments among historians over whom we should credit as the inventor of electronic televisions. There are very passionate advocates for

two primary individuals, although they're not the only ones. There are others as well across the world in fact, but the two primary ones both had an idea that would transform TVs from these mechanical oddities into the electronic mainstays and homes around the world. And it really depends upon whom you ask as to which one should get the credit. And I'm gonna do my best to try and remain objective in this, but I do admit I have my own opinions on this matter, and they're probably gonna show

through pretty clearly. So we're gonna pick up our story. In Utah, there was a young inventive lad who worked on his family's farm, and that lad's name was Filo Taylor Farnsworth Filo t. Farnsworth. He was precocious kid. He had a keen interest in science and physics and electronics. He was born in nineteen o six and according to his family, when he was just fourteen years old, and at this point I believe they had moved to Idaho, he came up with an idea that would lead to

the invention of the electronic television. So, according to the story, Farnsworth, who was already fascinated with the properties of the mysterious electron, had been thinking about using electrons to transmit images rather than the mechanical methods that were currently in development at that time, the ones that depended upon the nip cow discs. And if you don't know what a nip cow disc is, just listen to part one of this series. I go

into detail about it. Anyway, Farnsworth thought that if you could use electrons to scan and transmit images, you could do so much faster, with a higher resolution and a higher frame rate than the mechanical method could manage it. But the question was how would you do that? And there's a kind of an interesting story. Don't know if it's true or not, but it's how his family told it. Farnsworth was pulling a harrow across his family's potato field.

A harrow, by the way, is a heavy frame that has times on it, like a fork, and you place the frame on the ground so that the times face downward into the ground, and you pull it across the ground, typically across ground that's already been plowed, and this helps break up clods and remove weeds and uh otherwise prepare plowed land. It can also help cover seeds that have

already been planted. So, according to his family, it was while Farnsworth was doing this for his farm and he was looking at these neat, straight lines across freshly plowed earth, they came up with the idea of creating televised images line by line with electrons. So the television screen would effectively be a stack of horizontal lines, and the electron stream would paint the lines in sequence so quickly as to seem like an uninterrupted series of moving images to

the human eye. And this would be somewhere around the year nineteen twenty when he came up with this idea. But there's another inventor who factors into this story, and that would be Vladimir Cosmo zorikin Now. Zorakin was born in Russia in either eighteen eighty eight or eighteen eighty nine, depending upon the the paperwork you look at. It seems that eighty nine is the more accurate one, but I've seen both listed. He attended school in Russia and in France.

He studied science. One of his teachers was a guy named Boris Rosing, who in nineteen o seven, filed a

patent for a television system. They used a mechanical scanning method similar to the nip Cow disc we talked about in Part one, but it used an electronic receiver that used a cathode ray tube to transmit electrons to a screen, so it was kind of a hybrid between mechanical and electronic, and Rosing demonstrated a version of that technology in nineteen eleven, so uh Zorikin was at least aware of that work

at the time. Now, during World War One, Zorikin joined the Russian Signal Signal Corps, and after the war he moved to the United States. He got out of Russia just as it was experiencing its own civil war. He grew up in Czarist Russia, and then there was the Great Revolution in Russia. He got out. His family worked for the Czar, so he found work as an employee

of Westinghouse. After settling in the United States, he actually traveled back and forth a couple of times, but ultimately decided to relocate to the US permanently, so he started working for Westinghouse and in nineteen three he filed a patent for an electron scanning tube and it would eventually be named the or it would eventually be incorporated in an invention called the iconoscope that will be important later on.

So his work and began to work on this idea, trying to create a practical application based upon the notion of a scan electron scanning tube. But his early efforts weren't terribly successful. In fact, his employers at Westinghouse, sensing that Zorikin wasn't making much progress, actually told him he should work on something else. They were not impressed at all. Meanwhile, over in the US, Farnsworth was also trying to build a practical electron scanning tube. Now he called his version

the image dissector. And he wasn't the only person to come up with this idea. There was also a German scientist named Max Nieckman, and also Rudolph Hell who was a student of Deacons, who filed for a patent for a similar device in Europe. But it seems Farnsworth, who was working completely independently and unaware of that work, was the first guy to create a working version of this

particular technology. The tube was meant to replace the mechanical scanners used in nip cal discs, and we be inside a camera, so the camera lens would direct light to an image dissector, which would focus that light onto some photo sensitive material that would create a voltage, inducing current

