Doctors had long relied on “wet clinics”-instructional surgeries performed in front of live audiences at medical meetings-to learn their craft. It wasn’t initially used for entertainment, but as a tool for surgeons and medical students. Interestingly, color television systems had been demonstrated as early as the 1920s, though the technology was refined in the late 1940s. Even without vivid color, they had become deeply entwined with the growth of consumerism, the expansion of the suburbs, and the workings of the domestic life of the postwar middle-class nuclear family. ![]() By the 1950s, black and white television sets had been on the market since the mid-1940s and were now affordable to most Americans. And what we are is not hidden by curtains and what we say not hidden by censorship.”ĭespite all of its advantages, however, it took a while for color TV to catch on. Sarnoff proclaimed the RCA color camera before him was “relentless in its revelations.” In contrast to people in communist countries (who didn’t yet have color TV), Americans feared no revelations, he added, as “we want everyone in the world to see America in its true and natural colors… Here we do not seek to be anything other than what we are. Eisenhower at the 1958 dedication of NBC’s all-color station in Washington, D.C., seemed to promise that color television was even an efficient political technology-an engine of detection, knowledge, and truth. RCA President David Sarnoff, addressing President Dwight D. Network executives pitched it to advertisers as a unique medium that would inspire attentiveness and emotional engagement in viewers, making them more likely to purchase advertised products, a growing myriad of consumer goods and appliances that were now available in a wider set of vibrant colors like turquoise and pink flamingo.Īnd, as much as rocket thrusters, the color TV was presented as a quintessentially Cold War machine. It was, in fact, often discussed by its proponents as an ideal form of American postwar consumer vision: a way of seeing the world (and all of its brightly hued goods) in a spectacular form of “living color.”Ĭolor television was sold to viewers as a way to experience everything from sports and nature to musical theater in a more legible, realistic, captivating, and sensational way. “There are some instances, for example color television, where we’re ahead of you.”Ĭomparing the significance of the invention of color television to the development of space rockets sounds ludicrous to us today, but color television was one of the most complex and transformative technological innovations of its time, symbolizing a unique and thoroughly modern form of seeing and representing. “There are some instances where you may be ahead of us, for example, in the development of the thrusts of your rockets for the investigation of outer space,” he said. ![]() Nixon, speaking to Krushchev through a translator, pointed proudly to the television camera before them and addressed the technological competition between the two nations that the leaders had just been debating. In 1959, at the height of the space race, Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev stood together, surrounded by reporters, in the middle of RCA’s color television display at the American National Exhibition in Moscow.
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