It was 50 years ago on New Year’s Day, that NBC made history with the first live national broadcast in “living color,” over a 22-city network hastily constructed by AT&T. The event, the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, Calif., was tailor-made to demonstrate color television technology.
Only a few thousand people actually saw the parade in color on TV that day. For the occasion, RCA built a special run of only 200 color sets-designated the Model 5 (the prototype number)-for the NBC affiliates and RCA Victor retail distributors. Other manufacturers, wanting to enter the color TV business, also built their own prototypes for the occasion. The idea was to build excitement about color TV, and it did.
The first consumer color televisions hit the market a few weeks later, with 5,000 units rolling off the RCA assembly line in Bloomington, Ind. in March, 1954. Nicknamed “the Merrill,” the RCA Model CT-100 had a 12-inch diagonal screen and cost a whopping $1,000 (well over $6,000 by today’s standards).
Since only 31 stations in the United States had color capability, there wasn’t much to watch. In fact, any color program broadcast in the 1950s was a big event. Just before the inaugural live Rose Parade broadcast, the first filmed series to have a color episode aired was “Dragnet” in December 1953. Other notable events were the first color broadcast of a president (Dwight Eisenhower in June 1955) and the first color broadcast of the World Series (Dodgers vs. Yankees in September 1955).
Even with these special broadcasts, it would be a long time before most Americans experienced color television in their living rooms. Those indelible images from the November 1963 Kennedy assassination-ten years after the Rose parade colorcast-were still in black and white.
The tide began to turn in the early ’60s, after about half-a-million color sets had been sold. Walt Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color” began in 1961. The first color cartoons, the “Flintstones” and the “Jetsons,” began in the fall of 1962. However, to baby boomers and their parents, one show would come to define the move to color television. The first episode of “Bonanza” aired on Sept. 12, 1959.
The 115th Rose Parade, might be more interesting by monitoring radio frequencies. Rose Parade War Driving was performed by Frank Keeney, president of Pasadena Networks. He mapped 802.11b Access Points along the Rose Parade Route.
“The Rose Parade has been held in Pasadena for over a hundred years. Campers and motorhomes line Colorado Blvd. three or four days before the event. The whole street becomes a big party. Each year I notice more and more of the motorhomes have satellite dishes. I wonder how many have Internet access via satellite?”
The Datastorm Users Group, established by Don Bradner, maps locations of satellite-equipped RVs. Check out Don and Joy’s Adventures using his 2-way Datastorm.
NBC’s Year in Pictures has a multimedia review while Astobiology Magazine had a Wild New Year’s Bash.
University of Washington astronomy professor Donald Brownlee is the principal investigator for Stardust, a NASA mission to capture comet particles and return them to Earth, in the plains of Utah. Stardust will encounter comet Wild 2, tomorrow.
Comets, like asteroids, are planetary building blocks that were never incorporated into planets. In the intervening 4.6 billion years, they languished in the deep freeze of the outer solar system, little changed.
Stardust deployed a dust collector roughly the size of a tennis racket. The collector will soon be folded into a capsule for the return journey to Earth. In January 2006, the capsule is scheduled to separate from Stardust and land in an Air Force test range in Utah.
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