When were color movies first shown in cinemas in America?

Answer 1

The year was 1946. World War II had just ended, and Americans were impatient, eager to catch up on all they had missed during the war years. Black and white television had made its debut in 1939, shortly before the war began. Engineered in RCA Labs on Route 1, and manufactured by RCA Victor in Camden, the first sets "went over like a lead balloon," says Alex Magoun, director of the Sarnoff library. Carrying price tags of $200 to $1,000, the sets were wildly expensive, and there was little in the way of programming for them to receive. Americans were still enjoying the novelty of radio in their homes, and a good tabletop radio could be had for $10. After the war, though, the idea of "adding sight to sound," as David Sarnoff, chairman of RCA put it, began to sound appealing. Production of all kinds of consumer goods, including electronics, had been curtailed during the war, and there was tremendous pent-up demand. Magoun says CBS, an RCA rival, boldly announced to a war-weary nation: "`Let's leapfrog. Let's go straight to color!'" This was not to be. Not right away. A final standard for color television was not approved by the FCC until 1953, and for many years thereafter only a few programs were broadcast in color. Throughout the 1950s any color program was a big deal, and it was not until 1966 that NBC became the first 100 percent color network. As with any invention, there were alternate development branches and missteps a plenty. It is difficult to fix the exact date when color television was born, but Magoun says late-fall 1951 is as good a date as any. The IEEE is presenting a Milestone award to Sarnoff, successor to RCA, to honor this accomplishment. Ninety-five percent of the standard for broadcasting and receiving color television signals originated with RCA. Beyond contributing substantially to the development of color television technology, divisions of the company, under the leadership of David Sarnoff, also made the sets and produced programs to fill their screens. Magoun speaks on the history of color television at an event titled "Adding Sight to Sound: Television's Past, Present, and Future" on the Sarnoff corporate campus on Route 1 on Thursday, November 15, at 8 p.m. Glenn Reitmeier, a Sarnoff vice president and architect of HDTV, the next generation of television, which also was developed at Sarnoff, speaks on where television will go next. Dick Webb, who invented the color television camera, was set to add his insights. Now retired, and living in Estes Park, Colorado, Webb has decided against an in-person appearance. "He said there is just too much stuff going on in New Jersey. He doesn't feel safe coming here," Magoun says. But he is hoping Webb will be able to join the gathering via a remote hook-up. The event is sponsored by the ACM/IEEE Computer Society and the public is invited. Call 908-582-7086. The first design for color television, the one that came from CBS, then a radio network and owner of the Columbia record label, was mechanical. Based on a system invented by Englishman John Logie Baird in 1928, it was developed by CBS's Peter Goldmark in 1940. A spiraling, perforated wheel was at the heart of this early color television. A camera scanned images as the revolving color wheel spun in front of it. It then transmitted three fields -- red, blue, and green, the primary optical colors -- in sequence. At the receiver end a second color wheel, synchronized with the first, reconstructed the image. "The colors were great," says Magoun of a positive attribute of this system, which is called field sequential. But the image was far from perfect. "The problems of the CBS, or any color field sequential image, are inherent in the trade-offs," he explains. Each primary color in a frame or displayed image (30 frames per second in television; 24 frames per second in movies) has to be scanned in at the same time as one monochrome frame. Therefore the eye sees each successive color for only one-third of the time. This results is flicker when something like a runner, or a car, or a basketball moves across successive frames. Reducing the brightness of the screen decreased the flicker, but resulted in an image that had to be watched in a dark room. RCA researchers, replicating CBS's mechanical color television in their own labs, discovered its limitations for themselves. Television sets built around it would need to contain a wheel with red, green, and blue color filters, and would need to be very large -- three times the displayed image, or a three-foot wheel for a 12-inch display, plus the motor to drive the wheel. RCA researchers also considered mechanical color television to be a step backwards. "They already had an electronic black and white television," says Magoun. "They said, `if it's going to be color, it should be electronic." Another reason RCA was