An animated gray peacock unfolds its tail feathers to a musical flourish.
This is what the vast majority of us saw and heard before some KHQ Channel 6 NBC network shows beginning in the Fall season of 1957. NBC had begun to broadcast a color TV signal that was compatible with black-and-white television sets. This heralded a gradual move to viewing color TV in homes that could afford the profoundly expensive round-screen sets manufactured by NBC’s manufacturing arm, RCA.
A color signal that was compatible with monochrome sets was crucial, or color TV would not get off the ground. This also served to remind us members of the masses that we were missing something grand by seeing shows through dumbed-down gray blinders. I really really wanted to see a color program in living color.
That summer of 1957, industry interests staged a public showing in the Spokane Civic Center. Bob Parry and I sat in the auditorium and watched a dreadful Technicolor murder mystery drama on three round-screen RCA sets before us at the front of the room. This only made me want more.
I studied how color TV worked. By my senior year in 1960, I’d had some success in the Inland Empire Science Fair (NOT the Inland Northwest, by the way). I decided to make a rudimentary color TV science fair project. In some ways color is three times the job of displaying monochrome because three colors are mixed instead of using a single color.
I looked for a way to reduce the complexity. I found a journal article about The Edwin Land Two-Color System. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-color_system. This system proposed the mixture of only two primary colors to produce the entire suite of subjective colors. It depended upon a human physiology phenomenon.
I rigged two picture tubes at a 90 degree angle to one-another. A half-silvered mirror at the 45 degree point mixed the pictures into one picture. One tube had green cellophane covering it while the other had red cellophane. I drove each from a separate receiver chassis. I built a circuit that could decode the brightness of a chosen color from a color TV signal. Each receiver had one of these circuits, one set to decode red for the red tube, the other set to decode green for the green tube. I found that, in the presence of a color signal, I would see a color program – a dark, washed-out color program. Good enough for me. It was a proof-of-concept. Trouble is, how could I guarantee that the judges would see it when NBC chose to broadcast a color signal, and what if reception was terrible? I couldn’t mount a TV antenna on the roof of Rogers or at Shadle Park, the Inland Empire venue.
Because the project was more about the Land Two-Color System than color TV, I made a parallel demo that used two slide projectors using a red and green filter, respectively. I used black-and-white film to take pairs of still-life pictures through red and green filters. When the two projectors projected one of these pairs through filters, I got a washed-out rendition of the original still-life.
I entered the Rogers Science Fair and the Inland Empire Science Fair with a huge cabinet that contained the TV lash-up, the slide gadget, and an explanation of the Land Two-Color System. For the first time, in four years, I won zilch. Nada. Nothing, but it was a good experience.
The judges didn’t understand the project. You probably don’t get much out of reading about it either! Selfishly, I got a great recorded memory. The 1960 Treasure Chest annual shows Bob Parry, Mr. Carroll, and I, standing beside the exhibit in the rear of a wide-angle shot of the Rogers Science Fair held in the old gymnasium. That picture is my long-run award.
-Ed Mauget