to flow through a wire. The current strength was proportional to the brightness of the image, so darker stuff generated a lower current than brighter stuff, and if you used magnetic fields or electrostatic plates, you could then direct that that actual flow and the image dissector could scan an image many times a second, and then the photo system

material would convert that light energy into electricity. A receiver that was synchronized with the scanner could then take that current and apply it to a cathode ray tube, which would shoot electrons at the back side of a screen, and the synchronization allowed the receiver to project the electrons in the appropriate order and at the appropriate level on the screen, so that you would get an image, a moving image, of whatever it was the camera had been

looking at. Now. The screen itself is essentially a series of horizontal lines. Each line is made up of points, which we call pixels, that represent a point of light. These are all side by side in those horizontal lines. So the backside of a television screen also has a phosphorus coding on it, and the coding will fluoresce or light up when it is struck by an electron at

high velocity. So the cathode ray tube sends electrons shooting out at this phosphorus coating on the back side of the screen, and when the electron collides with the phosphorescent atoms, it causes them to jump up in energy levels. And when the electrons come back down from those excited energy levels,

that's when they give off light when they fluoresce. The brightness of the light depends upon the amount of energy that hits the the atoms, so it depends on how fast those electrons are going, or rather the current that's coming from that cathode ray too, So all of that is dependent upon how much light came into the camera

in the first place. It's a really elegant kind of situation, and you might wonder, all right, well, how does the catholice ray tube actually paint the backside of a television screen? And it's all done with magnets. So let's consider the anatomy of an old fashioned CRT television set. This is what it would look like if you took one apart by the way, do not take one apart. If you puncture something, you could end up causing a bit of an explosion, and it is messy and potentially dangerous, so

don't do it. You've got capacitors in there too that can hold onto a charge. Uh, it's not safe, but this is what would happen if you could, you know, do an exploded view. So I mentioned that the screen represents a series of horizontal lines. We're gonna be a bit us centric in this part of the episode, so I can just describe our CRT television's work, but just know it works the same way in other places. It's just the actual number of horizontal lines and frames per

second are a little different. So in the United States with old CRT sets, the screen was a stack of five twenty five horizontal lines of pixels, and it's the cr te's job, the cathode ray tubes job, to paint each of those lines multiple times per second to refresh the image on screen and transmit that that sense of movement. So you've got your CRT and that's shooting electrons at a very tightly controlled beam on the back side of

the television screen. So how do you steer the electrons use magnetic fields because remember, electrons are negatively charged particles, so you can push them with similar similar negative charged or negative magnetic fields, or you can attract them. You can pull them with positive magnetic fields, so you can actually change the flow of electrons by applying magnetic fields

in a very controlled way. Also, the magnetic fields are a great band, and you should listen to them, but it's kind of tangential to this discussion, so I don't know why you brought it up now. Using magnetic fields generated by a coil of copper wiring, the television paints each line of phosphorescent material on the back side of the screen one by one in a row from top to bottom, so it goes top left or right down

to bottom. Uh, And it doesn't line by line. The electron beam sweeps across the first horizontal line at a blinding speed. It slams electrons into the phosphores to generate the light you see on the other side, and there's also an electron absorbing layer so it catches all those electrons. They don't just keep on shooting outside the TV screen and getting involved in all your business. They stop at the screen because of that absorbent layer. Now, the beam

follows a pattern that's called a raster scan. So this is where we paint that first line from left or right, and when it gets to the end of the line, it jumps back to the beginning of the next line. So it doesn't go left to right and then right to left. It goes left or right, jumps back down to the beginning of the next line. It goes left or right again. Sort of more on that in a second. Now, that is called the horizontal retrace. When it it's to the end of the line and moves to the beginning

of the next line. Uh, then you've got it going all the way down the entire length of the screen until it gets to the bottom right corner. At that point, the beam switches off and it relocates it to the top left part of the screen. That's the vertical retrace. It's kind of a diagonal line from bottom right to top left, so it gets it ready to start painting again. Uh. And now I've got to explain that sort of I mentioned earlier. You know, I said it it's sort of

goes to the next line. It's because of interlacing. See the whole screen is refreshed sixty times per second. At least that's the idea. You want a sixty time per second refresh rate. That's not what the earliest electronic televisions did, but ultimately that was the goal for us television's uh, except that you really are doing thirty frames a second

because you're alternating lines. So I mentioned there are five twenty five of these horizontal lines, and I mentioned that the electron beam paints that horizontal line went after together. Only it takes a lot of work to paint five lines of pixels sixty times every second. And our human vision really doesn't need the screen refreshed that frequently to experience what seems to be movement to us. You could

have that and you still have convincing movement. Uh. So film works at twenty four frames a second, television works at thirty frames, although they're not really frames, it's more like fields per second. Uh. But it alternates. It's kind of weird. So the first time the electron beam goes down, it will paint every other horizontal line, and then the second time it will paint all the even numbered pixels

in a horizontal line. You know what this is gonna require a lot more explaining, but before I jump into that, let's take a little break right now and thank our sponsors. Al Right, So instead of painting the entire screen sixty times a second, let's just paint half the screen thirty times a second and the other half thirty times a second. And then we do that just by alternating the lines.