against adopting CBS's mechanical system was economical. The company had just spent a great deal of money developing black and white television, and didn't want to see that investment go for naught. Vladimir Zworykin had applied for a patent on an electronic television system in 1923. His iconoscope television camera -- made of clear glass, and looking something like a cross between a drum and a medium-size saucepan -- is on display at the Sarnoff technical library. Along with his kinescope, a specialized cathode-ray tube, it made electronic black and white television practical and marketable. His portrait hangs in the library, not far from a portrait of David Sarnoff. Zworykin persuaded Sarnoff that he could develop an electronic color television in two years for $150,000. It took much longer, and the final cost was something like $65 million, but Sarnoff, a determined visionary, hung on, even when every other network and manufacturer gave up on color television. Sarnoff's RCA, which he had joined as a young man and rose to lead, made a commitment to electronic color television, and prepared to take its case to the FCC, which held the power to decide what standard would be adopted. In the fall of 1949, there were "color shoot outs," says Magoun of hearings before the FCC. He characterizes CBS's impatience to get on with it: "`Look, look,' CBS was saying, `We have color. It's here now.'" But CBS's color television was found to be too flickery, Magoun says. What's more, its bulky system did not fit into the 13, 6-MHz VHF channels that carried black and white television. CBS thought it could solve that problem by using UHF channels, which had just been made available. UHF, says Magoun, allows for wider channels, but produces a picture that is significantly inferior to that transmitted via VHF channels. Despite its flaws, and despite the fact that it was not compatible with black and white television, CBS's color television technology was declared the national standard by the FCC in October of 1950. RCA sued the FCC to halt the start of CBS colorcasts. CBS eventually prevailed in court in late-May 1951. But while CBS had won the battle, RCA's delaying tactic had won it the war. CBS began color programming on a five-station East Coast network in June of 1951. But black and white televisions could not receive the programs. This would not have been a major obstacle for CBS in 1950, when few homes had a television of any kind, but by the time the first color programs were cleared for broadcast, 10.5 million black and white televisions had been sold, about half of them by RCA. Consumers were not about to buy a separate television to receive the few color programs available, and so few were sold. Meanwhile, RCA was working at refining its own color television system. Called triniscope, it was a dot sequential system, as opposed to CBS's field sequential system, and was developed from 1946 to 1949. It used three cathode-ray tubes, or CRTs, to project each of the primary colors. This color system used a set of mirrors to combine the colors into one image reflected off another mirror. Not practical for the average living room, a triniscope television set, says Magoun, would have had to be "the size of a laundry machine." "It was a `kluge,'" says Magoun. "That's what engineers call something that works, but isn't practical." As unwieldy as CBS's color system, the triniscope's color was even worse. The FCC declined to approve RCA's color system in 1946, and again in 1949. Soon thereafter, America became involved in the Korean War and the government banned the production of all color televisions. The delay gave RCA time to refine its system. RCA promised the FCC it would do away with the mirrors and come up with a color system that used just one tube. "In the winter of 1949," Sarnoff wrote a blank check," says Magoun. "He told everyone in the labs to put on their thinking caps." Working 18 hours a day under RCA's Harold Laws, researchers came up with 16 different proposals. The possibilities were narrowed to five, and then to just one. Alfred Schroeder, a retired RCA researcher, now living in Newtown, Pennsylvania, had applied for a patent for a shadow mask CRT in 1947. "They decided to take another look at it," says Magoun. The researchers decided to go with Schroeder's idea. A shadow mask is a screen full of tiny perforations. This color system combined three separate electron guns, one for each color, in a single CRT. The electron guns shot through tiny holes in the shadow mask, each hitting dots of red, green, or blue phosphors. In early prototypes, there were 150,000 clumps of phosphors, each one containing all three primary colors. "Each gun had to hit the right phosphor," says Magoun. "It was a tremendous task of alignment. Everyone said it couldn't be done, but it worked." RCA's first shadow mask color televisions needed much more tuning