[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Monday until I run out of good ones.]
I remember when black-and-white TV turned to color. I’m sure my family’s first color TV arrived on a Saturday morning because the first thing I watched on it was a Superman cartoon. It took my sister and me no time to find the brightness and contrast knobs and crank up the colors to eye-blistering.
Before that, I actually once saw a few seconds of color on a black-and-white TV. It was a commercial for the soft drink Squirt, and the tagline was something like, “So flavorful you may see it in color!” And I did! The Squirt bottle turned green! On a black-and-white TV!
I had caught a one-time use of Color-Tel technology, which strobed white light to create the impression of color, like the Benham’s Top optical illusion. Unfortunately for Color-Tel, it came along at the same time as actual color TV, making it an obscure novelty instead of a revolutionary game-changer.
There was a period when TV shows’ titles proudly proclaimed, “In Color,” partly to entice viewers into buying a color set. Programs quickly exploited the new medium in occasionally garish ways. For example, the original Star Trek’s red, blue, and yellow-green costumes were not coincidentally the primary colors produced by the three electron beams that shot colors onto a TV’s cathode ray tube.
The only technological transition I can recall that rivaled the miracle of color TV was the leap from vinyl records to CDs. The first time I encountered both, I knew the future had arrived.
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