When TV took off - in living color
9:33 PM 3/25/04

Not many noticed at the time, but a momentous event occurred 50 years ago this week: RCA began manufacturing color television sets at its plant in Bloomington, Ind. <

Barely three months earlier, on Jan. 4, 1954, the RCA-owned NBC network had aired its first nationwide color broadcast - "nationwide" being defined at the time as 21 cities (including Milwaukee) where TV stations had been equipped to broadcast color TV. The show was the Tournament of Roses parade from California, and the New York Times reported that across the country, "several thousand people" saw the broadcast, mostly in hotel lobbies and appliance dealers' showrooms. A year later, when NBC broadcast "Peter Pan" in color for the first time, the audience was estimated at 65 million - but most were still watching Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard in black-and-white. It wasn't until 1961, when Walt Disney began airing "The Wonderful World of Color," that color TV really took off. <

Today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 98.2 percent of U.S. households have at least one TV set, and the average household has 2.4 - almost all color TVs, of course. The average adult is projected to watch 1,669 hours - that's 70 days - of TV this year. <

RCA's 1954 "model CT-100 color receiver" had a 12-inch screen and cost $1,000, or about $6,500 in today's dollars. That's roughly the price of a state-of-the-art 70-inch flat-screen HDTV today. Of course, back in 1954, few people other than science fiction writers could even imagine a 70-inch TV screen. The New York Times' Jack Gould noted that it was necessary to sit further away from a 12-inch TV in order to appreciate a color image than it was with black-and-white, and fretted that if color TVs became widespread, viewers would be forced to rearrange their furniture. Perhaps that's the reason the average U.S. home has doubled in size in the past 50 years: We have to sit further away from all those big-screen color TVs dotting our interior landscapes. <

No doubt some blame TV - color or black-and-white - for most of the ills affecting modern society. But the rest of us should raise a toast - bright purple grape juice perhaps? - to the wonderful world of color that debuted 50 years ago this week. And maybe tune in an old black-and-white show on the TV Land channel just for old times' sake.