than modern color televisions do, but in eliminating mirrors, multiple CRTs, and rotating wheels, the labs had come up with a design that would work in the home. As important, it added color information to the standard 6-MHz channel, so that existing black and white televisions could receive color signals. The $65-million race to produce a practical color television was a success. In December, 1953, the FCC approved RCA's color television format, and television sets meeting the new standard went on sale the following year. The first RCA color sets cost $995, according to Magoun. That would be the equivalent of $6,186 today. In 1954, it was enough to buy a car, and nearly enough to buy a modest house. The spread in price was similar to today's gap between the analog televisions most of us have and the newer digital televisions. The issue of programming is the same, too. "It's the chicken and egg thing," says Magoun. Even people who could afford the substantial premium for a color set had little incentive to buy one because there were few color programs. And producers had little incentive to spend extra money on color programming, because so few homes had color television. The same situation exists today with digital television. Despite all obstacles, Sarnoff forged ahead. A self-made man, he had emigrated from Russia to the Lower East Side of Manhattan with his family when he was nine. At the age of 15, he left school to help support his family. Working for the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company in 1912, he picked up a message relayed from ships at sea: "S.S. Titanic ran into iceberg, sinking fast." Rising quickly in Marconi, which became RCA after its U.S. assets were purchased by General Electric, Sarnoff proposed an idea for a "radio music box," for radio channels, and then for a radio network, which became NBC, an RCA subsidiary. He then turned his attention to television, and soon thereafter, to color television, and refused to give up. By the mid-1950s, every other company stopped manufacturing color televisions, and few produced color programming. But Sarnoff, losing some $65 million for RCA over a decade, persisted, despite the fact that he was angering the the board of directors. Finally, in 1964, the tide turned, and RCA began to profit handsomely from its investment in color television. The first commercial television program on color film was an episode of Dragnet that aired in December, 1953. It was followed by such milestones as a live telecast of the Tournament of Roses parade the following month, the first color broadcast of a president (Dwight Eisenhower in June, 1955), the first color coverage of the World Series (Dodgers vs. Yankees in September, 1955), and the first colorcast cartoons (the Flintstones and the Jetsons in fall, 1962). The premier of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color in September, 1961, was a turning point, persuading consumers to go out and purchase color televisions. But it was not until 1966 that NBC became the first network to show the color we all now take for granted on all of its programs. It had taken 25 years from color television to go from its earliest prototypes to mass acceptance. This, Magoun says, is about the time every new technology takes to really catch on. He points out that radio was used for ship-to-shore communications for more than two decades before it achieved broad penetration in American homes. The personal computer, available since 1975, is now only in about 60 percent of households. Magoun, who has been director of the David Sarnoff library for a little over a year, says so much of the communications and electronics technology we use every day came out of RCA labs. He is on a mission to preserve and display milestones in the development these technologies at the Sarnoff library. It was Sarnoff himself who oversaw the installation of the dark wood bookcases, fronted with glass, that run along its walls, and the large glass display cases in the middle of the room. Sarnoff, who died in 1971 at the age of 80, studied presidential libraries before designing his own. "He spent the last 20 years of his life collecting awards," Magoun says of RCA's leader. It is those awards -- bronze medals, citations, and an impressive sterling silver model of a sailing ship -- that fill the library. Magoun, however, says that Sarnoff was much more than a sum of all the scrolls he collected and pictures of world leaders who honored him. "Sarnoff was innovation," says Magoun. The rare entrepreneur who appreciated, and listened to, engineers, Sarnoff took color television, and so much more, from the lab to practical use by consumers, hospitals, businesses, and the military. Magoun began to appreciate the man, and what he and his researchers accomplished, as he spent time in the library researching the history of the phonograph record for his