That's what interlacing is. So CRT the cathode ray tube would shoot electrons at the left top corner on line one. At the end of line one, it would go to the horizontal retrace. Only instead of starting at line to it actually starts on line three. It skips line too. It goes down line three, goes down to line five, down to line seven, etcetera, until it gets all the way down to In theory, not all television broadcasts actually

used all lines, but that doesn't really matter. It gets down to the bottom, it's time for it to go to the vertical retrace. Only instead of going back to line number one, it actually goes to line number two, and it starts to do the same process while all the even numbered lines. So it goes to the end of line two. Horizontal retrace brings it to line four, goes to the end of line four, horizontal retrace brings the line six, and it does that through that next sequence.

It does both of these things thirty times every second for each thirty times each for every second that goes by. So it's so fast that we don't detect that only half the number of horizontal lines are being refreshed at any given moment. It's way too fast for us to be able to see that with our human eyes and human brains. To us, it's just an uninterrupted sequence of moving images. This is where we can take advantage of human limitations. The technology is able to perform at a

level beyond what we humans can experience. So that allows you to make some shortcuts on the technology side. And as I said before, it's easier to refresh half the screen thirty times a second than a full screen sixty times a second. Kind of nifty. Now, eventually you would get to progressive scans systems, and progressive scans do every single horizontal line every you know, sixty times a second

or however many times it refreshes. You'll hear about crazy refresh rates that like four eight hurts, which means four d eight times a second it's refreshing the whole screen. But that's way off further into the future. We are not covering that in part two. You'll have to wait for Part three to get to the high refresh rate stuff. So you've got the basic idea of how these electron

scanning two machines worked. The prototypes that Farnsworth is working created were much more primitive than what I just described, but they used similar techniques. It was based upon essentially the same principle, just it was more limited in what it can do. Now let's get to the drama of the story, because it gets pretty crazy. So Farnsworth grows up. He's had this dream since he was fourteen of a method of creating television. He starts to really investigate it

further as he gets older. He takes charge of his family farm after his father passes away. But then he ends up meeting and then marrying a woman named Elma pem Gardner in nineteen six, and shortly thereafter they moved

to California. In fact, according to some accounts, as soon as they got married they moved to California, and originally they moved not too far away from cal Tech because Farnsworth was hoping that he would be able to use the location to help further his own efforts in developing this electronic television idea he had uh some would say that he was obsessed at this point, and the following year, in nine seven, the two happily married people would relocate

to San Francisco, and there Farnsworth was able to find some funding from investors, which was a tradition that many start up follow to this very day. If you have a startup in the tech world, chances are you're going to San Francisco to take a lot of meetings. That year, ninety seven, Farnsworth applied for a patent for his invention. The title of the patent was Television System, and in it he described his method for capturing, transmitting, and receiving

moving images. Now, Zorakin had filed his patent back in nineteen twenty three, but the U. S. Patent Office still had not granted that patent. It was still pending. Moreover, z Workin's approach, while similar to Farnsworth's, wasn't exactly the same, and Zorakin had had no real success up to that point in getting it to work in the real world. He could not make a practical demonstration of it. The

attempts he made were very muddled. Now Farnsworth, by comparison, was able to get a system working in ninety seven, although that initial demonstration, which really was more just a proof of concept, was ry modest. His first transmission was a horizontal line. It wasn't exactly the Super Bowl, but it did say that he was onto something and he

could capture, transmit, and playback moving images electronically. So he kept at it, and in nineteen he brought some reporters over to his laboratory and he held a demonstration that was a little bit more impressive. It showed a very blurry but clearly moving image on the screen uh and it was at a refresh rate of twenty pictures per second, so much less advanced than what we would see later on, but enough to get the reporters excited, and it showed

actual motion. So that really got people talking about his methods, and in nineteen thirty the U. S. Patent Office granted Farnsworth his patent keep in minds workin still did not have a patent for his invention. He was still encountering problems with his approach, so in nineteen thirty, he decided

