Early color would make a good mini-series
 

With all the twists and turns, along with the power struggles amounst the network moguls, I think the story behind color television would make a great mini-series.

They say sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. All of the intrigue involed with the developement of color has all the ingrediants. The two egotistical heads, David sarnoff and William Palley from CBS.

Along with all the other players who got left in the dust.

What do you think?

If they ever get The Farnsworth Invention into theaters, this might be the sequel.

...

Outside of some poorly-remembered Life magazine ads from the 40's showing colored "confetti" explaining the concept of image dissection and transmission, I have never read or heard of color research by Philo Farnsworth and associates. Can anyone offer any information on this subject?
Kevin

I read an entire book tracing the development of flat-screen (LCD/Plasma) televisions, by one of the key people in the development of that technology. I was surprised how far back it went; work in the labs preceded product releases by quite a few years.

That could have been/be made into a mini-series, too, as companies raced to develop technology and secure patents while also keeping secrets, blundering up dead ends, making risky financial bets, etc... but color TV was a much more interesting story because of the personalities involved; I hope one day someone does it.

Heck, the early days of public transmission of electricity/power grids was interesting enough to make a show about. Thomas Edison originally promoted using DC current! A detailed bio-pic on the life of Nikola Tesla would also be good. Lots of interesting stories in the history of audio. [...or are they only interesting to audio nuts like us?:scratch2: ]

Hello Gentlemen,

Funny for this topic to just spring up now. I've been working on precisely this subject with a French TV director for the last year or so. The film's title is "Color Wars".

We are in the process of actively scouting for a production company & getting a budget together. I have translated into English the 30 page synopsis to widen the selection of coproducers we are targeting.

A project like this takes forever to take off in France, and we got the comment several times: "not enough French content" i.e. SECAM.

We answer, well the US single-handledly developped color TV and had it in service a full 16 years before Europe! so there's much more of a story there.

Concerning Henri de France & SECAM development, there is very little data, documents & footage. It's virtually as if the man never existed!

Best Regards

jhalphen

Tesla has already been done. See this link

http://www.pbs.org/tesla/boutiq/index.html

I know there was also 2 movies about the life of Edison. Spencer Tracy played the lead roll in one of the movies. Seems to me that in the Tesla movie there was also information about the war between Westinghouse and Edison... AC vs DC but may memory is foggy on that issue. Maybe there was a seperate special on the Westinghouse vs Edison battle. Just can't remember.

Getting too old... mind not what it used to be.

Out of time
 

The existance of color television in the 40's in inself is a modern marvel. It almost seems out of place compared to the other technology of the time.

The story of color television would be much more appealing to the general public, since television itself is a mainstay in many homes worldwide. The fact that Sarnoff strong-armed the NTSC commitee with RCA's vast wealth and power seems to be a foot-note compared to the overall significance of color!

Pal and Secam were far superior to the NTSC system back then, and like everything else Beta vs Vhs. 8mm vs Vhs-c. The manufacturers rush to judgement in order to be first in the marketplace, sometimes to the detriment of the results.

Hello Jerome,

There are some rare German books and reports about the color war in Europe, and there are whole chapters about the development of SECAM and the political troubles as well as photos of Henry de France:

- Walter Bruch, Heike Riedel: PAL - Das Farbfernsehen. Deutsches Rundfunkmuseum Berlin e.v., 1987.

- Walter Haas: Farbfernsehen. Ein Geschenk unseres Jahrhunderts, 1967

Of course, these books are biased toward PAL. But I think, they are a good source of information with respect to SECAM history.

Kind regards,
Eckhard

Sarnoff, Bill Paley, & Henri DeFrance are pretty interesting characters...I don't know if you could get a movie out of it, but an interesting History or Discovery program could be done out of it...Sure would beat seeing ANOTHER program about Hitler's left testicle or the JFK assasination...<grin>