dissertation. A student at the University of Maryland working on a Ph.D. in the history of technology, he did research one day a week in the library. As he worked, he spoke with Sarnoff staffers about his opinion that Sarnoff's library should showcase technology, not just the man's life, and should do so in a way that would engage scholars, school children, and the public. Putting forth a convincing argument, Magoun was hired, and has begun the job of integrating into the library lab notebooks, sketches, and inventions telling the story of how Sarnoff scientists have worked on the technologies that underlie so much of life in the 21st century. Among them is the world's oldest electron microscope. It sits seven feet tall and weighs 1,200 pounds. A photo above the microscope shows Zworykin working with Jim Hillier, inventor of the microscope who went on to become RCA's vice president of research and winner of the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. He is also father of Bob Hillier, founder of the Hillier Group architectural firm. "Zworykin hired Hillier and provided protection from RCA's beancounters in stimulating creation of what could be called the medical electronics industry," says Magoun. Also on display, sitting atop a case of Sarnoff's medals, is one of the earliest optical recording disks. Developed by Bob Bartolini in the 1970s to early-1980s, it is the precursor of the re-writable CD. Bartolini is now Sarnoff's vice president of international business. Another new exhibit at the library is the science notebook Steven Hofstein used in working on the MOS transistor. This metal-oxide semiconductor field effect transistor is the basis for every computer and electronic device. "It was a significant breakthrough in the early-1960s," says Magoun. Fleshing out the library's displays a little at a time, Magoun speaks of his desire to have more exhibits that would illustrate the progression of Sarnoff's work. "It would be great to have a line of televisions from the '30s, and the '40s, and right on through, all showing Seinfeld," he gives as an example. This, he says, would be an engaging way of getting visitors to ask questions, and make comparisons. Magoun, a 1981 graduate of Trinity College, studied history there, and went on to earn a master's in history at the University of East Anglia. One of four brothers, he grew up in Manchester, Massachusetts, "between the Perfect Storm and the Salem witches." His mother, Faith, worked her way up from volunteer to director of the Lynn, Massachusetts, historical society. That was not an easy task in the 1970s, Magoun says. His father, Frank, became a bond trader after studying history in college, and being talked out of a career as a professor by his father, a Harvard professor who thought the profession did not pay enough. Magoun wonders if his father would have been happier as a professor, yet he himself ran into frustrating barriers on a college campus. After earning his master's degree, he returned to Trinity to coach track and cross country. As an undergraduate, he had set the school's 5K record -- 14.40.97, which has yet to be beaten. He enjoyed coaching, but he was a part-time coach, and as such had to coach six teams, while full-time coaches had to coach only two. When the college would not make the track coaching position full time, he felt he had to leave. Magoun is settling into Princeton. Many of his first friends are members of the Princeton Hash House Harriers. He explains that hashing is an extreme form of cross country running where one runner marks a course in varied, and difficult terrain -- behind shopping centers, across brooks, through back alleys -- and the others try to find their way through it. Now the hashers are in trouble in a number of states. The reason? Says Magoun: "You have to mark the trail with something. You want something biodegradable. What do you use?" Ah, of course, flour! The substance works beautifully, but police in at least four states have had to respond to alarmed residents, who came upon the stuff and suspected it to be anthrax. Investigating costs a fair amount of money, and peeved police departments have started sending the hashers the bills. Following chalk-marked trails, Magoun continues to run on Sundays with the Princeton Hash House Harriers. It is one of his few leisure activities as he spends 10 to 12 hours a day at the David Sarnoff library and working on a website for it. One thing he does not do on his time off is watch television. As Magoun prepares to mark color television's 50th anniversary, he notes that the sets are as ubiquitous in American homes as are faucets. But he does not own one. "After I come home," he says, "the last thing I want to do is look at a screen." Even if it displays all of its programs in living color. --Kathleen McGinn Spring The year was 1946. World War II had just ended, and Americans were