to visit Farnsworth. Farnsworth was known for getting this method to work, and his workin was still running into problems, so he arranged a visit and he went and visited for about three days, according to Farnsworth's wife, and he learned all about the methods Farnsworth used to create this electronic television, and he even supposedly watched Farnsworth assemble one

of the scanning tubes. He then returned to Westinghouse and attempted to reverse engineer Farnsworth's invention, and he was later approached by our CI A and began working for them. Uh our Cia had already made an enormous amount of money by dominating the radio industry at that point, and at the helm of the Radio Corporation of America was a guy named David Sarnoff, who I'm going to talk

a lot about in this episode. He was originally from Russia, and Starnoff was the type of guy who if he wanted to dominate an industry, he would do so big time. He would go in guns figuratively a blazon. He's really good at it too, to a point where you might call him um Ruthless really start off led our CIA through an era of prosperity for the company. During the radio days, our CIA had held onto patents that had to do with radio components, and they also owned broadcast

stations and entire networks. Actually, essentially, if you were in the business of radio back in those days, you were paying our CIA for that privilege. You might be paying licensing fees. You might be paying licensing fees just to build radios for people to buy, or you might be paying fees so that you could broadcast on stations. Pretty much anyway that there was a way to make money on the radio, some of that money was going to

our c A at that time. In fact, the company even had a basic philosophy which a lot of people have alluded to over the years, which was that our CIA would not pay licensing fees. R c A was the company to whom you paid licensing fees um. They also created a major broadcast company INBC. You might have heard of it if you're in the United States. It

is the oldest of the major broadcast networks in the US. UH. This was back when our c A was still part of General Electric, which eventually it would get spun off from General Electric and become its own company. Also, if you want to be technical, r c A created ABC as well. ABC was originally part of NBC that they had created two kind of parallel networks, both of which were called NBC at the time. But uh, the government stepped in and said, hey, you're muscling in on everybody.

You've got to break this up. And so eventually they spun off part of this network which would later become ABC.

So in a way, our c A was responsible for two of the three major broadcast companies, and you early u S Television, and these sort of practices got really serious, so serious in fact, that the Department of Justice got interested, and on May three, David Sarnov was called before the Department of Justice and the d o J was concerned that our CIA was using its patent portfolio to suppress competition.

So this is not a new thing. It might sound familiar to anyone who has followed news about patent law in general. There's been a lot of stories about companies like say Apple and Samsung, using patents to put pressure on each other, or you might have heard stories about patent trolls. These are entities that hold patents that seem

to have no intention of actually making anything with the patent. Rather, they just sit on the patents that either require people to license the patent or they end up just waiting for people to try and make something that infringes or seems to infringe upon that patent, and then they sue them and that's how they make money. There are a lot of people who criticize that particular method of business.

So this court case required our c A to eventually make some concessions and to back off a bit on its practices, although the company also won a few victories during all the legal maneuvers. In also is the court case that led to the birth of the modern Federal Communications Commission, or FCC. This is the one that replaced the Federal Radio Commission Earlier. That same f CC would almost immediately force our cia to split ABC off from NBC. So our CIA's troubles began with this lawsuit, but they

didn't end with them. Ah. So Sarnoff, though has working as an asset, he went out and he hireds work in a way to try and develop television because Sarnoff said, we did this thing with radio and made a huge amount of money. I think television is going to be the next big thing, because it still wasn't a thing yet. Not very many people had mechanical TVs and nobody had

electronic TVs yet, and there was a problem already. Saranoff was upset because he saw that Farnsworth was seeing some success and his working had not yet met with success, even though he had a very similar idea and Farnsworth had our They secured a patent in so now there was patented information out there, and our CIA does not pay licensing fees. That was dead set against his corporate philosophy,

Sarnoff's corporate philosophy. I should say, I will often equate Sarnoff in our Cia in this episode, but it's really just to talk about the specific era of our CIA's history. And there was another problem, which was that the glory days of our CIA were in danger at this time because the government's intervention meant the company had to slash licensing fees or else be charged with suppressing competition. The Great Depression was also having a major impact on the

consumer electronics field. People didn't have the money to spend on luxury items like radios, and that's what the main product was for our Cia, so it was it was really a difficult time for the company. Our Cia stock dropped nine in value. But Starnoff really thought that television was the cart that was gonna take him back to success. He was gonna hitch his horse to that one, or hitch his cart to that horse. I guess I should say I go backwards. I put the cart before the horse. Literally, no,

just figuratively. Literally, it just doesn't work anyway. He thought that TV was going to be the next big thing, so he really wanted to get ahead of this, and the problem was Farnsworth was in the way because Farnsworth had filed this patent and our c A does not want to pay licensing fees. So in April nineteen thirty one, Sarnoff actually paid a visit to Farnsworth's lab. Now, Farnsworth wasn't in his lab at the time that Sarnof was there. He wasn't in town, but his wife showed Sarnoff around.

