On August 27, 1940, engineer Peter Goldmark gave the world's first public demonstration of color television, broadcasting from the top of the Chrysler Building in New York City. Working at CBS Laboratories, Goldmark had spent years developing a system that could finally deliver moving pictures in vivid, full color.

The inspiration

Goldmark's drive to develop color television is often traced to a specific moment: in 1940, he attended a screening of Gone with the Wind, one of the era's first major motion pictures filmed in vibrant Technicolor. Struck by the richness of the color image compared to the flat black-and-white television broadcasts of the day, Goldmark became convinced that television's future depended on solving the color problem. With that, he set out to do it himself, leading the engineering effort at CBS Laboratories.

How the system worked

Goldmark's solution was called the field-sequential color system. This system used a rapidly spinning disk divided into red, green, and blue segments, placed in front of both the camera and the receiving television set. The disk spun in perfect synchronization at both ends, rapidly alternating between the three primary colors fast enough that the human eye perceived a single, full-color moving image, blending the rapid sequence of red, green, and blue frames into the appearance of continuous color. This is similar in principle to how a film projector tricks the eye into seeing continuous motion from individual still frames.

The August 27, 1940 demonstration showed colored images, like flowers, fabric, and a girl chasing a ball. Instead of viewing the typical black-and-white medium, observers witnessed moving images in full color, an outstanding achievement. In 1950, CBS would go on to receive FCC approval to begin limited color broadcasts using the system.

Why it lost the color war

Despite its technical success, Goldmark's color system had a commercial flaw: it was incompatible with the millions of black-and-white television sets already in American homes. Most viewers didn’t have the necessary special adaptor nor one of CBS’s color-capable receivers. Therefore, they couldn’t watch the broadcast at all, not even in black and white. This incompatibility became known as the central battleground in what historians call "the color war."

CBS's chief rival, RCA, led by David Sarnoff, developed a competing electronic, fully compatible color system that could be received in black and white on existing television sets, with color displayed only on sets equipped to show it. The FCC, which had briefly approved Goldmark's system in 1950, reversed course in 1953 and adopted RCA's compatible system as the U.S. broadcast standard. This standard would eventually be used for decades.

Goldmark's legacy

Although his color television system was ultimately overtaken commercially, Goldmark's broader engineering career was extraordinarily prolific: he later led the team that developed the long-playing (LP) vinyl record in 1948, revolutionizing the music industry, and developed scanning technology used by NASA's Lunar Orbiter missions to transmit photographs of the Moon back to Earth. His color-wheel camera technology, while abandoned for consumer broadcasting, found a lasting niche in scientific and industrial applications, including the color cameras used during NASA's Apollo Moon landings throughout the 1970s.