impatient, eager to catch up on all they had missed during the war years. Black and white television had made its debut in 1939, shortly before the war began. Engineered in RCA Labs on Route 1, and manufactured by RCA Victor in Camden, the first sets "went over like a lead balloon," says Alex Magoun, director of the Sarnoff library. Carrying price tags of $200 to $1,000, the sets were wildly expensive, and there was little in the way of programming for them to receive. Americans were still enjoying the novelty of radio in their homes, and a good tabletop radio could be had for $10. After the war, though, the idea of "adding sight to sound," as David Sarnoff, chairman of RCA put it, began to sound appealing. Production of all kinds of consumer goods, including electronics, had been curtailed during the war, and there was tremendous pent-up demand. Magoun says CBS, an RCA rival, boldly announced to a war-weary nation: "`Let's leapfrog. Let's go straight to color!'" This was not to be. Not right away. A final standard for color television was not approved by the FCC until 1953, and for many years thereafter only a few programs were broadcast in color. Throughout the 1950s any color program was a big deal, and it was not until 1966 that NBC became the first 100 percent color network. As with any invention, there were alternate development branches and missteps a plenty. It is difficult to fix the exact date when color television was born, but Magoun says late-fall 1951 is as good a date as any. The IEEE is presenting a Milestone award to Sarnoff, successor to RCA, to honor this accomplishment. Ninety-five percent of the standard for broadcasting and receiving color television signals originated with RCA. Beyond contributing substantially to the development of color television technology, divisions of the company, under the leadership of David Sarnoff, also made the sets and produced programs to fill their screens. Magoun speaks on the history of color television at an event titled "Adding Sight to Sound: Television's Past, Present, and Future" on the Sarnoff corporate campus on Route 1 on Thursday, November 15, at 8 p.m. Glenn Reitmeier, a Sarnoff vice president and architect of HDTV, the next generation of television, which also was developed at Sarnoff, speaks on where television will go next. Dick Webb, who invented the color television camera, was set to add his insights. Now retired, and living in Estes Park, Colorado, Webb has decided against an in-person appearance. "He said there is just too much stuff going on in New Jersey. He doesn't feel safe coming here," Magoun says. But he is hoping Webb will be able to join the gathering via a remote hook-up. The event is sponsored by the ACM/IEEE Computer Society and the public is invited. Call 908-582-7086. The first design for color television, the one that came from CBS, then a radio network and owner of the Columbia record label, was mechanical. Based on a system invented by Englishman John Logie Baird in 1928, it was developed by CBS's Peter Goldmark in 1940. A spiraling, perforated wheel was at the heart of this early color television. A camera scanned images as the revolving color wheel spun in front of it. It then transmitted three fields -- red, blue, and green, the primary optical colors -- in sequence. At the receiver end a second color wheel, synchronized with the first, reconstructed the image. "The colors were great," says Magoun of a positive attribute of this system, which is called field sequential. But the image was far from perfect. "The problems of the CBS, or any color field sequential image, are inherent in the trade-offs," he explains. Each primary color in a frame or displayed image (30 frames per second in television; 24 frames per second in movies) has to be scanned in at the same time as one monochrome frame. Therefore the eye sees each successive color for only one-third of the time. This results is flicker when something like a runner, or a car, or a basketball moves across successive frames. Reducing the brightness of the screen decreased the flicker, but resulted in an image that had to be watched in a dark room. RCA researchers, replicating CBS's mechanical color television in their own labs, discovered its limitations for themselves. Television sets built around it would need to contain a wheel with red, green, and blue color filters, and would need to be very large -- three times the displayed image, or a three-foot wheel for a 12-inch display, plus the motor to drive the wheel. RCA researchers also considered mechanical color television to be a step backwards. "They already had an electronic black and white television," says Magoun. "They said, `if it's going to be color, it should be electronic." Another reason RCA was against adopting CBS's mechanical system was economical. The company had just spent a great deal of money developing black and white television, and