By the end of the visit, Sarnoff said to his partners that he felt they could make televisions without infringing on Farnsworth's patents. It wouldn't be a problem at all, and that our c A was in the clear. However, not that law. Long after his visit, he must have had second thoughts. He must have either heard something that changed his mind, or maybe one of his attorneys said something.

At any rate, he went to Farnsworth and said, hey, buddy, how about I buy your company for one hundred thousand dollars and you can come work for me. You can be an r c A employee and we'll just buy your company. And of course all the intellectual property like your patents will own those forever and ever. And people who want to make TVs want to pay us a licensing fee. Does that sound good to you, buddy? And Uh? He probably didn't word it exactly that way, but Farnsworth

did not. I think the deal was great. I mean, a hundred grand was a huge amount of money in nineteen thirty one. It's still a good junk of change. I'll happily accept a hundred grand from anyone who's willing to get rid of it. Uh, I'll take it. I mean, assuming it's not like a money launder ring thing. I don't want in on that. I got troubles on my own, but a hundred thousand dollars, way more money than more

buying power than why don't we get you today? But Farnsworth suspected that his patent was actually worth more than a hundred grand and that he can make more money licensing his ideas to interest in parties. In fact, that's exactly what our Cia wanted to do with his work. So Farnsworth's like, I don't really feel like I need to go work for you. I can do this on my own. So he rejected the offer, which did not

make David Sarnoff very happy. Farnsworth then attempted to work with one of our Sier's competitors, phil Co. No relation to Filo T. Farnsworth, but phil Co, which was an East Coast company that was also looking at getting into televisions. They also created did radios as well. Now, according to pem His you know, Farnsworth's wife, our Cia got word of Farnsworth's plans that they were able to pick up

transmissions when Farnsworth was demonstrating his UH technology. Two people over at Philco, and once they learned that Farnsworth was going to go work with Philco, r c A decided to put the screws to Philco. Again, this is according to Farnsworth's wife, And so our c A essentially went to Philco and said, if you hire this guy, if you or rather if you become his customer, if you license his technology, we're going to revoke our licenses to you to make radios and you won't be able to

make radios anymore. It would be illegal for you to make radios because you would be doing it in violation of our intellectual property. And Philco then backed off from working with Farnsworth. So that's according to Farnsworth's wife. It sounds pretty uh vicious if you ask me, so Farnsworth

was left without a customer. Now, in nineteen thirty three, is Working would file a patent for what was now called the r c A Icono scope, and the nineteen thirty three patent application included references to the earlier nineteen twenty three application, and in nineteen thirty eight he would essentially he would eventually get this patent granted to him

by the U S Patent Office. Sarnough actually used this filing as an argument that our c A really invented television because it's Workin's original patent application was in nineteen twenty three. That was four years before Farnsworth filed his patent in nineteen seven. So Starnup saying, look, we've got it on file here. Sure it's not a granted patent, but the fact that the idea existed before Farnsworth ever filed a patent for it tells us that we own

this idea, not this guy. So the big issue at stake was really not paying that licensing fee, and he didn't want to have to. Sarno didn't want to pay Farnsworth a penny if he could help it. So our c A decided to challenge Farnsworth's patents in court in one of the ugliest tech lawsuits in history. I'll get into that more in just a moment, but let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Let's get into this massive lawsuit that our ci A leveled against Farnsworth.

So Zorakin really had the backing of our CIA and all their lawyers and Sarnof behind him. And at the crux of the case was a claim in Farnsworth's patent, and that was claim number fifteen, which stated the device was designed to display an electrical image. That was the term Farnsworth created an electrical image, and it is so intrinsic to the way television's work, electronic television's work, that there just was no real wiggle room for our CIA.

