BoomerZoo Almanac for June 24-30 2007: The Ghost of TV Yet to Come
OK, summer has just sprung, autumn has not yet fallen, and the first day of Christmas shopping is still weeks away, but somehow, this late June time slot has given us some interesting television previews.
On June 25, 1951 CBS broadcast the very first commercial color TV program from New York to Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, DC. This premiere program, creatively called Premiere, featured entertainers Arthur Godfrey, Faye Emerson, Sam Levenson, Robert Alda, Ed Sullivan, Isabel Bigley and Garry Moore. William S. Paley himself even appeared briefly. Because CBS used something called the Field Sequential System, which was not compatible with the black-and-white TVs most widely available at the time, color programming went into hibernation in October of the same year. Within five years, an improved color TV showed up in retail stores, but it wasn’t until Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color was added to NBC’s lineup in 1961 that color TV sales really took off.
Then, on June 24, 1963 the BBC News Studios in London were the site of the first demonstration of a home video recorder. This consisted of an open-reel recorder mounted on top of a TV cabinet. This Telcan device, which was developed by Norman Rutherford and Michael Turner of Nottingham Electronic Valve Company (NEVC) never made it into the stores, and both Telcan and NEVC went out of business.