didn't want to see that investment go for naught. Vladimir Zworykin had applied for a patent on an electronic television system in 1923. His iconoscope television camera -- made of clear glass, and looking something like a cross between a drum and a medium-size saucepan -- is on display at the Sarnoff technical library. Along with his kinescope, a specialized cathode-ray tube, it made electronic black and white television practical and marketable. His portrait hangs in the library, not far from a portrait of David Sarnoff. Zworykin persuaded Sarnoff that he could develop an electronic color television in two years for $150,000. It took much longer, and the final cost was something like $65 million, but Sarnoff, a determined visionary, hung on, even when every other network and manufacturer gave up on color television. Sarnoff's RCA, which he had joined as a young man and rose to lead, made a commitment to electronic color television, and prepared to take its case to the FCC, which held the power to decide what standard would be adopted. In the fall of 1949, there were "color shoot outs," says Magoun of hearings before the FCC. He characterizes CBS's impatience to get on with it: "`Look, look,' CBS was saying, `We have color. It's here now.'" But CBS's color television was found to be too flickery, Magoun says. What's more, its bulky system did not fit into the 13, 6-MHz VHF channels that carried black and white television. CBS thought it could solve that problem by using UHF channels, which had just been made available. UHF, says Magoun, allows for wider channels, but produces a picture that is significantly inferior to that transmitted via VHF channels. Despite its flaws, and despite the fact that it was not compatible with black and white television, CBS's color television technology was declared the national standard by the FCC in October of 1950. RCA sued the FCC to halt the start of CBS colorcasts. CBS eventually prevailed in court in late-May 1951. But while CBS had won the battle, RCA's delaying tactic had won it the war. CBS began color programming on a five-station East Coast network in June of 1951. But black and white televisions could not receive the programs. This would not have been a major obstacle for CBS in 1950, when few homes had a television of any kind, but by the time the first color programs were cleared for broadcast, 10.5 million black and white televisions had been sold, about half of them by RCA. Consumers were not about to buy a separate television to receive the few color programs available, and so few were sold. Meanwhile, RCA was working at refining its own color television system. Called triniscope, it was a dot sequential system, as opposed to CBS's field sequential system, and was developed from 1946 to 1949. It used three cathode-ray tubes, or CRTs, to project each of the primary colors. This color system used a set of mirrors to combine the colors into one image reflected off another mirror. Not practical for the average living room, a triniscope television set, says Magoun, would have had to be "the size of a laundry machine." "It was a `kluge,'" says Magoun. "That's what engineers call something that works, but isn't practical." As unwieldy as CBS's color system, the triniscope's color was even worse. The FCC declined to approve RCA's color system in 1946, and again in 1949. Soon thereafter, America became involved in the Korean War and the government banned the production of all color televisions. The delay gave RCA time to refine its system. RCA promised the FCC it would do away with the mirrors and come up with a color system that used just one tube. "In the winter of 1949," Sarnoff wrote a blank check," says Magoun. "He told everyone in the labs to put on their thinking caps." Working 18 hours a day under RCA's Harold Laws, researchers came up with 16 different proposals. The possibilities were narrowed to five, and then to just one. Alfred Schroeder, a retired RCA researcher, now living in Newtown, Pennsylvania, had applied for a patent for a shadow mask CRT in 1947. "They decided to take another look at it," says Magoun. The researchers decided to go with Schroeder's idea. A shadow mask is a screen full of tiny perforations. This color system combined three separate electron guns, one for each color, in a single CRT. The electron guns shot through tiny holes in the shadow mask, each hitting dots of red, green, or blue phosphors. In early prototypes, there were 150,000 clumps of phosphors, each one containing all three primary colors. "Each gun had to hit the right phosphor," says Magoun. "It was a tremendous task of alignment. Everyone said it couldn't be done, but it worked." RCA's first shadow mask color televisions needed much more tuning than modern color televisions do, but in eliminating mirrors, multiple CRTs, and rotating wheels, the labs had come up with a design that would