There was no way our CIA was going to be able to make televisions without paying a license fee to Farnsworth because there was no way to it around the fact that their devices had to create an electrical image. It was pivotal to an electronic television. So they thought, well,

how can we get around this. Let's undermine the claim, and that's where they started to try and make a case, Sayings workin that his UH nineteen twenty three patent application was for a device that also would create an electrical image, and since it was filed in nineteen twenty three, although not granted, it still wasn't granted at the time of this lawsuit, which began in nineteen thirty one and lasted

for about four years. UH. Even though it hadn't been granted yet, it was a show that this idea was around before Farnsworth had filed for it, and that really r c A should have ownership of that idea, not Farnsworth. But here was the problem. They couldn't prove that Zarikins approach would you know, work, and without it working, it was hard to make an argument that Zorkin had really come up with this idea. Uh. You know, a patent is supposed to be for an idea that ultimately can work.

If it has proven to not be a workable idea, then the patent is not supposed to be valid. Now, the team cited a supposed nineteen thirty four demonstration towards the end of this lawsuit. They said, hey, Workin demonstrated that his system works. He built a working version of what he had uh proposed back in ninety three. But there was no evidence to support this claim. There were no eyewitnesses of this demonstration that they could bring up. There was there were no lab notes to show what

had happened or the procedure that's Workin used. Uh. So, ultimately they could not prove that the nineteen twenty three version of what Zorkin was saying would ever work, and that Farnsworth's idea seemed to be the first one to actually be viable. So ultimately the Patent Office decided in favor of Farnsworth. He won. They are c a could not get around the fact that Farnsworth had a patented idea that they would have to license if they wanted

to make televisions. Now, by that time, Farnsworth himself was pretty sick of the whole thing, and sick as the operative word. He had bleeding ulcers and uh, you know, the stress had really gotten to him over the course of several years. Uh. David Sarnop once joked that they must have spent about fifty million dollars. Our ci A must have spent fifty million dollars in this lawsuit just to get around licensing fees and to secure them for themselves.

Um brutal. Right, But things were starting to look up for Farnsworth. The television era was poised to take off, and then a little thing called World War Two happened. Where World War Two obviously changed everything. Priorities changed dramatically. Once the United States entered into the war. The US government suspended consumer electronics manufacturing and rededicated all those assets

to wartime production. So Farnsworth, who was now free and clear to pursue these working relationships with various television companies and to get licensing fees, suddenly found himself without any customers. Because consumer electronics was shut down while World War Two was going on. When the war ended, Farnsworth had a little more than a year before his patents expired. Because patents don't last forever. Once they expire, that information is

public domain. Anyone can invent anything based off a patent that has expired and not have not be expected to pay licensing fees, assuming that you haven't infringed upon some other patent with your new invention. But yeah, that meant that once those patents expired, anyone can make an electronic television based on Farnsworth's approach and not have to pay

Farnsworth a penny. He never made the money he should have off of his invention, and in fact, when his patents expired in nine there were only about six thousand television sets in the entire United States. Just a few years later that would number in the millions. So they were we were literally on the precipice of the electronic television age when Farnsworth's patents expired, and he wasn't able

to become insanely wealthy off of his ideas. Other people became insanely wealthy off of his ideas, but he was not able to do that he didn't. He didn't just give up. He actually went on to work in another you know, boring, normal job, nuclear fusion. Yeah, Farnsworth, the TV guy went on to work in nuclear fusion. Now, his work would not lead to a viable nuclear fusion power solution. If it did, our world would be totally different. Right now, we're still trying to develop nuclear fusion power

that is sustainable. We've seen some promising early experiments, but nothing that's truly a sustainable nuclear fusion power plant. But farns worth work actually meant that we were able to create neutrons using his approach, so that was very important for other scientific work and experiments. So he still made some very significant contributions, even though his patents had expired and he wasn't able to really profit off of them

the way he should have. As for our CIA and Starnoff, they continue to throw their weight around, or at least attempt to. Uh. The late nineteen forties saw companies like our ci A start to look into ways to incorporate color in television broadcast. And this is still at the very beginning of TV, so black and white was still, you know, very important, but they were they already thinking ahead,

how can we incorporate color into this? But there were actually other companies that were also looking at incorporating color into television broadcasts. And our CIA had made a huge amount of money by defining the standards for radio, so what they wanted to do was do the same thing but for color TV. If they made their fortune by creating a standard in one format, why not do the same thing for another format, similar to what they were trying to do with just basic television when they tried

to undermine Farnsworth's work. So to that end, Starnoff decided to sue a major competitor to our CIA. That would be uh CBS. CBS was working on color television at the same time. CBS, by the way, was the one major broadcast company that r c A did not have a hand in create ing. Now, the lawsuit went all the way up to the Supreme Court, and our c

A once again found itself on the losing side. The Supreme Court sided with CBS, saying that the company could continue to create its competing standard, So our CIA was free to continue working on their standard. CBS was free to work on their standard. This didn't define the standard because The Supreme Court had nothing to do with that. They were just deciding whether or not CBS would be allowed to pursue this, and they said yes. So our c A was not able to cut it off there.

