Archive Gallery: Now You Can Watch Television in Color!

To insiders, NTSC stood for Never The Same Color since there was no way to insure viewers saw what the studios intended them to see. Europeans got a better deal with PAL sets.

A real issue was that early sets used a large number of unreliable vacuum tubes. The typical color set owner would become very good at using the tube testing machine at the local electronics shop.

Another issue with early color sets was the ~35KV electron guns needed to get early screen phosphors to glow brightly enough knocked subatomic particles off the CRT color mask and into living rooms. These and the X-Rays produced could set off Geiger Counters producing news stories headlined "Your Color TV is Radioactive!" Later sets used leaded safety glass to reduce the problem.

Some of those early electronic color TVs actually gave some kids radiation poisoning. As mentioned by bildan, the high voltages required to accelerate the electron beam enough to light the old color phosphors caused some CRTs to give off X-Rays.

It was how they found out that was kind of tragic. At the time that the first color sets came out, there were no safety standards. There were many different brands and people bought the TVs that had the largest, clearest, brightest picture. So, manufacturers kept jacking up the beam voltage to get brighter images. A few sets went as high as fifty thousand volts.

When it came to kids and TVs, they liked to get as close as possible to the picture. Some practically put their faces against the screen. Doctors started reporting that they were seeing children whose hair was falling out and they had symptoms of leukemia. At the time, people were paranoid about radiation. The A-bomb had been used a few years earlier and the arms race was on with the Russians. The government investigated and found that the kids with radiation poisoning spent a lot of time sitting in front of the TV. That's when the radiation from the TVs was discovered. The government immediately issued a warning to the population to stay back a certain distance when watching. I think it was ten feet.

That's why parents in the nineteen fifties and sixties were constantly on their kids about sitting too close to the screen. It took a long time for that paranoia to fade away. The problem these days is that kids still sit way too long in front of TVs and computer screen. But, its obesity that is killing them.

This is a very distressing article. The (recent) copy writer clearly has absolutely no clue about the technology. The artwork and text for the original article shows similar more ignorance. Is this the US public education system at work? Is it better now? Or worse? I still have my 6th grade "Science" textbook. It covers optics, color, mechanical and electronic television, and many other things accurately and coherently. Why doesn't anyone in the media seem to learn this stuff today?

This is exactly where we are today. We are at a point where no one really knows. I don't think 3D will grow much more and LED seems to be holding for the moment. OLED (organic light emitting diode) may be the answer and we shall soon see if this holds. They will eventually be cheaper to manufacture. Other possibilities exist such as laser but, they don't seem to be catching on. We can't wait for the future Holographic TVs to be. They are ten years away. All of this reminds me of another analogy, we have the same issue with energy, we need to change but, can we? Government, failing we the people, it also needs a change. We adapted in the 50's due to who we were as a people, I'm not so sure about us now.