work in the home. As important, it added color information to the standard 6-MHz channel, so that existing black and white televisions could receive color signals. The $65-million race to produce a practical color television was a success. In December, 1953, the FCC approved RCA's color television format, and television sets meeting the new standard went on sale the following year. The first RCA color sets cost $995, according to Magoun. That would be the equivalent of $6,186 today. In 1954, it was enough to buy a car, and nearly enough to buy a modest house. The spread in price was similar to today's gap between the analog televisions most of us have and the newer digital televisions. The issue of programming is the same, too. "It's the chicken and egg thing," says Magoun. Even people who could afford the substantial premium for a color set had little incentive to buy one because there were few color programs. And producers had little incentive to spend extra money on color programming, because so few homes had color television. The same situation exists today with digital television. Despite all obstacles, Sarnoff forged ahead. A self-made man, he had emigrated from Russia to the Lower East Side of Manhattan with his family when he was nine. At the age of 15, he left school to help support his family. Working for the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company in 1912, he picked up a message relayed from ships at sea: "S.S. Titanic ran into iceberg, sinking fast." Rising quickly in Marconi, which became RCA after its U.S. assets were purchased by General Electric, Sarnoff proposed an idea for a "radio music box," for radio channels, and then for a radio network, which became NBC, an RCA subsidiary. He then turned his attention to television, and soon thereafter, to color television, and refused to give up. By the mid-1950s, every other company stopped manufacturing color televisions, and few produced color programming. But Sarnoff, losing some $65 million for RCA over a decade, persisted, despite the fact that he was angering the the board of directors. Finally, in 1964, the tide turned, and RCA began to profit handsomely from its investment in color television. The first commercial television program on color film was an episode of Dragnet that aired in December, 1953. It was followed by such milestones as a live telecast of the Tournament of Roses parade the following month, the first color broadcast of a president (Dwight Eisenhower in June, 1955), the first color coverage of the World Series (Dodgers vs. Yankees in September, 1955), and the first colorcast cartoons (the Flintstones and the Jetsons in fall, 1962). The premier of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color in September, 1961, was a turning point, persuading consumers to go out and purchase color televisions. But it was not until 1966 that NBC became the first network to show the color we all now take for granted on all of its programs. It had taken 25 years from color television to go from its earliest prototypes to mass acceptance. This, Magoun says, is about the time every new technology takes to really catch on. He points out that radio was used for ship-to-shore communications for more than two decades before it achieved broad penetration in American homes. The personal computer, available since 1975, is now only in about 60 percent of households. Magoun, who has been director of the David Sarnoff library for a little over a year, says so much of the communications and electronics technology we use every day came out of RCA labs. He is on a mission to preserve and display milestones in the development these technologies at the Sarnoff library. It was Sarnoff himself who oversaw the installation of the dark wood bookcases, fronted with glass, that run along its walls, and the large glass display cases in the middle of the room. Sarnoff, who died in 1971 at the age of 80, studied presidential libraries before designing his own. "He spent the last 20 years of his life collecting awards," Magoun says of RCA's leader. It is those awards -- bronze medals, citations, and an impressive sterling silver model of a sailing ship -- that fill the library. Magoun, however, says that Sarnoff was much more than a sum of all the scrolls he collected and pictures of world leaders who honored him. "Sarnoff was innovation," says Magoun. The rare entrepreneur who appreciated, and listened to, engineers, Sarnoff took color television, and so much more, from the lab to practical use by consumers, hospitals, businesses, and the military. Magoun began to appreciate the man, and what he and his researchers accomplished, as he spent time in the library researching the history of the phonograph record for his dissertation. A student at the University of Maryland working on a Ph.D. in the history of technology, he did research one day a week in the library. As