But Sarnav had another trick up a sleeve. He had his research and development over at our CIA working on developing a superior color technology UH for television that would be better than cbs is approach, but more importantly, would be backwards compatible for old r C A black and white television sets, which meant if you owned an r C A black and white television set and you were tuning into an r C A color broadcast, you could

still watch it. Now, it wouldn't be in color, because nothing's magically going to turn a black and white TV into a color TV, but you could actually watch what was going on. It would just be in black and white. The CBS approach, however, was not backwards compatible. If you wanted to watch a CBS color broadcast using an old black and white r C A set, you actually had to go out and buy a hundred dollar adapter, and a hundred dollars was a huge amount of money back then,

still pretty hefty sum. If you just want an adapter for your television and uh and they so r c A was saying that, well, by making back ours backwards compatible, it's more attractive, right, Like, not everyone has a color set, and when color sets hit the market, they're going to be incredibly expensive. Most people are gonna stick with their black and white sets. So if we make a color broadcast strategy that works even with older black and white sets,

we have an advantage. And they also had already he did the market with thousands millions of black and white r c A sets, so they knew that the customer base was going to be on their side. So even if you were to argue that cbs IS approach would be superior or cheaper or faster to market, the fact that it didn't have that backwards capability was what held

it back. And sure enough it ended up working. The f c C and the National Television Standards Committee decided to go with our CIA's standard instead of cbs IS standard to be the industry standard. And this was still years before anyone had really got into color TV manufacturing. Uh, it was all part of the long game. But Starnov could see where things were going, and he said we got to get ahead of it so that we're the

ones who defined the standard. That's how we make the money because our c A gets paid the licensing fees. By night. R c A standard was the way to go, and the company collected licensing fees, but the Justice Department made sure that our c A stuck to what was defined as reasonable prices. So that meant that they couldn't do the same thing they had done back in the radio days, but they still were collecting lots of licensing fees, so it was great for the company. Now, both Starnoff

and Farnsworth passed away in nineteen seventy one. Z Workin actually outlived both of them. He would pass away in ninety two in Princeton, New Jersey. And that's the story of the first electronic televisions. But there's still more to talk about. I mentioned color TVs, but how the heck do they work? So I'm gonna wrap up this episode with a quick lesson on color TVs, and the next episode we'll look at developments and television like l C D S, l e D S, plasma screens, high dynamic range,

and more. But first let's talk about color TVs. So the first color TVs which we're using. The CBS method. Hearken back to those mechanical television set days. In fact, CBS color TVs had a mechanical element to them. They had a color wheel. So similar to what John Logie Baird, the Scottish inventor who worked on mechanical television sets UH twenty years earlier, what he had been doing. He had been using a color wheel to create color television. Well,

CBS wanted to do the same thing. So a cathode ray tube would be between the wheel and the screen and that would provide the stream of electrons spinning the wheel would allow you to get whatever color you needed for that particular pixel. And because the wheel could spend quite fast, and because our brains will merge different colors into new color all on its own, the speed of

transmission is what did all the work. Our brains just would assimilate the information we had to see a color that was represented by lots of individual colors being presented to us very rapid within the span of a second. So in other words, you can get red, green, or blue because that's what the color wheel had. Those were

the primary colors on the color wheel. But if you wanted to get purple, then what you're getting is a series of red and blue pixels that are presented so fast that our brain just ends up combining those into a purple pixel. It's super cool. So I love this because it again depends upon the limitations of the human brain to make the technology work. And uh, it really makes me appreciate both the amazing work of the technology and also how weird humans are. And I include myself

there along with you human. So you've got this this super fast method of presenting colors that end up sort of bleeding into one another to represent whatever the actual color needs to be for the picture. Um, and it was really nifty, but the mechanical approach didn't end up becoming the standard. Again, that was not compatible with the old black and white television sets. So instead our c A went with an electrical standpoint and used colorful phosphors.

