Posted on 11/05/2010 9:50:59 AM PDT by Callahan
This is sample footage of the earliest surviving colour videotape recording which is the Dwight Eisenhower inaugural address to WRC-TV on 22nd May 1958. The first 15 minutes of this event was shot in B&W which you see the president arriving to the building and the news reporter giving details of the event, then about nearly 15 minutes in Robert Sarnoff hits the colour switch and on comes the colour. For the remaining 15 minutes Robert Sarnoff, Dwight Eisenhower and David Sarnoff speak about the station and the colour television technology while being recorded in living colour!!! The whole program is available for download in DVD quality from a user on Veoh right here http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/cat... . In the sample I've included the B&W portion where the president arrives and the colour portion which Robert Sarnoff and Dwight Eisenhower speak.
USA started broadcasting colour in late 1953 and colour TV sets were available to the public in 1954 at an expensive price. Colour videotaping began in USA in 1958 and this footage is the earliest known to exist and it has been successfully transferred to digital for preservation. It is totally awesome to know that some colour programs from the late 1950s have survived on colour videotape as they show to us younger generations how good colour television really was back in its earliest days!!! Those RCA TK-41 cameras gave brilliant pictures back in the day!!!
It's interesting how seeing the past brought closer to life humanizes history for people who were not alive then. You realize that, as much as things have changed, our ancestors were just as alive as we are today.
The intro says this was NOT the first color broadcast that occurred in 1953, but it was the first color broadcast to be recorded on videotape. Meaning it is the earliest color broadcast you will ever see, because there was no way to make a record of the earlier ones.
Thanks I realize that after I posted but was too lazy to correct. Any old timers care to recall the first time they saw color broadcast?
"So Obama wasn't the first colored president of the US?"
"No teleprompter?"
A lot of us were around in those days, before 1958, Sonny. Not that we had color TV receivers. They were very up market. My family didn't get one until roughly 1970. I recall early tube-based color receivers didn't work very well. The color was off.
Look at how quickly technology changed a mere ten years after this broacast.
Video tape was slow to be accepted in television because of the expense involved in mobil recording.
As a kid, my Mom was in the audience for a Howdy Doody broadcast back in the day so she at least saw that in color once. My Dad had a pretty well-to-do uncle and he told me they always visited his place to see the cool new stuff. This guy had a color tv very early on and also bought the new T-bird every year.
*Bump* to watch the video later.
I can’t wait to tell my kids stories about the days when you had to dial in for an internet connection and TV wasn’t even HD much less 3D.
Thanks for that. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen Ike in color. Got my first color TV around 1976.
You would have to pound the TV when it went haywire, and then it would go back to color again, must have been a lose tube or something.
It really wasn’t that long ago in the grand scheme of things was it?
Man I would love to be able to travel through time backwards and forwards. Where’s Doc Brown when you need him?
My Dad had an Army buddy who lived on Long Island and we visited once in a while. I remember seeing Mutual of Omaha’s Animal Kingdom at his house, around 1960. My impression was that skin tones weren’t very true to life. My grandmother probably had a color set, but I don’t recall watching TV much before 1957. (I was born in 1950.) The first time I saw TV, some people down the street had a used set, about the size of small refigerator with a 5” screen and blurry B&W images. Still, it seemed like a miracle. He soon got a nice B&W set with about a 19” screen around 1957. I do remember Howdy Doody, for sure.
My family’s first color set was a Sony Trinitron around 1970, and it worked flawlessly. Kids today don’t understand vertical and horizontal hold. I bought my first TV in 1980 (!) at age 29 to watch NFL football. One of my first memories of it was hearing Howard Cosell announce John Lennon’s death on it on Monday Night Football.
I bought my next set in 2002, which was my first set with a remote control. I still own it. In fact, I’ve only purchased two television sets in life.
I am beginning to think it may be time to purchase a flat screen TV one of these days....
Our visual knowledge of history has always been seen through the filter of the media of that time. That’s why it’s fun to watch shows like Boardwalk Empire that really humanize history and make your realize everybody in the 1920’s didn’t walk fast and sound like a muffled record player. It’s only in the past 20 years that the ability to record audio and video became so ubiquitous that we will be able to look back at the lives of average people and see how they lived in amazing detail.
I remember getting a VCR in 1985 when I was in the 4th grade. I thought my folks were the last people on the planet to get one. The first movie we watched was Ghostbusters.
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