he worked, he spoke with Sarnoff staffers about his opinion that Sarnoff's library should showcase technology, not just the man's life, and should do so in a way that would engage scholars, school children, and the public. Putting forth a convincing argument, Magoun was hired, and has begun the job of integrating into the library lab notebooks, sketches, and inventions telling the story of how Sarnoff scientists have worked on the technologies that underlie so much of life in the 21st century. Among them is the world's oldest electron microscope. It sits seven feet tall and weighs 1,200 pounds. A photo above the microscope shows Zworykin working with Jim Hillier, inventor of the microscope who went on to become RCA's vice president of research and winner of the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. He is also father of Bob Hillier, founder of the Hillier Group architectural firm. "Zworykin hired Hillier and provided protection from RCA's beancounters in stimulating creation of what could be called the medical electronics industry," says Magoun. Also on display, sitting atop a case of Sarnoff's medals, is one of the earliest optical recording disks. Developed by Bob Bartolini in the 1970s to early-1980s, it is the precursor of the re-writable CD. Bartolini is now Sarnoff's vice president of international business. Another new exhibit at the library is the science notebook Steven Hofstein used in working on the MOS transistor. This metal-oxide semiconductor field effect transistor is the basis for every computer and electronic device. "It was a significant breakthrough in the early-1960s," says Magoun. Fleshing out the library's displays a little at a time, Magoun speaks of his desire to have more exhibits that would illustrate the progression of Sarnoff's work. "It would be great to have a line of televisions from the '30s, and the '40s, and right on through, all showing Seinfeld," he gives as an example. This, he says, would be an engaging way of getting visitors to ask questions, and make comparisons. Magoun, a 1981 graduate of Trinity College, studied history there, and went on to earn a master's in history at the University of East Anglia. One of four brothers, he grew up in Manchester, Massachusetts, "between the Perfect Storm and the Salem witches." His mother, Faith, worked her way up from volunteer to director of the Lynn, Massachusetts, historical society. That was not an easy task in the 1970s, Magoun says. His father, Frank, became a bond trader after studying history in college, and being talked out of a career as a professor by his father, a Harvard professor who thought the profession did not pay enough. Magoun wonders if his father would have been happier as a professor, yet he himself ran into frustrating barriers on a college campus. After earning his master's degree, he returned to Trinity to coach track and cross country. As an undergraduate, he had set the school's 5K record -- 14.40.97, which has yet to be beaten. He enjoyed coaching, but he was a part-time coach, and as such had to coach six teams, while full-time coaches had to coach only two. When the college would not make the track coaching position full time, he felt he had to leave. Magoun is settling into Princeton. Many of his first friends are members of the Princeton Hash House Harriers. He explains that hashing is an extreme form of cross country running where one runner marks a course in varied, and difficult terrain -- behind shopping centers, across brooks, through back alleys -- and the others try to find their way through it. Now the hashers are in trouble in a number of states. The reason? Says Magoun: "You have to mark the trail with something. You want something biodegradable. What do you use?" Ah, of course, flour! The substance works beautifully, but police in at least four states have had to respond to alarmed residents, who came upon the stuff and suspected it to be anthrax. Investigating costs a fair amount of money, and peeved police departments have started sending the hashers the bills. Following chalk-marked trails, Magoun continues to run on Sundays with the Princeton Hash House Harriers. It is one of his few leisure activities as he spends 10 to 12 hours a day at the David Sarnoff library and working on a website for it. One thing he does not do on his time off is watch television. As Magoun prepares to mark color television's 50th anniversary, he notes that the sets are as ubiquitous in American homes as are faucets. But he does not own one. "After I come home," he says, "the last thing I want to do is look at a screen." Even if it displays all of its programs in living color. --Kathleen McGinn Spring

Answer 2

Color movies first shown in American movie theaters in 1908. Hollywood made its first film in color, called "The Toll of the Sea", in 1922.

Answer 3

According to American Film Society, the year was 1952.