So the stuff that fluoresces on the back of your television screen, so when you're looking at the front of the television screen, the opposite side has that phosphorus cover coating on it. Well, it would have colorful phosphors, not just ones that would shine white or gray. Depending upon the amount of electric or the energy of the electron

hitting it. So a color CRT television has three electron beams, not just one, and those beams are called red, green, and blue, although the beams themselves don't have any color to them because they're electrons, but they're dedicated to red, green, and blue phosphors. Uh, the screen itself would have red, green, and blue phosphers that would be arranged as dots or line on the back of the screen. And each pixel has three phosphors right as each pixel has a red component,

a green component, and a blue component. And between the phosphorus coding and the electron beams was a little mesh screen. It was actually called the shadow mask, and the holes in the shadow mask match up with the phosphorus dots

or stripes depending upon the actual model of TV. So color TV signals are really similar to black and white TV signals, but in addition to intensity, it includes a component called a chrominance signal, and this involves superimposing a special sign wave over the top of the black and white television signal. And what kind of special sign wave? I hear you ask pipe down? Nobody asked you. But if you really have to know it's a three point five seven nine five four five mega hurt sign wave.

Are you happy? No? Sor right? Neither am I? Anyway? The chrominance signal indicates which color to display based on a phase shift. So if you're looking at a sine wave on a graph, a phase shift is shifting it to the left or to the right, so it's out

of phase with its original position. So a shift of a degrees would indicate blue, a shift of just fifteen degrees would be yellow, and shifting it would tell I'm using air quotes the electron beams which color it needed to represent, So that shift would give the the electron beams the information necessary to replicate whatever color you were

looking for. And this would give the electron beams the ability ability to scan those phosphors in the correct order, the correct frequency to generate the color necessary for you to perceive it on the screen itself. And again, that rapid succession of lines on display and the colors would eate that illusion in our minds that we're watching a

color moving image on a screen. It's really kind of incredible that just by using red, green, and blue, you could replicate all sorts of colors just depending upon the amount of time they're on screen and the frequency that you switch back and forth between those three, and that that's all you need to create all the different colors that we can perceive. Now. The first color television set was made by Westinghouse and it cost a whopping one thousand,

two hundred dollars in March nineteen fifty four. If you want to adjust that for inflation, which I did, it comes out to almost twelve thousand dollars in today's money, which it's pretty expensive. And here's a shocking fact. They put out a full page ad in the New York Times that sixty New York stores were carrying those sets, and they sold zero of them from those stores. Now, eventually they were able to move about thirty sets. I think they produced about five hundred total in that first run.

But I guess the only people who were capable of buying them were colors starved millionaires. Everyone else couldn't really afford such a thing, so they eventually slashed their prices down to an affordable one dollars, still a princely some, as Chris Palette and I would used to say, most of those sets that Westinghouse made were never sold there. There was hardly anything to watch in color. Back in

nineteen fifty four. There were very few color broadcasts and it was just so darned expensive, and it also would break down fairly easily, so uh never really took off at that time. Color television sales were actually really slow until about the mid nineteen fifties. Um all the way up into the nineteen sixties, it was just not a whole lot to move them. But then the combination of lower prices and more programming started to create a bit

of a demand in the early sixties. Oh. One of the companies that was instrumental in color television taking off in the United States was Disney. In nine, Disney began to broadcast The Wonderful World of Color, which was essentially an advertisement to go out and buy color televisions when you get down to it, because you couldn't really enjoy

the color broadcast without one. I actually remember watching an episode of The Wonderful World of Color where Professor Von Drake explained how color television was so much better than black and white TV, and did so in a song called the Spectrum Song. And if you've never heard the spectrum song. You need to look that up because it's amazing. I will not sing it now. Keep in mind I'm talking about a show I saw as a rerun because I'm not that old. I wasn't born in the sixties.

Stop looking at me that way now. The first year to see color television sales outpaced black and white TV sa als wasn't until nineteen seventy. So while everyone was fighting over the color television standards in the late forties and early fifties, it wasn't until nineteen seventy the color TVs were actually out selling black and white televisions. The technology had been around for more than fifteen years before

it began to overtake the old black and white sets. Now, I want you guys to remember that when I talk about h d TV in the future episode, because it's a very different story. Some people were thinking, like, how long was HDTV around before people started actually using it? Not as long as we went from color from black and white to color rather, But for now it is

time to sign off. In the next episode, I'll talk more about the display technologies that competed with CRT systems and how they work, as well as chat about stuff like flat screen TVs or HDR televisions or two K and eight K t vs and more. But if you guys have any questions or comments and you suggest is for future episodes or people I should have on this show, please let me know. You can email me. The email address for the show is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line

on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for the show at both those locations is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com